Events

Mesh Marketing

The Mesh Conference team continually amazes me. You can read my bromance piece on the big brother Mesh Conference. But Mark, Rob, Mathew, Stuart, Mike and Sheri continue to do a fantastic job bringing together leading thinkers with the Toronto community. I have hosted my share of local events and I recognize balance of cost and accessibility, but the quality of the mesh speakers and the ticket price is fantastic. I’m always impressed with the spread of speakers from startup to agency to larger company. This event is no different. It has a great group of founders, executives and thought leaders.

The current event is happening in the middle of the fall startup event storm, but it is significantly differentiated from the regular startup event. This is an event for marketers. It is focused on content strategies, mobile tactics, social media tools and features some great folks like:

Jennifer Lum (LinkedIn, @jenniferlum)
Hicham Ritnani (LinkedIn, @HichamRitnani) of Frank And Oak
Wehuns Tan (LinkedIn, @Wishabi)
Kristina Halvorson (LinkedIn, @halvorson)

It’s a great group. I’ve personally seen the amazing work of Jennifer and Hicham (I sit on the advisory board of TribeHR where Jennifer is an investor, and I’m a semi-loyal customer of the Frank and Oak – only semi-loyal because they keep selling out of stuff to fast). It’s a great event and it would be a shame for Toronto marketers to miss the event in their own backyard.

Halifax Pop Explosion

by davidcrow

I had a great time at NxNE. It wasn’t representative of the time I’ve spent at SxSW. But this is probably a good thing. I was on a panel hosted by Dave Senior of Playground Inc. with Michael Litt (@michaellitt) of Vidyard and Raja Bhatia (@raja) of Confluence Labs. Great fun talking about startups, traction, funding, teams, marketing, etc. It’s funny, it was a great panel, I spent a lot of time heckling Mike. But I guess the reviews were positive. Because my friend Meghan Warby (@withoutayard) invited to Halifax to attend Halifax Pop Explosion.

I have a few confessions:

I have never been to Halifax.
I am going because I get to see my friends Jevon (@jevon) and Ben (@byosko)
I am putting together new material

I’m in Halifax from Tuesday, Oct 16 until Friday, Oct 19. It’s a short stay, but I am choosing to be home for dinner on Friday with the kidlets. I’m looking for food recommendations, a place to have a pint, and some sights. Any suggestions on where to eat?

A foodie’s tour of Halifax

I’m also putting together a new presentation. The program description for my talk, titled How to Start a Startup, is:

Everyday more and more web startups are getting founded by entrepreneurs tenured and new. However, most abandon basic business pillars when building a venture in the digital economy. Not every start-up requires the same advice, but there a similar threads that apply to almost every company attempting to build a new digital product. We will be discussing the 5 things every startup must have to succeed.

I need to build a new talk and slide deck. I was thinking I could do something fun, like try to only build a presentation using quotes from The Social Network. Which in looking through the IMDB quotes could be surprisingly difficult. I need to make this presentation a little more fun. Otherwise it’s going to feel like a “how to” guide for the basics of a startup. Which isn’t a bad plan, but I’m not sure I would sit through an hour long talk. Maybe I can use Paul Graham’s Want to Start a Startup:

The Idea
People
What Customers Want
Raising Money
Not Spending It

And just intersperse stories I have from Influitive, Maintenance Assistant and the startups I’ve worked with. I think coupled with Thomas Tunguz’s Your startups top 3 priorities

Distribution
Monetization
Engagement

I guess I can talk about my experiences along The Startup Curve. And since I’ve never seen the Acquisition fo Liquidity or Upside of Buyer, my experience will be limited.

Strangely I haven’t given a presentation in what feels like a long time. It’s a good time to build a new deck that is engaging and fun. Maybe I need to start with a simple hypothesis and build out the supporting materials.

Featured Image: Some rights reserved by Steve Dinn

Hacking Health

by davidcrow

A Hacking Health Follow @hackinghealthca event is happening October 19-21, 2012 in Toronto. The event focuses on bringing innovation to health care. It brings together clinicians with developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to look for real world solutions based on real clinical experience. It should be a very interesting event. The Montreal event has a 138 developers, 28 designers, 66 healthcare experts and 32 mentors. This signals a huge opportunity in the healthcare clinicians and practitioners for new tools and change. I wonder if the health care funding mechanisms/decision making will limit both the development and the adoption of any potential tools. It would be an interesting to discussion to have with others at the event.

