Thanks to Michael Fergusson and the team at Rude Boy Games for hosting last nights meetup with the team from Wavefront. Wavefront is a non-profit “accelerated commercialization centre” for BC, focusing on wireless and mobile applications and devices.

They came to Gastown to find out more from developers and companies working in mobile here in Vancouver, to tell us more about themselves and the services they offer, and to feed us free beer and pizza.

Michael ran the evening admirably. He had everyone sit in a circle, introduce themselves, their company, their projects, and talk about challenges they were facing around mobile here in BC. We didn’t get very far before some person’s commentary on anything from embracing the web as THE path for mobile development or a discussion on funding realities right now evolved into a discussion by everyone in the room.

I talked a bit about Bootup Labs, a bit about the VCC program (info on BC’s Venture Capital Programs here) that we’re applying for, and a plea for less duplication and more working together on common issues. Things like “HR bootcamp” or a seminar on getting investor ready is not at all specific to mobile startups, and I’d hope that local industry groups work together on co-sponsoring or organizing such events.

Lastly on the funding side of things, I mentioned the JumpStart program from the BlackBerry Partners Fund — this is something to keep an eye on to get started with really early stage. For those that are currently iPhone crazy, getting some investment dollars to focus on BlackBerry might be what it takes for people to look at the platform more closely. I definitely think there are interesting demographics around it, and of course folks are much more guaranteed to have things like data plans.

Back to the discussion, the huge theme was seeing the web as the primary platform for delivery, and anything like device specific applications being a step backwards. There were a handful of Nitobi developers there that in particular esposed this point of view, hence their involvement in the open source Phone Gap project, to make native iPhone apps (and soon, Android) using just web technologies. Parveen Kaler from Smartful Studios – who comes from a game developer / console background where he has dealt with lots of “gatekeeper” companies with much stricter rules and is now building iPhone apps – was the main contrarian: he’s loving Objective C and developing natively for the platform, and his business model fits with the rules in place.

It was great to find out more about Wavefront and the programs they’re currently offering. The item of biggest interest, judging by the crowd, is probably the handset library they are going to build up. They have a couple of G1 Android phones today, and one of them already got lent to the guys from Handi Mobility. I still see a little bit of overlap with, for example, WINBC, but it would be great if Wavefront focused on the developer / technology / direct carrier interactions. I think leading these type of developer-centric gathering events would be a great direction for Wavefront, and hope to see more of them as they get ramped up.

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.

Well, James and I head back to Vancouver tomorrow, after 2 days in Banff, and one day in Calgary.

The Banff Venture Forum was definitely a worthwhile event. I got to connect with many different people, from entrepreneurs to VCs to government representatives. I also got to review a ton of different investment pitches, taking notes for working on our own pitches.

I worked with James at AdHack to tune the presentation: we ripped it apart and put it back to together last week, with an excellent graphical upgrade from AdHack Community Manager, Corey Rollins (check out the WTF is AdHack video for another Corey production). But, at the end of the day, James went off by himself, prepped, and then stood up on stage and spent 12 minutes telling the story of AdHack, and (in my opinion) — knocked it out of the park. Congrats, James!

(Sandra captured most of the pitch on video, so I hope that we can link to a copy soon.)

After a great closing keynote by Terry Matthews, Calgary Technologies Inc put on an entrepreneur “unwind”. I invited Terry to join us, but he was a bit busy — he did have great things to say about Todd Tessier, Director of the Investment Capital Branch and BC Renaissance Capital Fund. At the unwind, I spent quite a bit of time finding out more about the non-profit CTI program and people, and how they support startups of all kinds in Calgary. I’m looking forward to connecting the west by working more with them.

Kudos to Nicola Burdeniuk, Associate Executive Director, and the entire rest of the Banff Venture Forum team. You put on a great event and I look forward to attending next year, hopefully with a larger contingent of delegates of all kinds from BC.

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.

Well, James and I arrived in Banff. We left early this morning from Vancouver and drove out. It was a long day, but was actually a great opportunity to talk strategy and different ideas around AdHack without interruptions.

We checked into our hotel, and then managed to connect with Sandra MacDonald for dinner at the Rose & Crown. Sandra and Mic are working with the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program and are talking to startups across the country. They’ve got a temporary blog up, I’m hoping to see it integrated directly into the SSE Canada landing page  — where’s the RSS feed icon on that page! (that’s a hint in the direction of Sun folks…)

I was probably a little rant-y at dinner with Sandra over what I would LOVE to see Sun do: they feel like my old company Nortel - great engineers, really bad marketing, really bad at explaining / showing their value to the people that want to love them. Write me up some real world solutions / architectures around dtrace, OpenSolaris, ZFS, containers, etc. etc. - if you’re long on engineers, let’s see bi-weekly “solution” blog posts - either cool tech you want to talk about, or responses to questions on how to solve problems real startups are having. From my blog ranting we digressed into talking about how startups don’t really buy servers - they buy hosting. Hmmm, those Amazon Web Services credits sound more interesting, now…

Anyway, as I said before, it’s great that Sun has connected with such great people, I’m interested to see the stories they discover.

