Bootup Labs Blog

Yes, it’s been a while since we pushed out a Wednesday Wrap Up. I’ve been away on a trip to Washington DC getting my Drupal on, and Danny has been hard at work on the funding grindstone. The grapevine says you missed us, so here’s another one with some recent news.

The rockstars at Nitobi are looking for JavaScript and Flex pioneers to join their time. I’m not sure what they mean by pioneers — maybe you should show up at the interview wearing a coonskin cap? Get in touch using their contact form if you’re interested. Also, congrats to Nitobi for open sourcing their Complete UI AJAX component suite. It’s been a long time since a VanDEV presentation I gave on Open source and your business where I first met Andre and the crew – way back when Nitobi was still called eBusiness Apps.

By the way, we’re happy to post about jobs or co-founder opportunities here on the Bootup blog, and most especially for the Wednesday Wrap Up. Other than that, I can highly recommend what the Techvibes team are doing with their Vancouver tech jobs section. The featured jobs that show up on their blog I also find interesting, although could maybe do with a little more spice. Video?

It’s AdHack’s one year anniversary today: happy birthday, AdHack!. Congrats to James and the rest of the team and community – I see more good stuff in your next year. It also so happens that 130 years ago today, Alexander Graham Bell spoke over the telephone for the first time. And that’s a lead in which gives me an excuse to link to Confused of Calcutta, which made me aware of that fact. It also happens to be a fantastic blog, which you should definitely be subscribed to.

Turns out this very blog is #90 with a bullet on a list of top 150 blogs for entrepreneurs. I got contacted by Marc Dangeard of Entrepreneur Commons today to share an entrepreneurial story or two. Guess we better get cracking in “long format” posts here – I know I need to write something about NDAs, since I’ve just been sending folks over to Mark Peter Davis’ Get Venture blog to read his series (long story short: VC-type people generally don’t sign NDAs, and sharing your idea is good).

Have other blogs that are “must subscribe” (for whatever reason)? Let us know in the comments, I’ll put them in the wrap up next week.

Open Web Vancouver (June 11th and 12th on Upcoming) is now open for talk submissions. This conference is Vancouver’s techiest conference — I remember dragging Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate from Google back to the offices as the Strutta team was heading towards their first launch. Hopefully we’ll see Kevin and lots of other folks from the industry use this as a good excuse to come up and see Vancouver in the summertime. Maybe we’ll do an entrepreneur social or other meetup to coincide with the conference.

The BCTIA Technology Impact Awards deadline is this Friday, and I don’t think *anyone* has taken David Crow up on his offer?. I guess Strutta is going to sweep this one…

Riz’s Links

• Information Technology Assocation of Canada (ITAC) is seeking nominations for their 2009 IT Hero awards – deadline is April 30th
• Western Canada VC Activity in 2008 is down 39% in the IT category (life sciences were also down, clean tech and non technology sectors were up slightly) – from a recent report by the Ministry of Economic Development
• The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2009 from the MIT Technology Review. I’ve heard the Intelligent Software Agent story a time or two before. HashCache seems at first glance to be, again, yet another caching algorithm, but for the developing world a phrase like “a classroom equipped with pretty much any kind of computers, even castoff PCs, could store and cheaply access one terabyte of Web data” definitely is compelling.

I’ve got various bits and pieces of real-estate related news today, hence the Real Estate edition.

It looks like some of the feedback we gave on the PACT event we attended in San Francisco are moving ahead — the Canadian Trade Commissioners are putting on a Canadian Regional Boot Camp for Technology Start Ups. They’re starting with some back east locations, and when I asked, Guillaume Parent let me know about a time frame for Western events:

As far as the boot camps are concerned, yes, we are planning a Round II for the West with stops in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Saskatoon and/or Winnipeg. We are targeting early summer (May/June) for this. As FYI, and as you may have read on our website, we are in the process of opening the Canadian incubator at Plug and Play so CDN tech start-ups can use this as a landing ground, at no costs for up to 3 months, while focusing on securing partnerships in the Valley.

We’ll keep you posted on timing for the boot camps. The latter half of that news — that you can potentially work out of an office at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Silicon Valley — I’ll call the first bit of real estate related news.

The second real estate news is that Jamie Cheng of Klei Entertainment called to tell me that he’s looking for someone to sublet part of his cool new space in Yaletown:

We are moving into a new space of 3800sqft at the end of the month.
That’s about 1000-1200 sqft extra than what we need, and it’s got built out offices, kitchen, etc. I’m wondering if you know anyone who may be  looking to sublease some space.

The rent is cheap — $17/sqft + operating costs in Yaletown.

Get in touch with Jamie at sublease@kleientertainment.com if you’re interested.

