Rocco Rossi ignited his campaign on Wednesday with his speech to the Toronto Board of Trade, taking shots at rival mayoral candidate George Smitherman for keeping a low profile and flip-flopping on the view of selling off city assets, and generally fighting fury with fury. Ten years ago this week, though, Rossi was pitching a different product: the StellaCam. Installed in bars in Brussels, Manhattan and Vancouver, the trial involved setting up webcams that would allow shut-in web surfers to buy the person on the other side a Stella Artois, using a coupon dispensed through a machine, and type-chat for 15 minutes. Total cost of the experience: $10, including the unshared drink. “Where else does the guy in Timmins have an opportunity to meet a beautiful woman in New York?” Rossi rhetorically asked in the National Post on March 10, 2000 — incidentally, the day that the NASDAQ peaked at its all-time high, precipitating the colossal crash of the dot-com industry. Beer.com, the portal he was tapped to run, was a well-funded latecomer: Interbrew, then the Belgian owner of Labatt, teamed with Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Heineken to create a website about the stuff that people who liked beer might like to look at in those dial-up days. Rossi was recruited from Torstar, where his role in starting Toronto.com established what counted for an industry reputation at the time — the ability to concoct an entire website with nothing to work with but a coveted domain name. And, on October 12, 1999, he was confident enough in the content on Beer.com to throw a launch party, with beer caps spelling out the website address on the artificial field of SkyDome. Continue Reading

A year ago, when Twitter was gaining the kind of traction that led every newspaper to write about it every day, the notion that a mayoral candidate in the 2010 Toronto municipal election would do all of their campaigning 140 characters at a time would have seemed a bit less preposterous. Sarah Thomson knows better than to rely on the medium, of course — her own publication, Women’s Post, features her on the front cover, much to the dismay of the head of the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors. She had every intention of spotlighting any lady that ran for the job, it just turned out the one at the top of the masthead is the only woman currently registered on a ballot that, as of today, also includes 28 men. (Adam Giambrone, incidentally, has still not technically withdrawn.) The printed campaign speech was paid for, at whatever price Thomson charges for editorial content in her business-boosting circular — which is partly distributed in rusty pink boxes around town, for which proper permits were presumably obtained. But it’s too snowy to do anything but stay home and watch the Winter Olympics, and election day is eight months away, so what else for a candidate to do but fiddle around with the internet? Rocco Rossi is welcoming detractors to argue with him on his blog — itself a breakthrough strategy compared to past would-be mayors — but @ThomsonTO is ready to mix it up in real-time with anyone, even if she has to start the exchange herself. Continue Reading

“Two-timing TTC chair gets back to work” is the headline on Michele Mandel’s column in today’s Toronto Sun, although the truth wills out in the National Post: “Adam Giambrone goes back to being boring.” Before things settled down, there was an actual chase! “Giambrone just ran … the long way … around the rotunda of City Hall to get into TTC meeting,” tweeted Global News reporter Jackson Proskow. But dealing with mundane transit matters is the city councillor’s idea of a therapy session — leading Royson James of the Toronto Star to ask, in the aftermath of Mayor David Miller’s defense of his political protégé, “Where is Giambrone’s ‘leadership’?” And the first meeting since he slipped away to France with putative live-in partner Sarah McQuarrie after an outbreak of text messages provided Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 president Bob Kinnear with the best takeaway, after luxury hotelier Steve O’Brien was named head of a blue-ribbon panel on customer service: “I’m sure he’s done a wonderful job in the hotel industry,” Kinnear spouted to The Globe and Mail, “but I’d like to ask him when was the last time one of his clerks got punched in the face? That’s something that we have to deal with.” Continue Reading

With his replacement in the provincial legislature, Glen Murray, being sworn in today — and the humiliation of Adam Giambrone fading into punchline history — the time has come for the sharpening of the knives directed at mayoral candidate George Smitherman. Surfacing over the weekend, a typically anonymous blog called CuriousAboutGeorge.ca — introduced with a video set to Frédéric Chopin’s soothsaying “Piano Sonata No. 2″ — which promises to be “an information hub for voters looking to learn more.” You know, just in case the profile on the cover of Toronto Life — where journalist Gerald Hannon recalls the career politician’s hotheadedness going back to when Smitherman owned a film developing lab on Church Street — isn’t enough to get him elected over eight months from now. Bumbling around Queen’s Park didn’t hurt the subsequent aspirations of former premier Bob Rae, but then he didn’t have the same trove of recent press criticism, easily Googled — like when, as health minister, Smitherman had to apologize for announcing he would personally test the adult diapers used in nursing homes. Financial Post editor Terence Corcoran is more succinct in his write-off this morning: “The left can have Smitherman” — citing examples like the deal for wind turbines that were reportedly making people sick. But the eagerness of Smitherman to be liked by everyone can be viewed in the video of his St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood office opening, with a speech that could be any generic campaign kick-off: “If we’ve done our work well, and we’ve summoned all of our passion, all of our energy, and all of our capacity,” he hollers, “we will have led the people of Toronto forward, and we will be on the path to get Toronto working again!” Then, right on cue, a black female voice echoes his fervor: “Yes we can!”