Well, James and I head back to Vancouver tomorrow, after 2 days in Banff, and one day in Calgary.

The Banff Venture Forum was definitely a worthwhile event. I got to connect with many different people, from entrepreneurs to VCs to government representatives. I also got to review a ton of different investment pitches, taking notes for working on our own pitches.

I worked with James at AdHack to tune the presentation: we ripped it apart and put it back to together last week, with an excellent graphical upgrade from AdHack Community Manager, Corey Rollins (check out the WTF is AdHack video for another Corey production). But, at the end of the day, James went off by himself, prepped, and then stood up on stage and spent 12 minutes telling the story of AdHack, and (in my opinion) — knocked it out of the park. Congrats, James!

(Sandra captured most of the pitch on video, so I hope that we can link to a copy soon.)

After a great closing keynote by Terry Matthews, Calgary Technologies Inc put on an entrepreneur “unwind”. I invited Terry to join us, but he was a bit busy — he did have great things to say about Todd Tessier, Director of the Investment Capital Branch and BC Renaissance Capital Fund. At the unwind, I spent quite a bit of time finding out more about the non-profit CTI program and people, and how they support startups of all kinds in Calgary. I’m looking forward to connecting the west by working more with them.

Kudos to Nicola Burdeniuk, Associate Executive Director, and the entire rest of the Banff Venture Forum team. You put on a great event and I look forward to attending next year, hopefully with a larger contingent of delegates of all kinds from BC.

I’m here in Banff, at the Banff Venture Forum 2008. I’m here with James from AdHack, who is presenting at 2:45pm on Thursday. We’ve got the AdHack booth set up at #14, and already had a great discussion with Kevin Dahl from Calgary Technologies, Inc.- a non profit that helps grow the Calgary technology ecosystem. Sounds like a great partner for Bootup (and I’m going to hit the Vancouver municipality over the head with your example) - we’ll be trying to make some cross pollination happen.

Update: a few one liners around some of the companies and presentations I saw during the forum. Look at Rob’s great coverage on Techvibes for a more in depth write up of each company.

In any case, for the next 2 days, we’ll be hearing 12 minute pitches from the following companies in the IT Stream:

• StandOut Jobs
  - social media upgrade your careers page. I’m going to talk to Ben to see if we can maybe use Standout Jobs to connect around startup jobs and co-founder searches somewhere on Bootup. Regardless, a good solution that’s getting even more interesting
• Shopster.com
  - good solution for super charging
• Myotis Wireless (placeholder page, no website yet?) - funny comment was “we have no one under 40″; has real tech around very low power radios, and cuts through interference
• Semanti Corp. - toolbar powered semantic search upgrade on top of Google results
• Business Infusions Inc.
  - practice management software for veterinarians
• Reflex Photonics Inc.
• VoIPshield Systems Inc. - security solutions around VoIP systems
• WideSail Technologies Inc. - sells digital chip designs that increase range and/or throughput using new error correction techniques - excellent quote is “when I make a sale, I send an email”
• Flixel Technologies Inc.
• Psyko Audio Labs Inc. - positional audio, initially for gamers
• Mingleverse Laboratories Inc. - stealth! out of Vancouver, interesting plan with audio, also related to positioning. More general usage with web-delivered audio conferencing and virtual rooms. Pretty much have to demo for it to make sense until they come out of stealth
• Akoha - Austin Hill’s new startup, labeled as “casual gaming”, but has lots of real world interaction through physical cards and missions. I went for dinner with Austin and have a bunch of Akoha mission decks that I’ll schedule a meetup around.
• MoboVivo Inc.
• Tribal Nova - kids gaming, lots of licensed content like Curious George, etc.
• Ph03nix New Media Inc. - casual gaming, deal with Big Fish Games, and new virtual world concept with education plus gaming on a hip hop theme.

I’ll be coming back to this post to flesh out some one-liners about what each company does, and link to any longer posts or comments from my myself and others.

Well, James and I arrived in Banff. We left early this morning from Vancouver and drove out. It was a long day, but was actually a great opportunity to talk strategy and different ideas around AdHack without interruptions.

