Headed to Under the Radar

I’m off to Under the Radar Monday. Looks like Colleen, CEO of hot, recently funded, Vancouver startup Movieset will be presenting, or should I say representing. And also I’m looking forward to hearing Lowell talk about Loud3r. He’s good friends with my brother and has been keeping me up to date as he progressed with his company — very cool concept. Other companies that will be there are:

PRESENTING COMPANIES:

• 33Across - Identifies influential online users
• Animoto – Create personalized, professional-quality videos from images and music, offering a new alternative to traditional online photo slideshows
• AudioMicro – Stock music and sound effects licensing platform
• Aviary -Suite of web-based applications for people who create and a marketplace to sell that content
• BigStage – Animate yourself with cutting-edge virtualization technology
• Comedy.com – aggregated comedy entertainment site
• CrowdSPRING – crowdsourcing of creative talent.
• Curse – MMO gamer community.
• Dizzywood – A virtual world that allows kids to dress up 3D avatars, play games, explore worlds and meet new friends in a safe environment
• ffwd - Organized, multi-platform, video content delivered via a browser, with social network awareness, and predictive recommendations.
• GumGum - A licensing and distribution platform for online content
• Hollywood Interactive Group – A mass casual mmo based on reality TV concepts and Hollywood stardom.
• Jacked – Browser-based “second screen” for TV viewers, which provides synchronized content and a real-time interactive experience that complements what they’re watching on TV
• Jygy – Mobile social networking with SMS
• Keibi – Moderation and classification of user generated content (UGC)
• Kosmix – Categorization engine that crawls billions of Web pages in a unique manner to create algo-generated home pages
• Lil’Grams – Tracking your babies memories in real time.
• Loomia – Social recommendations bridging established social networking sites with media websites
• Loud3r – Aggregating and publishing semantically searched content
• MediaForge – We’ve got widgets comin’ out our ads
• Mochi Media – Provides independent game developers with analytics, distribution, tools and monetization while providing advertisers with turnkey opportunities to reach the one in three Internet users who play online games.
• MovieSet - Platform that brings behind-the-scenes filmmaking online, giving fans authentic access through its proprietary toolkit for Producers.
• Mytopia -Social gaming community for Web, Mobile, Smartphone and TV
• Nesting – Organizing family activities; scheduling, networking and more
• Overlay.tv - video commerce platform that overlays contextual information directly onto online video content
• Pikum! – A new kind of betting game
• PluggedIn – Enjoy stunning, broadcast-quality music videos from your browser
• PutPlace – Media storage all the way from Ireland
• Shift Control Media – Shift Control Media is a branded entertainment company, specializing in the creation of original Brandworthy Games, as well as the development of game and emerging media strategy
• SocialMedia Networks – enables developers of social media applications to monetize their traffic
• Sometrics – Social Analytics and Social Ad Platform
• Verismo Networks – High quality video over broadband without a pc.
• Vivaty – Brings together your friends, photos and videos into a personal virtual scene, in your browser
• Vusion – HD Quality Video over the internet
• Wetpaint – Wiki powered websites
• Xumii – Take all your contacts from your social networks with you — on your phone!

Bill Gates talks on NPR about the Vancouver development center

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.

Heading to Boston for Drupalcon

I’m heading to Boston for the next 6 days for the annual North American Drupal convention, aka Drupalcon Boston 2008.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the Drupal framework (I’m a Permanent Member of the Belgian-based Drupal Association), but the relevance here is my experience with open source development communities and methodologies in general. I was impressed and moved by Matt Mullenweg’s keynote at the recently finished Northern Voice 2008 conference: almost half of it was dedicated to open source. One line that he said really rang true for me (paraphrased): “the long term utility of proprietary software trends toward zero”.

I’m giving one presentation on mapping business requirements to code, participating in a panel on training your in house team on Drupal, and helping to moderate a birds of a feather (BoF) session on RDF and the Semantic Web in Drupal. Oh, and likely having one or two business and technical meetings ranging from my friends at brand new Acquia, to those crazy aggregation hackers from D.C., Development Seed.

While the conference is sold out (800 seats!), there are various social events in and around the conference. Drop a comment if you’d like to meet up while I’m in Boston. Are you using Dopplr yet? I’m finding it to be a useful tool, feel free to add me to see where I’ll show up next.