Well, it seems like September is going to be a busy one. It’s back to school and back to work. I’ve got a bunch of links and meetings cluttering up my bookmarks and my brain, so here’s a big post to clear the decks.

Calling Advisors

We’ve got several companies we’ve talked to at very early stages that are looking for advisors. The majority are web-based in some way, although with very different target markets (you can browse some of the public ones in our company directory).

Code Factory - coworking in Ottawa

I picked up the phone and talked to Ian Graham of Code Factory today - we talked about it when he launched back in March. Ian is adding about a member per day, has seen consistent increases in the DemoCamp Ottawa events he organizes, and in general is pretty jazzed about how things are moving in Ottawa. I spent 4 years there and am glad to see things taking off, especially around a commercial coworking space similar to Vancouver’s WorkSpace (which, according to a brief chat with the owner yesterday, is bursting at the seams and looking for more space).

LaunchParty Vancouver version 5 is up. Eventbrite is being used for registration, you need to signup here.

BarCamp Vancouver has venues locked down for the party (evening of September 26th at WorkSpace) and for the day of (September 27th, several locations around Granville Island). I’m looking forward to this first time semi-distributed version of BarCamp, wandering around Granville Island, heading to JJ Bean for coffee and maybe nipping in to the local sake brewery for a tasting.

The VEF Momentum guys don’t have their website up yet, but they’re putting together an event for September 30th.

I posted this to Twitter some time ago, but we ripped out our event listings (blanket statement: your website and the world likely don’t need yet-another-event-listings page) and changed it to be a pointer to places to look for events in Vancouver. The Techvibes Vancouver event listings are very solid, but we’ll also be pointing to Upcoming and Facebook. We’ve made a group on Upcoming and are fleshing out an event resources page plus a guide to the recurring events in Vancouver.

Entrepreneurs Everywhere

We’ve been hosting interns for the Impact Entrepreneuership Group in our office all of August. As it turns out, Impact is also the national host for Global Entrepreneurship Week for Canada, taking place in the third week of November (Bootup Labs is a partner, and we’ll be doing a startup / founder focused conference - more details to follow).

I’ve spoken with people at both SFU and UBC about various entrepreneur programs that are underway. SFU’s Surrey campus (which I have yet to go out and visit, but I will do and take some pictures) is expanding its Entrepreneurship program with a side of Innovation. The first classes don’t kick off until January, but by all accounts it looks very interesting. Continuing with SFU, I’ve also got my eye on COSTAR, who are going to be focusing on open source. I’ve long wanted more university-level involvement in open source.

I also sat down with Mark Mawhinney to talk about the expanded UBC New Ventures Program which is in the process of being defined. I really hope that this is something not restricted to the Point Grey campus — downtown is where business happens in Vancouver. In general, we should encourage more cross pollination of all the campus’ and the downtown action.

Finally, had a great lunch today with Basil Peters of Angelblog.net. We had a lively discussion about all things startup related in Vancouver, from funding to education to what needs to go in a term sheet. You definitely need to be subscribed to his blog, and we hope to see Basil sharing his knowledge at some upcoming startup / founder workshops.

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.