Real estate news #3 comes from Rilli, Vancouver’s own geo-web startup. They finally took a break from tracking and locating their users, and located *themselves* in a new office in Gastown. Situated on 116 Pender St (above Wild Rice, across
from Tinseltown), the “up and coming” neighborhood has already proven
itself entertaining. Any and all are encouraged to stop by to get a tour, a product demo, and a sticker. Colin Brumelle, who I got the news from, is now the only team member who hasn’t moved back to Vancouver. He told me a fun story about how their rent is so cheap that they actually calculated that working out of coffee shops would be *more* expensive. Colin, that calculation would make a fun blog post…

A little bit out of left field is a request from old Drupal buddy Zack Rosen. Aside from Drupal services firm Chapter Three, Zack also started Mission Bicycles -

Mission Bicycle is a bicycle store for the Internet age. Customers give us their measurements, pick colors and components, and their dream bike arrives in the mail in 2 weeks. We’re like the CafePress of bicycles. You can check us out at missionbicycle.com, see our photo stream of bikes, or read coverage of us on CurrentTV and Thrillist.

The U.S. bicycle industry is a $6.2B business that is over 100 years old. We’re disrupting this market by selling directly to the rapidly growing market of 20-30 year-old bicycle commuters in cities. We can make cycling in cities as desirable driving a car. We’ve sold 225+ bikes around the world in the past 9 months (average sales price of $1000) and we have twice the margin of our competitors.

Why post about them here? For one, these are very cool bikes that bicycle mad Vancouver is sure to be interested in. And secondly, Zack’s looking for a round of angel / friends and family financing to take Mission Bicycles to the next level. If you’re interested in investing in this type of direct to consumer, Internet ecommerce business, email info@missionbicycle.com.

We here at Bootup are working on prepping our first official application process which will open the middle of this month. In the meantime, the TechStars application is already open for their summer program. This interview with David Cohen of TechStars is an excellent listen.

Closer to home, the New Ventures BC 2009 seminar series is in sneak peak mode: they’ve posted an outline of the 9 week seminar series that goes from April to June. The 2009 competition will get rolling in March. I can definitely recommend it – it’s a good way to tune your ideas if you’re just getting started, and it’s also a great place for networking. I went through a part of the program when I came back to Vancouver 5 years ago, and made lots of connections.

Final decisions on accepted companies for the next Launch Party (put it on your calendar for Feb. 26th) are going to be made this Friday. Want your company to present? Send a short blurb about your company and what you’ll be launching to Maura.

Riz’s Links

• The SFU TIME Center has some incubator office space available, with prices ranging from $720 to $830 per month.
• When the Dragon’s Away: “Live” Social Enterprise business case competition on Feb. 26th (calendar link) – put on by JDQ and Vancity, with a first prize of $15,000

Links, stories, promotions etc. being accepted now for next weeks edition. Leave a comment or send an email and we’ll get the word out.

Since today is yesterday was Launch Party, I thought it would be appropriate to launch the new look for our website and blog. I’ve had the theme set live for myself and others on the team for weeks, so I’ve forgotten the rather … basic … nature of the default theme we were using

Dave Shea of Bright Creative did the original logo work. Paul Jarvis of TwoThirty tweaked the logo and did up the overall design plus the WordPress template for this blog. Alexa Booth took Paul’s design and did a Drupal template for the main site.

Why do we have two sites? Well, this is our social blog space. In general, we think it’s best practices for companies to have a corporate blog. Some see fit to integrate it into their main site, but especially when your “main site” is a web application that actually IS your business, we think it’s a good idea to run your blog on a separate system. It becomes your status spot if something goes wrong with your main site, so you can keep people informed.

As well, we have the challenge of wanting to present a fair amount of information. Some of that has to be easier consumable as “static” content, easily guide people to the right information, and so on. We can continue to be more conversational here, as well as showcase many of the other social tools that we use — here is the full list of tools that we use.

Lastly, since I’m a raving Drupal fanatic, I ended up building Extranet features into the main site. Our portfolio company members, mentors, and other advisors have access to some additional features and information when they’re logged in.

I know there are lots of bits and pieces still to tweak — from wording and clarity to graphical fixes (the auto complete throbber looks crappy on a black background). Leave a comment or let us know what you think on Get Satisfaction.

I was trying to flip the switch on the new design before Launch Party last night, but called away to do ‘networking’: you know, the kind that has you lasso’ing ethernet cables over a bar’s rooftop We’ll see if the switch does in fact get thrown today — at left a fun image that is going to be on the new home page.

In any case, the clock has flipped over to September 19th, so we are officially in Talk Like a Pirate Day. And of course, our oh-so-staid parent site, ye old Bootup Labs, has gone piratized in celebration! The about page is a nice demo:

A Vancouver-based startup accelerator designed t’ help founders build tech startups an’ take them t’ their first round o’ fundin’ o’er th’ course o’ a nine month placement.

The nine months be split into three trimesters – because we all know that growin’ a startup is like raisin’ a child! Each three month period has different deliverables in th’ areas o’ business, marketin’, an’ product. Founders will come in with different strengths an’ weaknesses, bein’ matched with th’ right set o’ scallywags at Bootup Labs or external Advisors t’ reach each deliverable.

Oh, I really never get tired of that …

Thanks as always to Richard, the scallywag at Raincity Studios that created the pirate module for Drupal.

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.

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.