Bootup Labs Blog

I attended this month’s VANTEC Angel Network meeting today.  I’ve attended many of Mike’s events in the past, but today’s was different for some reason.  I don’t know what it was. I just felt much more productive, professional. Maybe it’s because Mike has increased the cost to the investors from $10 per session to $50 per session (or $300 for the year).  It’s still not a lot of money, but only serious investors will pay.  Maybe Angels are feeling more confident about the economy.  I like to think my rant about inappropriate public comments about the presentation style has something to do with it, but honestly I highly doubt anyone in the room had seen that post.

Anyway, kudos to Mike.  He’s providing a great service to our Startup and Investor community alike.  If you’re looking for money, I recommend VANTEC.  There’s no cost to present, but you need a sponsor (a current investor or advisor will do), and then you have to go through a selection process.

The companies that presented and are in the digital media space were:

• Jostle.me – a collaborative Social intra-network to help employees communicate, collaborate and find hidden talent within their own organizations.
• Ayogo – a company that can port video games to social networks and help monetize them.
• Wireless Image – Very simple and cool way to advertise via people’s mobile phones.
• TinySpeck – This company didn’t actually present, but Stewart Butterfield (founder of Flickr.com, which was originally started in Vancouver) was in attendance to sponsor  Michael Fergusson’s Ayogo.  In the process, he mentioned the name of his new Startup and thought you might want to check it out.

If you’re interested in learning more about investing in Digital Media, check out my previous posts. More to come!

• VC is not broken – Anymore. Digital Media’s new funding models
• Assessing Competition Risk for Digital Media Startups

The judges have chosen, and six well-qualified Vancouver startups are set to demo their wares for you at Launch Party Vancouver 6.

Like with Launch Party 5, we’ll feature each of the companies in a 2 min video and give you the chance to vote on which is most likely to succeed. Voting will begin starting Monday, Feb 16.

Here’s a sneak-peak at the six companies chosen to demo their products at Launch Party Vancouver 6:

3rdWhale – In their own words: “We just launched 3rdWhale Mobile, an LBS-enabled iPhone application that lets individuals find sustainable businesses around them, everything from restaurants and grocery stores to yoga studios and ecou-tourism stores. With over 15,000+ green businesses in our DB, we’re live in Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose and are quickly adding more cities. Though the app is essentially in beta (”Lite” is Apple speak for beta), we aim to quickly add new functionality, including advanced social networking features, user feedback and Facebook Connect integration.”

HandiMobility – In their own words: “We’re launching a new tool called MobifyMe to let webmasters extend their current websites to mobile without developing separate mobile sites.”

Rilli – Rilli is a map-based online and mobile event creation tool for social people, doing real things, in the real world.

HearWhere – Find Live Music Anywhere – a worldwide discovery site for live music. Over 1 million show listings and growing, hearwhere plays samples from the artists, connects to blog reviews, tickets and music downloads and more.

TimeWindow – In their own words: TimeCam.TV is a service that creates an online time lapse from any Internet camera or webcam. It is the easiest way to create a time lapse online. You don’t need any additional hardware and there is no software to install. Just sign-up on TimeCam.TV and place a small piece of HTML on your website. That’s it.

Showbert – Showbert.com is where TV viewers come to review, rate, schedule, share, explore, and even watch their favorite TV shows. Using some Web 3.0 techniques we offer a unique, exciting and (most importantly) a useful site for tv enthusiasts.

You’ll be able to learn more about these compnaies and vote for your favorites soon, when the Strutta-powered contest site launches at LPV6.LaunchPartyHQ.com.

See you at the event!

One of our ‘alpha’ companies, AdHack, kicked off a fun promotion last week, called Show us Your Balls. AdHack’s main premise is about becoming a marketplace for ads, where creatives and buyers can connect with each other.

