Scott A. and I were trying figure out ways that we could get a bunch of people in one place to help us with some great videos that we are doing for Dex.

Scott A. came up with a great idea which was to offer to take everyone who shows up to be an extra in the MG video shoot to a free breakfast in downtown on Saturday morning.  We would have breakfast first, then do the video shoot.

The shoot is actually two short videos and would filmed on location at the Code Factory and at the corner of Metcalfe and Queen in downtown Ottawa. The whole video thing may take 2 hours max.

If you are interested in attending, just reply to this post and let us know how many people you will be bringing with you.  Also when filling in the comment form be sure to put your email address and I will send you the exact details.

Feel free to invite friends and family as well. The weather is going to be great on Saturday morning and the more the people we can get the better.

This will also be your only real chance to make fun of Craig Fitzpatrick who will be wearing a white suit for the shoot.

The whole thing would start at 10am on saturday morning.

We ordered our first limited run of t-shirts today in preparation for the upcoming web2.0 conference in San Francisco. If you’re going, let me know and we’ll hook up.

Thanks to everyone for some awesome suggestions. Special thanks to Oli and Brett for these great slogans. I still think there are more gems in the list, hopefully we’ll be able to pull more of them out for our launch!

I’ll be in touch shortly to get mailing addresses for shirts (through DEX!).

Here is a short video demo of Dex highlighting the contact management and some of the networking functions.

Ok, Dex isn’t launched yet but Scott A. gave it a sneak peak to VCs at last week’s Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit. Here is a short video of the presentation. Enjoy!

We’re getting close to launch, and for people who have been following this blog, you know that we are trying to introduce a more “human” and modern approach to CRM and online professional networking.  We also want to raise local awareness about dex.  And we all wear t-shirts.

So… we decided to solicit ideas from you for evocative, funny, appropriate captions for wearable t-shirts.

Here are some ideas to help ignite your creative flame:

“Dex.  It’s like a dating site for co-workers”

“Dex could have saved your marriage”

“Let’s talk about Dex baby,
Let’s talk about you and me…”

Send us your idea (in the comments below) and we’ll send you a t-shirt with the “winning” caption.

At a recent technology venture presentation, I introduced Dex by outlining the shortcomings of popular online networking tool LinkedIn and CRM software salesforce.com.

I really like Linkedin.  I have been a member for a couple of years and have twice as many professional contacts on Linkedin than I have “friends” on facebook.  I like that when people change jobs, I am notified, so I can keep track of their careers over time.

But the problem with Linkedin is that it just shows me a list of my professional contacts.  There’s no context to the list – it doesn’t show me how well I know them, when I spoke to them last, how their career path could intersect with mine, how they could help me – it doesn’t show me how “important” they are to me professionally.  In short, it doesn’t help me “work my network”.

I like salesforce.com and other CRM systems much less.  To me, CRM systems today are similar to excel spreadsheets with web forms attached that allow you and other people in your company to fill out information about people and interactions with those people.  Salesforce.com is simply a “central repository” that takes all the information you already know about people, and regurgitate it in nice charts and graphs.

What Dex provides – and what everyone should expect from their CRM system in a “networked world” – is a system that knows more than we know about our contacts.  Dex enhances the information we already know with the information our contacts say about themselves on the social web, like Linkedin and Facebook, with the information that trusted news sources say about them.  Dex takes all of that information, digests it, and then presents it back to us in a context that helps us make decisions to improve our business opportunities and professional careers.

Dex is going to revolutionize professional networking and contact relationship management for individuals and SMBs.

And we’re almost ready to launch…

This afternoon I’ll be demoing Dex for the first time, and after a couple of late nights and a lot of last minute edits by Creighton, I’m confident that Dex will give a great performance.

It’s great to see many of the key differentiators that we have been discussing over the last 4 months come to life, like the relationship meter and business opportunity rating with the underlying algorithm / scoring system;  a network health monitoring screen that helps find potential duplicates, incomplete records, and unassigned contacts; and a dashboard that suggests who I should be following up with based on a combination of my relationship strengths, my last contact, and business opportunity.

It’s also exciting to see Andrew’s design come to life.

I’ll be sure to post a short video before the end of the week of this first beta.

Wish us luck!