Bootup Labs Blog

Part 1 and Part 2 of Brad Feld’s talk from the April 22 Bootup Labs Entrepreneurial Society event are up now on the BLES website (which has had a bit more info added to it). Here’s Part 1 embedded in this post:

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.

Thanks as well to the volunteers who helped out with this event, especially Sonia Ryan and Neetu Chhabra who ran the registration desk, and Degan Beley who made people feel at ease by making them stand next to each other and get their picture taken. Thanks to Ron Stevens from Mingleverse for covering a big chunk of the speaker dinner afterwards.

Parveen Kaler did a great post on a lot of the content of the event and his approach – he’s building iPhone games at Smartful Studios. Anyone else have commentary to share outside of the great Twitter posts? Please link in the comments below!

Want to be kept up to date on other events like this? Subscribe to the Startup Events notification list. The next Launch Party is June 2nd (on upcoming), with a Cofounder Speed Dating event planned right before LPV7 kicks off.

Thanks to Michael Fergusson and the team at Rude Boy Games for hosting last nights meetup with the team from Wavefront. Wavefront is a non-profit “accelerated commercialization centre” for BC, focusing on wireless and mobile applications and devices.

They came to Gastown to find out more from developers and companies working in mobile here in Vancouver, to tell us more about themselves and the services they offer, and to feed us free beer and pizza.

Michael ran the evening admirably. He had everyone sit in a circle, introduce themselves, their company, their projects, and talk about challenges they were facing around mobile here in BC. We didn’t get very far before some person’s commentary on anything from embracing the web as THE path for mobile development or a discussion on funding realities right now evolved into a discussion by everyone in the room.

I talked a bit about Bootup Labs, a bit about the VCC program (info on BC’s Venture Capital Programs here) that we’re applying for, and a plea for less duplication and more working together on common issues. Things like “HR bootcamp” or a seminar on getting investor ready is not at all specific to mobile startups, and I’d hope that local industry groups work together on co-sponsoring or organizing such events.

Lastly on the funding side of things, I mentioned the JumpStart program from the BlackBerry Partners Fund — this is something to keep an eye on to get started with really early stage. For those that are currently iPhone crazy, getting some investment dollars to focus on BlackBerry might be what it takes for people to look at the platform more closely. I definitely think there are interesting demographics around it, and of course folks are much more guaranteed to have things like data plans.

Back to the discussion, the huge theme was seeing the web as the primary platform for delivery, and anything like device specific applications being a step backwards. There were a handful of Nitobi developers there that in particular esposed this point of view, hence their involvement in the open source Phone Gap project, to make native iPhone apps (and soon, Android) using just web technologies. Parveen Kaler from Smartful Studios – who comes from a game developer / console background where he has dealt with lots of “gatekeeper” companies with much stricter rules and is now building iPhone apps – was the main contrarian: he’s loving Objective C and developing natively for the platform, and his business model fits with the rules in place.

It was great to find out more about Wavefront and the programs they’re currently offering. The item of biggest interest, judging by the crowd, is probably the handset library they are going to build up. They have a couple of G1 Android phones today, and one of them already got lent to the guys from Handi Mobility. I still see a little bit of overlap with, for example, WINBC, but it would be great if Wavefront focused on the developer / technology / direct carrier interactions. I think leading these type of developer-centric gathering events would be a great direction for Wavefront, and hope to see more of them as they get ramped up.

I’m finally getting around to do the official posting of the date and topic of DemoCampVancouver06. As I had previously announced, we’re going to do things a little differently this time: the evening will have a theme, which is Gaming.

We’ve always said that we want to unite and mix the different “tribes” that we have around technology in Vancouver with our DemoCamp events, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of the gaming tribe. I know a bit about gaming, but I also know that I have much more to learn about this industry.

I’ve already got two speakers signed up:

• Indie Game Development with Dustin Sacks of SillySoft
• iPhone Game Development with Parveen Kaler (Parveen already beat me to the punch and posted about DemoCampVancouver06 as well as linking his presentation on the wiki page.

I’ve got an email contact in to someone with knowledge about developing for XBox Live Arcade (aka XBLA), so theoretically I have one slot left available. Anyone that wants to present on a topic / idea/ demo / whatever related to gaming, please contact me directly at democampvancouver@bootuplabs.com.

Update: that was quick! Jamie Cheng from Klei Entertainment is in. You may know Klei from their games Eets or N+. Jamie also happens to be an expert in AI. Woo hoo…I bet we could fill multiple DemoCamps just with some of the questions that I have for these guys…

As Parveen mentions on his post, I had originally been thinking that we could get a presenter about Sun’s Project Darkstar, but the timing actually overlaps with the Sun Labs Open House (which I’ll be attending at least one day of as well) – as of now, I’m not sure if I can get someone in on short notice.

Lastly, Megan Cole is going to help with BattleDecks. Have decks to submit? Send them along!

So, thanks again to our venue sponsors WorkSpace for the space at Suite 400, 21 Water Street. We’ll see you on April 10th, 2008, at 5:30pm, and please spread the word most especially to anyone in the gaming community so they can see what DemoCampVancouver is all about. See also: Upcoming, Facebook event.

P.S. don’t forget, April 3rd is the first DemoCampVictoria. I’m going to try and make it over for the first event and meet some more Victoria-based entreprenuers.