To show us what that means, AdHack teamed up with Giant Ant Media and friends to create a web video. For beer? Or balls? Watch:

Well, what’s next is up to you. Your job is to write the script for the sequel, including choosing the “brand” that this is all about. To keep the momentum going, AdHack released another web video today of what the sequel is not:

Personally, I’d love to drink some AdHack beer

It’s been fun to be involved in the lead up to this launch. My voice is the “kick balls” bass line, and we started creating our avatars on Twitter the week before. it reminds me of how much fun it was to create an ad for a business in an hour at Barcamp Vancouver 2007 – the Uncle Fatih video.

Head on over to the AdHack balls page for the full experience – remix the balls song, create an avatar, and submit your script entry to finish the story…you’ve got 1 week left to enter, and the winning entry will then be filmed and produced.

Sean from QCDocs is king of the “top 10 lists” on the QCDocs blog. He just posted a wrap up of lessons learned from our PACT conference attendance last week. I still need to do a longer wrap up plus cut and paste the content from my Cover It Live live blogging session from last week, but I’ll add a few comments on Sean’s post here.

As Sean says, Chris Gill from Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (SVASE) did a great job of running the presentation Bootcamp organized by the Federal government trade commissioners. I think there was consensus that running such a Bootcamp on a regional / provincial level would be ideal: get everyone trained in their home locations, and then do an investment roadshow to Silicon Valley similar to how TechStars, Y-Combinator, and Seed Camp do.

There were lots of connections to be made with Canadian companies from across the country, and we’re still navigating our way through introductions at both the Federal and provincial level. There definitely are resources to lean on, it’s a matter of finding the right ones. To continue those connections, please join the PACT Canada 2008 LinkedIn group so we can stay in touch.

Image by bmann via Flickr

And yes, the Mai Tais were delicious, and *I* think they helped loosen us up for presenting the next day.

Danny and I are still down in San Francisco at the Plug and Play Tech Center, just wrapping things up before we head up to our Canadians in the Valley beer up in the city.

I’m taking a few minutes to catch up on my reading when I came across May Chu’s post on the Clarity Accounting blog – Don’t be afraid to be small. It’s an absolutely great write up of their approach to their business.

Less than 12 hours ago, I received an email sent through our contact form from a potential client who wanted to know more about our company. He wanted to know how long we have been in business and how big our firm is. He noted that our mailing address looked like a small business running out of some one’s apartment. He wanted to know if the business he is dealing with is a big, fail-proof company.

At first I was worried about how best to respond to this inquiry. After all, we are a small company that is run virtually. Everyone who has ever worked on this project has been contracted virtually. In the spirit of being an online accounting software, we conduct our business using as many “online tools” as possible.

Go read the whole post, and also check out the two Seth Godin posts that May references — Small is the new big, from 2005, and his recent post Too small to fail.

May and Dobes are doing a great job with Clarity Accounting, building their business one piece at a time, and I can’t help but think that they will be highly successful. I’ll leave you with another piece of information that I think highlights this:

Recently I found out that a company providing similar services as us burns 6 million dollars a year. I thought to myself, “wow, give me 6 million dollars and I would only spend a fraction of that amount”. In fact, within 1 month of our full launch, the business is already paying its own bills.

Image by akakumo via Flickr

Yeah, that title has probably been overused a lot lately. We have a joke here in the office that pretty much anyone that has a website can now say that they do “cloud computing“. But we *have* been doing a lot of thinking about how hosting and Internet infrastructure will be changing. From the beginning of thinking about Bootup Labs, we also thought that we could support the companies we were working with by helping point them at best practices around scalable web services: from hosted tools to hosting providers.

LayerBoom is Trevor’s baby: it’s tackling problems around next-gen hosting and virtualization that would be THE area that I would have been diving into if Bootup weren’t around. Now I get to have my cake and eat it too, as I peer over Trevor’s shoulder in investigating where all this stuff is going.

To that end, I completely agree with his most recent post on the future of the hosting industry: Hosting Apocalypse. Yep, that does deserve a drumroll and an explosion. I could go into all sorts of Gutenberg printing press analogies etc., but the fact of the matter is that we don’t really know what orders of magnitude changes affect: some businesses are destroyed, but like fireweed after a fire, new opportunities are created. Hmm, kind of sounds like the current economic situation, too.

