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.

We’re already down one month of the 2008 year and it seems like the pace of activities are speeding up.

In upcoming order, here are the events in Vancouver relevant to startups that I know about:

• Fusion Forum (February 20 - 21): a financing event put on by New Media BC. What is Fustion?
  

  Fusion is designed to showcase the hottest digital media firms, provide valuable insights into key issues in the industry, provide a premium networking opportunity and a chance to learn from world-class investment professionals involved in the sector.

  Sorry I didn’t mention it earlier, but this past Thursday was actually an Entrepreneur Bootcamp. I believe there is still room if you want to pitch your company to investors. Bootup Labs was invited, but Danny is actually presenting Strutta and we’ve got too many other items still on the “to do” list between now and then to do it justice. Thanks for the offer, Adam!

• Northern Voice 2008: of course there’s a conflict of interest! I’ve helped organize this personal blogging / social media conference for the past 3 years (this is the 4th annual), and it’s always a mind expanding experience. We have people attending from across the country and around the world, with lots of travel from our US neighbours in particular. Anyone wanting to plugin to what is happening online from a personal / social perspective should attend, or at the very least plan some dinners or meetups with the many folks that are arriving from out of town. Almost sold out, so buy a ticket now if you intend to come.
• Launch Party (late March / early April): the last one at the Lamplighter headlined by Sun and their Startup Essentials launch in Canada was filled to the brim: networking and new product launches plus an intro to who’s doing what in Vancouver are the reason to attend every time. Sounds like late March or early April according to Maura.
• DemoCampVancouver06 - Gaming Edition (late March / early April): we just wrapped the DCV05, where I announced that we’d be doing something a little different for DCV06 — a themed version that will focus on gaming. There are lots of big gaming companies that have spun off some smaller studios, some of which only got re-absorbed (Baby EAs, in Rob Lewis’ parlance on TechVibes) — are there more gaming startups, or gaming related ideas out there? I’m going to reach out to the local gaming tribe and see about getting some of them out. Including, hopefully, a guest speaker from Project Darkstar.

P.S. OK, OK, I *didn’t* forget about CaseCamp Vancouver 3 on February 20th, I just would expect any startup worth its salt to know these lessons already.