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.

So, I was mentioning last week some of the international incubators that are out there, in reference to meeting with Zac Boon from Thymos Capital in Singapore. Today Stefan Korn from Webfund in New Zealand stopped by our office, Vancouver being the first hop on the way to a conference in Montreal (of the Denturist Association of Canada — as we find out in the video, Canada apparently has the most denturists in the world).

As another aside, Singapore, New Zealand, and the province of BC all have approximately the same population: close to 4.5M people.

Here are the companies that Webfund is currently incubating:

• Base Diary, the practice management software for denturists
• Book Habit, sell your ebooks, early buyers pay the least, as you the author get more popular, sale prices go up
• DIY Father, positive parenting community for new and young fathers, to go alongside the legion of resources for moms
• Global Registries (not launched), productizing the current New Zealand software for doing business registration online to other governments around the world

We’re working through a couple of ideas on how to cross pollinate. With various connections to governments in different countries floating around, look for something maybe the middle of next year. In the more short term, there is Canadian government involvement in an event at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. I added it to the Bootup Upcoming group, and we’re trying to track down more information from the government end of things.

I’ve been experimenting with the YouTube annotation method. We actually like Viddler for “produced” videos (it has great functionality to layer on a logo plus link automatically), but having the computer right there next to the kitchen makes it easy to do these “no editing” videos. Let me know if this is useful or distracting, either here or on Get Satisfaction.

Day two of our video work station and we captured another nice little video. A little more serious than the bacon haze!

Robin Puga and I go way back, as we explain in the video. He’s finishing up a stint at the BC Institute For Co-operative Studies and looking at starting a co-op of his own here in Vancouver, likely with a focus on web work and open source.

The Chicago Tech Cooperative and Civic Actions are the two co-op related companies that I know doing Drupal related work. I think the co-op model and open source are a good fit, as is co-op and independent web workers. I’m hoping that Robin does give a session on “What is the co-op model?” at BarCamp Vancouver.

Find out more about co-ops and Robin’s progress at Each for All, a radio show and podcast about co-op models.

We just set up a Bootup Labs YouTube account and a Bootup Flickr account on the shared iMac next to the kitchen and had a bit of fun today.

The Bootup offices are getting a wee bit fuller, and we’ll be talking more about that next week. And Launch Party on Thursday! Man, September is going to be busy….

Congrats to Na’im and Kerry and the rest of the crew at VEF Momentum for launching their website and announcing their first event on September 30th. Good to see the VEF funding such an “early stage” of young entrepreneurs. Here’s VEF Momentum in their own words:

We’ve been talking to the Momentum guys throughout the summer — it’s great to see them launched and off to the races. They stopped by the office today because we’re putting the finishing touches on the Starting Something conference that we’re jointly organizing for Global Entrepreneurship Week. The full details aren’t up yet (we’ll be doing a true announcement post tomorrow), but you can already put the event on your calendar.