Published by Boris Mann on December 18, 2009
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The folks from all of the companies at Bootup Labs and the rockstars of Strutta get together for another great holiday video. Includes “Last Christmas” by Wham.
Jordan did a great job of pulling together the holiday lip dub again this year.
My favourite spontaneous quote is “If you can’t even talk about what you’re passionate about and share it on the internet , how do you think you’re going to deal with the internet business?”
Of course, *talking* about ideas is always trumped by just going out and *building* them.
This is pretty much word for word and slide for slide the talk Eric Ries gave at the Vancouver Agile meetup group. It was really outstanding and I recommend everyone working on a startup watch it.
Published by Boris Mann on May 26, 2009
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Jordan did a fantastic job trawling through the Bootup Labs Flickr Account and then creating this awesome “montage” of all the visitors we’ve had so far.
We’ve got an iMac setup in our entry hallway and make sure to grab a photo of everyone passing through the office. Come by and visit any time to get in the next version.
The winners have been announced, and Bootup Labs Managing Director Danny Robinson has been selected as one of the recipients of the PopVox Awards.
Strutta hosted the voting platform for the popular choice categories, and the Georgia Straight has already published the list of all of the winners. Four additional awards, chosen by a jury, were given out to Individual Standouts, and Danny was recognized as the top Industry Advocate. Here’s Danny with a few words following the acceptance of the award:
The whole gang here at Bootup Labs HQ is very proud of Danny and this well-deserved bit of recognition. Morale is at a frenzied peak here at HQ, with lots of new faces and plenty of exciting announcements coming soon from the member companies. Stay tuned!
Thanks to the other sponsors W Media Ventures, the BC Innovation Council, and Yaletown Venture Partners for helping BLES put this event on. Of course, many thanks to Brad Feld for making the time to come and visit: the feedback on his talk has been universally positive. We’ll cut the Q&A when the questions get too specific next time, giving more time for one-on-ones.
The International Mentor Program page on the BLES website has a few more details on what you can expect from more visitors to Vancouver. A post requesting recommendations for other people you’d like to see will be up next week.
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.
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.