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.

I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but Techvibes doesn’t suck anymore.  We all know that they’ve done an fantastic job covering the local tech scene on their blog for the past year or so, but the main site had a bit to be desired.  This is not news to anyone, especially Boris W and Rob.

They’ve consolidated and organized tech communities around a main site, which includes at the forefront, their Blog, plus Events, Directories, Jobs, and Forums.  Then you can slice it by geographic areas, including Vancouver, Seattle, Kitchener-Waterloo, among others.  I can see how this can spread like Craigslist which doesn’t surprise me since everything that Boris touches seems to turn to gold.

Feature requests:  Dare I say, a few LinkedIn features would be nice?  And, at Bootup Labs we’d like to avoid reinventing the wheel, so a Crunchbase style API would be quite useful for us.

Quick post to remind everyone to check out Vidfest and The Vancouver International Game Summit.   Looks like it’s going to be a great event this year.  I’ll be there on Saturday to pitch Strutta at the Pitch ‘n’ Play part of the event.

A note to the organizers: We accidentally scheduled Launch Party on the same night as the Opening Reception.  I apologized to Adam, and explained that the reason we chose May 21st to host Launch Party was because of the VCs that would be in town for the VC Road Trip. Maura, Dimitri and I promised to pay more attention in the future….. Hey maybe we should have a unified calendar… err techvibes does I guess, but VIDFEST is not on there.  Besides, I told Boris Wertz that I wont use it until they break up with their 1999 web design?  That said, their blog is a great resource for the city and should be read daily if you want to know anything about the tech scene in Vancouver.

Time flies when you’re starting companies, and the time has come to bring someone on to help us get Bootup Labs moving faster. We’re happy to announce that Brendon Wilson has joined as us as Bootup Labs’ first employee!

Brendon just returned to Vancouver from four years in Silicon Valley as a Product Manager. He brings a wealth of experience as both a software developer and a business geek, and is generally the kind of “let’s get things done” guy we wanted to have involved with Bootup Labs. He’s also not shy about getting out there to stir things up – see his recent posts on TechVibes to get a flavour for that.

Over the coming months, Brendon will be the attention to detail guy, pushing forward the documentation of Bootup Labs’ investment process, helping to vet potential Bootup Labs recruits, and generally getting things moving. So ladies and gentlemen, start your pitching!

Along with employee #1, we have other announcements to make in the coming weeks about the first recruits to get “booted up”, dates for some planned events, and more.

P.S. Don’t forget that Rick Segal from JLA Ventures is coming to visit this coming Monday, April 21st at 4pm in our offices. You’ll need to signup for Vancouver.