Bootup Labs Blog

Bootup Labs Demo Days

Today we announced our plans for our first Demo Days for Bootup Labs’ first crop of companies. The event will be broken up into two events

Vancouver on January 28th, 2010
Hyatt Regency Vancouver
655 Burrard Street,
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6C 2R7

Silicon Valley on February 3rd, 2010.
Plug And Play Tech Centre
440 North Wolfe Road
Sunnyvale, CA 94085-3869

<< — INVESTORS RSVP HERE – >>

Bootup Entrepreneurial Society

The Bootup Entrepreneurial Society (BES) is an independent non-profit group founded to support founders starting digital media companies in Vancouver.  BES is organizing the Bootup Demo Days event.  In addition to the 5 Bootup Labs companies, BES is inviting 5 additional BC companies to join us, free of charge, travel expenses paid.  Interested companies should apply to be a part of this first-of-it’s kind event.  You can read more about it from their blog post.

We’re coming down to Seattle tomorrow, and we’d like to see you!

In particular, we’ll be at the Spitfire Grill from around 12noon to 2pm, having some lunch after the drive down from Vancouver. We’d love it if startups and entrepreneurs from Seattle dropped by and said “hi”. Did we mention that the application for our January 2010 program is open and you can apply here?

We’re actually coming down to hang out with our friends from TechStars, who are having demo days and a mini reunion. I’m also hoping to connect with the Founder’s Co-op team.

There’s an event on Upcoming if you like that sort of thing, and you can reach Boris on his Google Voice number at (916) 341-9528 if you want to get in touch. Come meet us at the Spitfire, tell us about what you’re doing, let us tell you more about Bootup, and let’s connect in the Pac Northwest, as the kids might say.

Thanks to Bryan Zug of Lilipip and Lee Lefever of Common Craft for venue suggestions, and Boo! to Chris Pirillo for having fun in Hawaii so we don’t get to see him.

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.

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.