Bootup Labs Blog

I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but Techvibes doesn’t suck anymore.  We all know that they’ve done an fantastic job covering the local tech scene on their blog for the past year or so, but the main site had a bit to be desired.  This is not news to anyone, especially Boris W and Rob.

They’ve consolidated and organized tech communities around a main site, which includes at the forefront, their Blog, plus Events, Directories, Jobs, and Forums.  Then you can slice it by geographic areas, including Vancouver, Seattle, Kitchener-Waterloo, among others.  I can see how this can spread like Craigslist which doesn’t surprise me since everything that Boris touches seems to turn to gold.

Feature requests:  Dare I say, a few LinkedIn features would be nice?  And, at Bootup Labs we’d like to avoid reinventing the wheel, so a Crunchbase style API would be quite useful for us.

My brain is still a little melted today from participating in the New Ventures BC mentor panel yesterday. 9am to 5pm, 8 presentations, 30 minutes for lunch, and short breaks between presentations. Wow.

For starters, let me say that this highlights the activity that is going on in Vancouver. Regardless of the specifics of the particular business model or idea, I was impressed by the way all the founders presented their companies and discussed their ideas.

As well, I really enjoyed hearing the varied feedback from the entire room of mentors. Everybody came from varying backgrounds, so it was great to hear the different perspectives that people had. One issue that came up a couple of times was the slippery slope of business feedback vs. presentation feedback (the mentors started riffing on the business). At the end of the day, the New Ventures BC program is a competition, and this event was to help the founders tune their investor presentations. Explaining your product or service succinctly and in an exciting, believable way, with the dollars and cents to back it up and show investor value.

The room I was in (there were three in total) had a technology / web focus. There were quite a few familiar faces presenting, but also some that were completely new to me. I’m trying to encourage new companies that I come across to enter themselves in StartupIndex.ca (we also have a company directory which we’re trying to figure out how to tune: the current list of companies are ones that we’ve spoken to the founders at length, and have extra information in our private Extranet).

Without further ado, here are the companies that presented to us:

1. ClicVue: a home theater video aggregator — hardware plus a software based remote
2. Project Opus: a revamped spin on the album — digital artist subscriptions for fans (I’m not getting this quite right, but I don’t know how public this is…I’m excited by this concept)
3. CrowdTrust: personal identity and knowledge management
4. QCDocs: the small business ERP (Sean the founder is our accountant, and we are going to be using QCDocs for all the startups that come through Bootup)
5. AdHack: eBay for advertising, DIY advertising — disrupting the ad industry
6. CloudTel: fully hosted business VoIP
7. DreamBank: give dreams, not stuff
8. Adventure Engine: a booking engine for adventure travel operators

The complete list of 30 finalists is on the NVBC blog. Aside from the official blog, Diaries of a Suburban Startup has been posting great content related to the competition, the startups, and the founders involved.

I spent some time posting commentary to my personal Twitter account. Unfortunately, my favourite Twitter tracker Twemes was affected by Twitter API breakage, so this Twitter search will have to do as an archive. Two of my favourite quotes are James Sherrett from AdHack mentioning the phrase “return on attention“, and David Gratton from Project Opus stating that the new “[music] album is a living document rather than an artifact”.

NVBC is definitely a great event that provides real value to the local entrepreneurial community. I myself participated in it 4 years ago when I came back to Vancouver, not to launch a company, but to go to the various seminars and meet the local community. NVBC should be on every entrepreneur’s list to attend. Thanks to Bob de Wit for asking us to participate.

Finally, special thanks to Andrew Kumar for loaning me an SFU wireless login so I could research companies and their competitors as they presented.

Today we’ve got 5 students from the Shad Valley program joining us at Bootup. What valuable life skills will they be learning about startup life? Putting together their own IKEA desks, of course!

Alex Shipillo showing off his IMPACT interns

Joking aside, we’re happy to have the students join us in the office: they’re an example of the sort of working environment that we’re trying to foster. The students aren’t interning with Bootup, just borrowing some office space while they work with IMPACT, another great organization encouraging an entrepreneurial spirit in young people.

With the VEF Momentum crew starting out soon as well, there look to be a lot of opportunities for young people interested in this space over the coming months. Stay tuned, we’ve got something to coincide with Global Entrepreneurship Week (mid November) in the works.

Brendon threw up a facebook group.

Jordan created a Strutta game: Most compelling reason for Caterina and Stewart to move back home contest!

Vancouver is Beautiful from Jordan Behan on Vimeo.

So, upload your video to Strutta and let’s get them to move back.

Also, you’ll be able to find everything here: www.bringcaterinaandstewarthome.com soon.

Here’s a very cool concept for a site that can generate a ton of equity value vs. the effort put into building it.  I actually know that Lowell has put a lot of energy into building out Loud3r, and it shows, but compared to what DWave is trying to do, it’s no huge technical accomplishment.  It just works.  On the web, what matters most is a fast, clean, easy to use site that give me only the information I want. In fact, I’m sure my friend Brian Sugar over at Sugar Inc (home of the popular site popsugar.com among others) would agree with Lowell’s approach to chunking up vertical content sites based on domain name vs sub-domain name like Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop.  Regardless of what you think, you should check it out, bookmark/subscribe to the sites that are relevant to you, and see how it goes.  As for me, I’ve pointed my RSS reader to found3r.com.

PS: I’m still holding out hope for similar, more personalized, feeds to starting coming out of the Something Simpler offices.

Donat Group’s Rochelle Grayson was profiled in the article on Sunday.

“What I love about the tech industry is that it’s incredibly creative. It really thrives on creativity and innovation,” says Grayson, 39. “You have to be adaptable and prepared to re-think things all the time.”

I was talking to Eric Lagerway, CEO of Lypp.  He mentioned that they released their Outlook plug-in for Lypp today.  You simply schedule a meeting like you normally would, and then press the conference button, which sets up a call in number for you and informs the attendees all in one shot.  A very cool addition to an already easy to use and low cost conference calling solution.  

Disclaimer: I’m a board advisor to Lypp

We’ve had some complaints that we party too hard at Launch Party.  So much so, that investors and entrepreneurs can’t hear each other talking.  Even when we turn down the music all the way, people can’t hear very well over all the mingling.  So, we have a solution.  If you’re an Angel, VC or Blogger, please let me know and I’ll put you on the list for the sneak peak portion of the event, which simply starts an hour earlier.

Check out the list at the Launch Party Blog

Featured Companies at LPV4

I’ve been getting some heat about my video I did for my friend’s company FundFindr.tv.  Some people believe that I’m a VC hater, but that could be no further from the truth.  Some of my best friends are VCs.  I admire and aspire to be more like them.  I’ve had some really good experiences from VCs.  Rex Golding, formerly MobiusVC, was my most respected role model at the time.  He took the time to understand our overall corporate strategy, and before he made recommendations, he thought about how it effected the big picture.  That said, I’ve had my share of VCs that were not so great, and shall remain nameless.

But all in all, if you’re starting a company, you will most definitely benefit from VC cash, credibility, connections, and a sounding board.  Just make sure that you know when to take it and when to leave it.