Other folks covering related ideas include Mark Mayo, who writes about the changing role / skillset of sysadmins. Tim Bray’s Tough Times series covers infrastructure in part. Zero Cloud Lockin is having a good discussion on what does or does not constitute lock in with platforms.

Lastly, the ask. LayerBoom is running a survey asking what people would want from tools to run their own cloud. Trevor will be sharing the results on the blog, trying to get some data to see if the hosting apocalypse concept is real, and how far away it is.

Strutta launched the first real customer on it’s new platform yesterday.  I’m saying “real” because we did run the Launch Party contest on it last week, but it was sort of an inside job since we also organize Launch Party.

Check it out, enter to win Free Pizza for a year, and let us know what you think.  Oh, and especially let Maura know if you want us to make something like this for you.

Win Free Pizza for a Year!

I’m here in Banff, at the Banff Venture Forum 2008. I’m here with James from AdHack, who is presenting at 2:45pm on Thursday. We’ve got the AdHack booth set up at #14, and already had a great discussion with Kevin Dahl from Calgary Technologies, Inc.- a non profit that helps grow the Calgary technology ecosystem. Sounds like a great partner for Bootup (and I’m going to hit the Vancouver municipality over the head with your example) – we’ll be trying to make some cross pollination happen.

Update: a few one liners around some of the companies and presentations I saw during the forum. Look at Rob’s great coverage on Techvibes for a more in depth write up of each company.

In any case, for the next 2 days, we’ll be hearing 12 minute pitches from the following companies in the IT Stream:

• StandOut Jobs
  – social media upgrade your careers page. I’m going to talk to Ben to see if we can maybe use Standout Jobs to connect around startup jobs and co-founder searches somewhere on Bootup. Regardless, a good solution that’s getting even more interesting
• Shopster.com
  – good solution for super charging
• Myotis Wireless (placeholder page, no website yet?) – funny comment was “we have no one under 40″; has real tech around very low power radios, and cuts through interference
• Semanti Corp. – toolbar powered semantic search upgrade on top of Google results
• Business Infusions Inc.
  – practice management software for veterinarians
• Reflex Photonics Inc.
• VoIPshield Systems Inc. – security solutions around VoIP systems
• WideSail Technologies Inc. – sells digital chip designs that increase range and/or throughput using new error correction techniques – excellent quote is “when I make a sale, I send an email”
• Flixel Technologies Inc.
• Psyko Audio Labs Inc. – positional audio, initially for gamers
• Mingleverse Laboratories Inc. – stealth! out of Vancouver, interesting plan with audio, also related to positioning. More general usage with web-delivered audio conferencing and virtual rooms. Pretty much have to demo for it to make sense until they come out of stealth
• Akoha – Austin Hill’s new startup, labeled as “casual gaming”, but has lots of real world interaction through physical cards and missions. I went for dinner with Austin and have a bunch of Akoha mission decks that I’ll schedule a meetup around.
• MoboVivo Inc.
• Tribal Nova – kids gaming, lots of licensed content like Curious George, etc.
• Ph03nix New Media Inc. – casual gaming, deal with Big Fish Games, and new virtual world concept with education plus gaming on a hip hop theme.

I’ll be coming back to this post to flesh out some one-liners about what each company does, and link to any longer posts or comments from my myself and others.

Keith Spencer is part of the organizing committee of a very cool event called the Canary Derby. He’s making sure I’m going and I’m passing the order on to everyone else I can.

Steam clock picture by TheGoodReverend

 

It’s for a good cause. Funds raised will go to the BC Cancer Foundation. So come out, have some fun, watch some cool companies compete to WIN.

I realize that Notchup is a company from the Bay Area, but I have to give a shout out to my friends and former Peerflix colleagues, Rob Ellis, and Jim Ambras who are making noise all over the place. 

Check out Pay to Play, an article that will be in the next edition of Forbes Magazine.