I’m going to be Twittering a few reactions to other companies in the IT Stream (Life Sciences and Cleantech are also presenting here in Banff). I’ll be using the #bvf08 tag, looks like a few other people using Twitter as well. More on the other companies in another post.

The day after tomorrow, James from AdHack and I will be heading up to the Banff Venture Forum. We’re both foodies, so our trip planning amounts to departure time wrangling so we can make it to Trufflepigs in Field, BC for lunch

AdHack is presenting in the IT Stream, plus will be present on the floor with a booth. I’ll be lending a hand at the booth and getting to know the other companies. I also hope to catch up with Brad Feld of Foundry Group aka Brad of TechStars that my last post was about: he’s the keynote speaker for the IT Stream.

Sandra MacDonald and Michal Berman will also be in town, representing the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program — which launched at the beginning of the year at Launch Party. I think we’ll do an ad hoc dinner in Banff at some point, watch Twitter* and/or blog postings here for updates.

After Banff, James and I will be spending the weekend in Calgary and have a couple of meetings booked already. I have an email out to the STIRR Canada folks to maybe help get the word out about a Calgary Tech Entrepreneur Meetup on Saturday night. For now, here’s a placeholder Upcoming event. Please sign up and let us know you’re interested, as well as suggesting a venue for Saturday, October 5th in Calgary.

*I’m using #bfv08 as my tag for the event. Watch Twemes to just monitor those postings.

TechStars is the incubator that we feel philosophically most aligned with. Their successes don’t hurt, either Danny is down in the Valley right now, and attended their Demo Day. Here’s Vator.TV interviewing Brad Feld about the TechStars model.

Danny actually spoke with David Cohen of TechStars a couple of weeks ago. One of the really interesting pieces of information was that 50% of founders / companies decide to stay in Boulder after the program is over. 50% of companies staying and running companies in a city?! Sounds like pretty fantastic numbers.

In other news, we’re putting together the details around a Canadians in the Valley event — if you’re interested, sign up for that Upcoming link and we’ll update the details as we figure it out. Dana Oshiro and Rebecca Reeve are Canadian ex-pats that were going to take Danny and I for beer when we went down for the Plug & Play event, and of course we decided to turn that into something a little bigger. Thanks Dana and Rebecca for playing along so far.

This is the third annual BarCamp Vancouver. This year we doubled the space available, and still “sold out”. It’s a free event, but we suggest a $20 donation which includes a lovely t-shirt.

There is a kick off party on Friday, September 26th, at WorkSpace which starts at 7pm. Thanks to Karen, Tara, and Raul for “party wrangling”, and to Anthony at Farmstead Wines for providing the wine for the evening. We’ll start with drinks and snacks, and can also use the wifi to get straight to hacking out some code.

Saturday will start with sign in at 9:30am at the Arts Club Revue Stage, and we’ll start schedule jamming at 10am, with the first sessions starting at 10:30am — including WordPressCamp and PhotoCamp in their dedicated space at the Playwright’s Theatre.

Check out the All the details page on the wiki for everything you need to know in one compact package, including the “Extended hits” version of this info — maps, editable wiki pages that you can add to, and more.

Those of you attending will be receiving an email with similar information later this afternoon. Now I need to go rest up so I’ll be fresh and prepared to think big thoughts and share ideas with people for 24 straight hours.

P.S. thanks to Pat B from Eventbrite for troubleshooting some email issues with us.

I was trying to flip the switch on the new design before Launch Party last night, but called away to do ‘networking’: you know, the kind that has you lasso’ing ethernet cables over a bar’s rooftop We’ll see if the switch does in fact get thrown today — at left a fun image that is going to be on the new home page.

In any case, the clock has flipped over to September 19th, so we are officially in Talk Like a Pirate Day. And of course, our oh-so-staid parent site, ye old Bootup Labs, has gone piratized in celebration! The about page is a nice demo:

A Vancouver-based startup accelerator designed t’ help founders build tech startups an’ take them t’ their first round o’ fundin’ o’er th’ course o’ a nine month placement.

The nine months be split into three trimesters - because we all know that growin’ a startup is like raisin’ a child! Each three month period has different deliverables in th’ areas o’ business, marketin’, an’ product. Founders will come in with different strengths an’ weaknesses, bein’ matched with th’ right set o’ scallywags at Bootup Labs or external Advisors t’ reach each deliverable.

Oh, I really never get tired of that …

Thanks as always to Richard, the scallywag at Raincity Studios that created the pirate module for Drupal.

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.