MarketingProfs B2B Forum Small World Stories

Some of my random encounters in Boston had me shaking my head in disbelief at the hidden connections we have with acquaintances.

Two years ago, Ruth Stevens conducted an interview with me on our research on LeadGen Tools. Ruth was kind enough to cite our research in her article in DIRECT Magazine. Ruth is an author, writer and consultant extraordinaire residing in New York. You may know her through her work with the DMA.

I was delighted to meet Ruth at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum and discuss some of her research initiatives.

As we were chatting, the conversation turned to the neighbourhood in Toronto where my family lives: the Beach.

Wham – Surprise #1! Not only does Ruth's best friend live on my street but her brother lived across from my house up until last year!

My office is on the second floor of a 100 year old brick & beam warehouse in old Toronto.

One of our neighbours is Idée who moved into their office across the street at about the same time as us in 2000.

Co-founders Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore have developed a fascinating technology that identifies the fingerprint of an image and then identifies matches by crawling the web. Unlike Google or the other search engines which rely on image text tags, Idée uses hundreds of criteria to categorize and unique identify an image.

I ran into Leila and Paul in the cramped and run-down Air Canada terminal at Logan. They had just finished a round of meetings with the Boston VC Community looking for the $10M+ of expansion capital.

Think of the photographer who publishes her image on the web but wants to ensure that unscrupulous website owners disregard her rights to that image. This technology allows that photographer to troll the web for copycats.

Wham – Surprise #2! A member of Idée's board also hails from my hometown of Hamilton and whose father was the best friend of my father.