Sunir from Fresh Books emailed me a couple of weeks ago to let me know that he was coming out West in order to help break the continental divide. How? With a traditional Canadian summer time BBQ!
Sunir, Colleen, and Redwerks are hosting a roof top BBQ this evening starting at 5:30pm, and they’re going to kick everyone out at 10:30pm to find another watering hole. Let them know you’re coming via the Upcoming entry.
It’s great when we have more people traveling physically between different high tech centers in Canada. I already feel bad enough that I don’t make it to Victoria or Calgary often enough, and that the most often connection between the Canadian Internet Mafia tends to happen at conferences…in the US So thanks to Sunir for taking the initiative and to Colleen and Redwerks for hosting.
And yes, a thousand apologies for the extremely last minute notice – I had originally planned to be down in San Francisco at the Structure 08 conference, along with Trevor O and Layerboom (his virtualization / cloud computing startup that we’re working with here at Bootup). C’est la vie! Now I get to enjoy charred meat in Canada, instead!
After the success and excitement of the visiting VCs at VC Forum last week, I expect several visitors from the US to be in attendance, as well as an excellent selection of local founders and funders.
What:
Founders & Funders Vancouver June 17th Founders & Funders is a private, invite only social event. Founders and Funders is dedicated: to helping Canadian entrepreneurs to meet each other; meet potential funders: angel, VC or other money sources; to have fun; and see how we can help each other create the NEXT BIG successful company.
When:
Wednesday, June 17, 2008 5:30 PM to 10:00 PM
We are limited to 100 seats. The fee for the dinner is $100 which will include drinks and dinner. This is a private networking event and we are selecting the audience to ensure a quality group of attendees. And to provide the best chance to network together.
As some of you may know, I co-host Launch Party Vancouver with Maura Rodgers and Dimitri Sirota. Well, the truth is, that Maura does most of the work, all while holding down a day job at Strutta and being the best mother I know. We don’t do it to make money; We do it because we love to bring the Vancouver tech community closer together to exchange ideas and build great stuff. I have no doubt that Vancouver can be a hotbed for tech startups, and Launch Party is just one of the ways that will help get us there.
I’ve asked Gordon to get as many VCs from the VC Road Trip to attend the event as he can, and a few have already confirmed.
For startups who are looking for people, or people who are interested in joining a startup, drop by the Career Fair.
Date: May 21st, 2008 Career Fair: 3pm VC Preview: 4:15pm
Demos: 5:30-9pm Party on: 9pm-late Location: The Republic, 958 Granville Street Vancouver, BC
Kudos to Mark Lise for organizing a succesful first DemoCampVictoria. Lots of excited post coverage of the evening: Mark, Yule, Tris, TechVibes – I think this was a great spring board for future meetups. My favourite quote from the evening was from Gels Saby, who said at the beginning of her talk “I wasn’t going to present, but I got excited about my project, so I wanted to share it with you”. Great stuff, this is exactly the kind of reaction that DemoCamps are meant to engender.
I haven’t been back over to Victoria in quite some time, so I was amazed by all the activity. Sure, the University of Victoria is my alma mater, and I know that it spreads co-op students everywhere – much like Waterloo – but after leaving, I certainly wasn’t in touch with the technology industry there. It turns out that tech is the #1 / #2 industry in Victoria, along with tourism.
The Juliet Presentation Center, where the event was hosted, definitely also deserves mention. This is for a new “Vancouver style” condo development in downtown Victoria. In general, there seemed to be consensus that holding the event downtown was a critical factor. Hmmm…a link between property developers and technology workers? Definitely something to explore.
I felt like it was a really successful trip for me: I got to meet a bunch of people doing cool things in Victoria, and then ended up in a couple of longer discussions – one with the crew from Flock (thoughts on the social graph for every website on my personal site) and Yule on Placeblogger-like functionality for Victoria.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the scene in Victoria, and encouraging cross pollination in both directions with Vancouver. For that matter, Seattle is pretty close as well…
I helped with this in a very small way by introducing Jonathan Ehrlich to the Auctomatic guys. Jonathan was hired by Communicate as President, and moved out to Vancouver from Toronto. We met back then through an introduction by Toronto-based mischief maker David Crow. Jonathan and Communicate have been excellent Vancouver tech community participants, supporting DemoCampVancouver and other local tech events.
I knew of the Auctomatic guys because they were a Y Combinator funded startup, and were hanging out with Avi and the team at DabbleDB. It was great to talk with this international team (England, Ireland, and elsewhere) and find them hiding in our backyard.
I call this success for Vancouver, and I’m looking forward to cool things from this team. Congrats to everyone evolved, I look forward to continue working with you. I expect great things!
I’m a big fan of video. I’m a big fan of the intersection of “new” media and old film / broadcast models – we’re not even close to having them figured out yet, but both new kinds of producers, talent, and distributors are going to play. And here in Vancouver, we just happen to have an intersection of old and new, in everything from film production to the hotbed of social media that this city is becoming (and check out Bridging Media**, which is targeted right at this intersection).
In any case, Giant Ant Media are producers and talent, and they do pretty good at kicking out the AdHack*-style videos, too. They’ve just put out their shingle looking for more work, and sent me a little note to say their site is up. Check out the demo reel on the front page of their site – it’s great stuff. There’s more in the work section of the site, around which I only have two complaints: please don’t make the home page video auto-play, and also, please prominently display an RSS feed I can subscribe to (video podcast or mainly text blog posts … I suspect you’ll want one of each).
