Peerflix is a company I founded back in 2004 with Billy McNair.  I’m happy to announce that LiveUniverse, started by MySpace founder Brad Greenspan, has acquired Peerflix.com.  Terms of the deal will not be disclosed.

Peerflix started as a peer-to-peer version Netflix where users traded the DVDs they own with each other for $0.99 each.  Later Peerflix morphed into a much more lucrative business called the Peerflix Media Ad Network.  Kind of an ad network in the movie industry vertical.  In the process, Peerflix acquired TheMovieBlog which helped to achieve critical mass.

Great job to Billy and the team!

Techvibes did a good job stirring up some controversy last night/today with their post entitled Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em.  But they hit a hot button for me, so I had to comment on it.

Ian also did a post with his thoughts: What’s Broken About the Vancouver Startup Scene?

The problem is that it’s too easy to pick on us Vancouverites.  We’ve just now found our way.  If you look at how far we’ve come over the past year you’d agree.

All startups endure their share of criticism regardless of if their eventual success or failure.  But, man, it sure is easy to predict a startup’s failure; After all, you’d be right 9 times out of 10.  The really impressive thing is to predict the ones who succeed.  If you do that, you have my ultimate respect, if you do the latter you have my ultimate disgust.

About 6 weeks ago I posted Venture Capital Is Broken, Let’s Fix It.   I received many comments from some high profile people who understand the industry.  Some of the comments came in through the blog, and more from individuals who weren’t particularly happy about having their thoughts made public quite yet.  Even though people mostly agreed with the point I was trying to make, their comments have caused me to slightly adjust my thinking.  I’m overdue to post an update, which will summarize what I have learned.  Stay tuned for more on that soon.

Until then, you might find this article posted by Bob Rice on Portfolio.com interesting: Tech Making Traditional VCs Obsolete. 

Guy Kawasaki was the first real entrepreneur I ever met.  I was so green, but had a full head of passion, and nothing was going to stand in my way.  He played an instrumental role in helping me to channel my passion into execution.  I’m sure he doesn’t even know how much of an impact he had on me.  He’s an author of bunch of must read books for aspiring entrepreneurs Art of the Start and Rules for Revolutionaries.  And he just sold his company Alltop Truemours to Vancouver’s NowPublic.

This morning he Tweeted the URL of his guest blog post on sun.com entitled Five most important lessons I’ve learned as an entrepreneur.  Check it!

Today, DreamBank launched!

DreamBank connects Dreamers and supporters to help create positive change by giving dreams, not stuff.

Very cool idea.  I still think the charity aspect confuses the message though.  I was forced to choose one to create a dream, and I didn’t know why.  Also, people will “dream” for “stuff” too.  I guess the slogan is to just discourage consumption, but not restrict it.

Good luck Dawn!

From all the coverage that Rogers has got about how bad they treat us Canadians, I’m sure it’s got the marketing geeks heads spinning.  They’re probably wondering if all this bad press is going to get them more subscribers or less, because it’s not obvious.  They’re probably asking themselves, what would have happened if they just priced the data at $30/6GB up front.  Would they have avoided the controversy, or would everyone have been just as unhappy with that plan.  What if they waited for all the crazy early adopters to wait in line and pay a premium for being first, and then reduce the price a couple months later.  What if they did nothing at all?  I’m not sure, but there are some facts.  Canada has some the highest priced cell phone plans in the world.  Part of the reason is a “System Access Fee” that we all pay.  David McGuinty, Member of Parliament, Ottawa South, is looking for support for his bill C-555 which will do away with the System Access Fee.  If you agree, sign the petition.