The PACT event that we attended just had a release from the Trade Commissioners out of the San Francisco office. It looks like some of our feedback — specifically, moving the “Boot Camp” programs of prepping companies for investment and pitches to regional locations in Canada — are going to go ahead. We’ll keep everyone up to date on how this program evolves, it looks like there are definite plans for a similar event April / May 2009.

Thanks Guillaume, Thierry, and the rest of the San Francisco and Palo Alto office teams for putting this event on. We’re looking forward to be involved in the regional Boot Camps as well. Full post of the results / press release after the jump.

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Danny and I are still down in San Francisco at the Plug and Play Tech Center, just wrapping things up before we head up to our Canadians in the Valley beer up in the city.

I’m taking a few minutes to catch up on my reading when I came across May Chu’s post on the Clarity Accounting blog - Don’t be afraid to be small. It’s an absolutely great write up of their approach to their business.

Less than 12 hours ago, I received an email sent through our contact form from a potential client who wanted to know more about our company. He wanted to know how long we have been in business and how big our firm is. He noted that our mailing address looked like a small business running out of some one’s apartment. He wanted to know if the business he is dealing with is a big, fail-proof company.

At first I was worried about how best to respond to this inquiry. After all, we are a small company that is run virtually. Everyone who has ever worked on this project has been contracted virtually. In the spirit of being an online accounting software, we conduct our business using as many “online tools” as possible.

Go read the whole post, and also check out the two Seth Godin posts that May references — Small is the new big, from 2005, and his recent post Too small to fail.

May and Dobes are doing a great job with Clarity Accounting, building their business one piece at a time, and I can’t help but think that they will be highly successful. I’ll leave you with another piece of information that I think highlights this:

Recently I found out that a company providing similar services as us burns 6 million dollars a year. I thought to myself, “wow, give me 6 million dollars and I would only spend a fraction of that amount”. In fact, within 1 month of our full launch, the business is already paying its own bills.

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.