Their Chocolate Love video is probably the best example of an AdHack: I can see any number of chocolate or aphrodisiac vendors wanting to use this as an ad.
So, looking for a place to create innovative video for your idea, startup, or event? Call Jay and Leah @ Giant Ant Media…
* AdHack is a Friend of Bootup, and we’ve been working with James Sherrett, the founder, for some time. We think AdHack is a pretty good name for cool social media ads, and that it’s a pretty good idea for a company, too. So the next time you see a social media ad for a product, call it an AdHack
** Bridging Media aims to connect film/broadcast with digital media Internet types, hopefully that both can learn from the other. March 29th, you should attend.
P.S. Got a Vancouver-area startup, service provider, or other company you want to get the word out around? Leave a comment…
I’m finally getting around to do the official posting of the date and topic of DemoCampVancouver06. As I had previously announced, we’re going to do things a little differently this time: the evening will have a theme, which is Gaming.
We’ve always said that we want to unite and mix the different “tribes” that we have around technology in Vancouver with our DemoCamp events, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of the gaming tribe. I know a bit about gaming, but I also know that I have much more to learn about this industry.
iPhone Game Development with Parveen Kaler (Parveen already beat me to the punch and posted about DemoCampVancouver06 as well as linking his presentation on the wiki page.
I’ve got an email contact in to someone with knowledge about developing for XBox Live Arcade (aka XBLA), so theoretically I have one slot left available. Anyone that wants to present on a topic / idea/ demo / whatever related to gaming, please contact me directly at democampvancouver@bootuplabs.com.
Update: that was quick! Jamie Cheng from Klei Entertainment is in. You may know Klei from their games Eets or N+. Jamie also happens to be an expert in AI. Woo hoo…I bet we could fill multiple DemoCamps just with some of the questions that I have for these guys…
As Parveen mentions on his post, I had originally been thinking that we could get a presenter about Sun’s Project Darkstar, but the timing actually overlaps with the Sun Labs Open House (which I’ll be attending at least one day of as well) – as of now, I’m not sure if I can get someone in on short notice.
Lastly, Megan Cole is going to help with BattleDecks. Have decks to submit? Send them along!
So, thanks again to our venue sponsors WorkSpace for the space at Suite 400, 21 Water Street. We’ll see you on April 10th, 2008, at 5:30pm, and please spread the word most especially to anyone in the gaming community so they can see what DemoCampVancouver is all about. See also: Upcoming, Facebook event.
P.S. don’t forget, April 3rd is the first DemoCampVictoria. I’m going to try and make it over for the first event and meet some more Victoria-based entreprenuers.
Rick Segal is a partner in the team at JLA Ventures, a Canadian VC firm with offices in Toronto and Montreal. He’s doing a VC Roundtable to give entrepreneurs across the country a chance to meet with him. Rick does a lot of “no harm, no foul” meetings that are much less like traditional “pitch” meetings, and in general has been doing a great job in supporting the growth of Canadian entrepreneurship.
As part of the VC Roundtable, Rick will be visiting Vancouver (signup) and Victoria (signup) (both in one day, Rick? Come on, stay a little longer….) on April 21st. What is this VC Roundtable all about?
Something’s missing in Canada’s tech community – the chance to informally interact with VCs, learn about what it is exactly that they do and how the funding process works.
The VC Roundtable series aims to fill this gap, by hosting small (free!) get togethers across Canada’s major cities where Rick Segal, JLA Ventures Partner and VC blogger (http://ricksegal.typepad.com) will walk through what getting involved with VCs is all about.
There is a bit of a longer write up on what this is and isn’t on each of the signup pages — see the Vancouver one for an example.
A friend (who currently works for Microsoft here in Vancouver, albeit remotely from the Richmond office) sent me a link to an NPR audio interview with Bill Gates, done after he testified to Congress about the need to liberalize H1-B visa rules. I have little interest in the US H1-B issues, but I am excited that he talked about the Vancouver development center (I first blogged about this on my personal site). The accompanying NPR story here:
Microsoft recently opened an office in Vancouver, Canada — where it can station high-skilled workers who can’t legally work in the U.S.
There, Gates tells Robert Siegel, the government welcomes “not only those people for these high-paying jobs, but the four or five jobs we create around each of those engineers.”
I haven’t heard much about the Microsoft Vancouver development center locally, and folks certainly haven’t been showing up at DemoCampVancouver or anything. I’ve heard some rumours that people only stay for a year, until they can do an intra-company transfer to the US (Redmond, likely), but I have no confirmation or knowledge about this directly.
I actually have two recent direct experiences as well. One being a friend that posted a small image of something private, where text was still readable, and the second being a legal briefing where the advice basically was “don’t put anything in email, please delete all email after 60 days”. To someone that has email archives stretching back a decade….well, I don’t even know what context to put that in.
Facebook and status messages and the high SEO of certain public systems “owning” your digital identity are other things I might bring into the conversation.
There is usually Windows-compatible video up on the BNN site, I’ll try and update the post with more notes on the appearance and a link to video.
So thanks to Sunir for taking the initiative and to Colleen and Redwerks for hosting.
Posted by Boris Mann 
Posted by Boris Mann 
Posted by Danny Robinson 
Rick Segal is a partner in the 