We checked into our hotel, and then managed to connect with Sandra MacDonald for dinner at the Rose & Crown. Sandra and Mic are working with the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program and are talking to startups across the country. They’ve got a temporary blog up, I’m hoping to see it integrated directly into the SSE Canada landing page  — where’s the RSS feed icon on that page! (that’s a hint in the direction of Sun folks…)

I was probably a little rant-y at dinner with Sandra over what I would LOVE to see Sun do: they feel like my old company Nortel - great engineers, really bad marketing, really bad at explaining / showing their value to the people that want to love them. Write me up some real world solutions / architectures around dtrace, OpenSolaris, ZFS, containers, etc. etc. - if you’re long on engineers, let’s see bi-weekly “solution” blog posts - either cool tech you want to talk about, or responses to questions on how to solve problems real startups are having. From my blog ranting we digressed into talking about how startups don’t really buy servers - they buy hosting. Hmmm, those Amazon Web Services credits sound more interesting, now…

Anyway, as I said before, it’s great that Sun has connected with such great people, I’m interested to see the stories they discover.

I’m going to be Twittering a few reactions to other companies in the IT Stream (Life Sciences and Cleantech are also presenting here in Banff). I’ll be using the #bvf08 tag, looks like a few other people using Twitter as well. More on the other companies in another post.

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.

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.

One of the things we’re doing at Bootup is to gather together best practices that we can share with startups and founders. The goal is to get the most bang for your buck, from spending money to spending your time.

When Danny and I decided on the name for Bootup, we had basic systems up and running in something like 3 hours: domain registered at NameCheap, configured for Google Apps for Domains to get email, calendaring, and docs up, and a basic website / blog at WordPress.com.

Even if you have technical people that can setup and run some of these things, your goal is to build your technology / grow your company. For instance, talking to AdHack, I quickly put them on to Unfuddle, a hosted SVN and ticket tracking system. Below are two tools that I love, and that are on the list of sites we encourage startups here to use.

I’ve been organizing a couple of events recently – VinoCamp is coming up August 16th, and BarCamp Vancouver is going to be either September 13th or 27th (you can help decide which date here). For both, I’m using Eventbrite to do registration and sell tickets. I’m evening considering using Eventbrite’s ticket functionality to “sell” sponsorships through their PayPal integration. Gathering registrant information? check. Affiliate links? check. Tracking links? check (Miss604 and TechVibes are neck and neck in sending traffic, BTW). In all, a really great tool for doing free as well as for pay events, although there are a few little changes that I wouldn’t mind seeing.

Which brings me to my next tool: how are you gathering feedback? feature requests? beefs or bugs with your product or service? Seeing a blog post by Vince at Pennyminder reminded me about Get Satisfaction. It provides a way to implement everything from bug reporting to forum discussions about your company or even specific products. While you certainly want to keep in close contact with your early users and respond directly via email, Twitter, blog posts, etc., you can promote Get Satisfaction as a more structured way. For example, a suggestion via email might get the response “Great idea, I’ve added it as a suggestion to our Get Satisfaction page - please tell other people about it if they also think it’s a good idea”. I just added Bootup Labs - you should probably at least claim your company name and monitor it, even if you don’t plan to use it directly.

What other tools can you recommend, and how have you used them? I know there are local Vancouver startups that would fit this bill, like ScribbleWiki.

I’m a big fan of video. I’m a big fan of the intersection of “new” media and old film / broadcast models - we’re not even close to having them figured out yet, but both new kinds of producers, talent, and distributors are going to play. And here in Vancouver, we just happen to have an intersection of old and new, in everything from film production to the hotbed of social media that this city is becoming (and check out Bridging Media**, which is targeted right at this intersection).

In any case, Giant Ant Media are producers and talent, and they do pretty good at kicking out the AdHack*-style videos, too. They’ve just put out their shingle looking for more work, and sent me a little note to say their site is up. Check out the demo reel on the front page of their site – it’s great stuff. There’s more in the work section of the site, around which I only have two complaints: please don’t make the home page video auto-play, and also, please prominently display an RSS feed I can subscribe to (video podcast or mainly text blog posts … I suspect you’ll want one of each).

Their Chocolate Love video is probably the best example of an AdHack: I can see any number of chocolate or aphrodisiac vendors wanting to use this as an ad.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=7NNZ5Jo51Y8]

So, looking for a place to create innovative video for your idea, startup, or event? Call Jay and Leah @ Giant Ant Media…

* AdHack is a Friend of Bootup, and we’ve been working with James Sherrett, the founder, for some time. We think AdHack is a pretty good name for cool social media ads, and that it’s a pretty good idea for a company, too. So the next time you see a social media ad for a product, call it an AdHack
** Bridging Media aims to connect film/broadcast with digital media Internet types, hopefully that both can learn from the other. March 29th, you should attend.

P.S. Got a Vancouver-area startup, service provider, or other company you want to get the word out around? Leave a comment…