The event in Montreal generated 19 projects, including:

HemoTrack – a mobile app that collects real time usage of Factor VIII, bleeding events and uploads that information to a web application accessed by physicians to monitor their patient’s health. This project included Dan McGrady Follow @dmix
Kinect Burn Area App – Using the off-the-shelf Microsoft Kinect, the 3D depth sensor feature accurately and rapidly provides doctors measurements of total body surface area. The camera feature allows clinicians to visualize and accurately mark the area of the burn on screen and automatically calculate the % of body surface area burnt as well as fluid requirements of the patient.

I’m hoping to get out and participate (weekends are incredibly valuable, taking time away from kid activities and time means this really has to deliver value for my participation).

Mesh is TO’s most important DIY conference

by davidcrow

Mesh Conference is Toronto’s most important DIY conference.

That’s right Mesh Conference is a DIY event. It’s the Do-It -Yourself endeavour of small dedicated group of individuals. And you can see each of their personalities and interests in the schedule and speakers. Rob Hyndman (@rhh), Stuart MacDonald(@stuartma), Mark Evans(@markevans), Mathew Ingram(@mathewi), and Mike McDerment (@mikemcderment) have been working very hard since 2006 to build a world-class that has attracted renown speakers, mayors, and attendees. The secret is that Mesh is an event that all of them want to attend. The reason they invest time and effort into this event is because it is really for them.

Why is Mesh Toronto’s most important DIY event?

There are great events ranging from my DemoCamp to EcommerceCamp, from MakerFaireTO to Open Toronto, TechTalksTO to HackTO. There are a great number of local events that have emerged. The thing about Mesh is that it started in 2006. Over 5 years ago, shortly after the first BarCampToronto. And since the very first Mesh, it has always had an air of professionalism that others should strive to obtain. Mesh from the very first event was an event that was world class. It was Canadian in size (about 1/10th the size of a US event). But it has always been DIY, it has never felt DIY.

Rob, Stuart, Mark, Mathew, Mike and Sheri deserve true accolades for building an event that defines the emerging technology, emerging culture, emerging policy in Canada. Thank you!

I hope to see everyone at the Allstream Centre this week.

Apps for Heatlh

by davidcrow

I am not a huge fan of design contests as a motivator or educational tool. However they seem to work, there are business plan competitions like Moot Corp, SIFE Student Entrepreneur Competition, MIT $100K, among others. They do define external criteria, timelines and rewards help structure the process. That aside there is a new competition happening at Mohawk College in Hamilton focused on building “technological solutions to real-world challenges sponsored by health care organizations”.

Ever since I had a heart attack at DemoCampToronto6 I have had a renewed interest in personal health technologies. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that my undergraduate degree in Kinesiology in the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences (ask me about how a 17 year old makes decisions about educational programs, and I did seriously want to be an orthopedic surgeon until I realized I’d have to work with sick people). I’ve been interested in reimagining personal health technology:

I have friends at BodyMedia, Massive Health and other organizations that are doing some amazing things. I am fascinated with the change in delivery and practice engagement that Canadian companies like HelloHealth and Myca. So I am impressed to see Apps for Health that presents a series of challenges:

Teams are then required to do the necessary research, design and iteration to build a presentation. You can think about this as the initial pitch session whether for funding, recruiting, customer development, etc. Teams create a 10 minute presentation that “demos” the solution. The goal is to concisely present your idea and demonstrate:

Must demonstrate a thorough understanding of the health care problem
Must be clinically useful in the health care environment
Must be created by team for purpose of the competition
Must be technologically feasible
Degree of completion
Cohesive presentation

What’s the best way to present this? Technical details? Screen shots? Demos? Simulators? etc. Up to each team. You need to demonstrate impact and win hearts and minds. I think I’ll look at forking out the $50 to attend including the drive to Hamilton.

Mesh 2011

by davidcrow

Apparently I’m late to the game with the recognizing that Mesh Conference 2011 has announced a new location and their schedule.

New Location

The conference moves to the Allstream Centre at the CNE grounds. This is a first year Mesh won’t be at MaRS. I’m hoping the new space allows for new conference experience. MaRS is a fantastic venue, but Mesh has really outgrown the space. It will be interesting to see how Sheri and the team organize lunch, social events, and other interactions to build strong connections between attendees.

Speakers

I’m excited there are a lot of my friends who are speaking at Mesh. These folks are just world class and it will be interesting to hear about their experiences.

I’m also incredibly stoked about Gabe Zichermann (LinkedIn) from GamificationCo. Gabe wrote Game-Based Marketing and hosted The Gamification Summit. Looks like another conference that covers marketing, culture/society, business, and media. It’s a great Canadian take on the web, technology, politics and culture.

I am disappointed that MeshU did not survive the fiscal constraints of running a conference. I know from our past experiences running StartupEmpire the lack of sponsorship and revenue that a smallish conference can generate. I’m hoping that there will be something for design technologists and entrepreneurial technologists in Toronto in the near future.