Events

Top 5 Reasons to go to Grow Conference

It’s Silicon Valley in Vancouver
How can you ask for a better lineup of people? You get the opportunity to interact and connect with Lane Becker, Rob Chaplinsky, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Jeff Clavier, Debbie Landa, Chris Albinson and others. This is a world-class list of angels, investors, entrepreneurs and technologists.
It’s Canadian startup royalty
Royalty is the wrong word. But it’s a chance to get inspired by some of the best Internet startups in Canada. The event is sponsored by the C100 and Debbie Landa, Chris Albinson, Rob Chaplinsky, Lane Becker and Dan Martell are all Canadian. But it’s the connection to all of the others attending and speaking that is most valuable: Rick Segal, Boris Wertz, Mark MacLeod, Danny Robinson, Amar Varma, Chris Arsenault, Steve Woods, Leonard Brody, Jonathan Ehrlich and all of the others that will be involved.
Tickets are cheap
The super early bird tickets were snapped up. Regular tickets are only US$285. It’s not a lot of money for an event. When you consider that food alone is approximately $15 breakfast + $10 morning break + $25 lunch + $10 afternoon break + $30 cocktails = $90, so your ticket is only costing you $195. You might not like my pricing but I can tell you that WiFi at the MTCC is $30/connections. There are hard costs to running an event.
The food
Vancouver has some of the best food in the world. Tojo’s, Vij’s, Blue Water Cafe, ReFuel, Gotham Steakhouse, Joe Fortes, Lumiere. The list just goes on and on. If you’re creative you can do this on a budget, step one follow someone who is on an expense account or has already had atleast one successful startup.
The Vancouver peeps
There are some great entrepreneurs, technologists, designers and thinkers living in and around Vancouver. Ben Skelton, Dave Olson, Kris Krug, Meg Cole, Danielle Sipple, Avi Bryant, Andre Charland, Boris Mann, Dave Shea, David Eaves, Kate Trgovac, Alexandra Samuel, Gordon Ross, Jason Mogus, Dick Hardt, Rebecca Bollwitt, Tod Maffin and others.

And the unwritten sixth reason to attend, though many will tell you this is a reason to avoid, I’ll be there.

Nerds on a train

I’m going to miss this years’ Make Web, Not War event in Montreal on May 27, 2010. I’ll be attending another event in Ottawa. There is a great list of presenters including:

Joël Perras, ~~Founder~~ Core Developer, CakePHP
Evan Prodromou, Founder, Identi.ca
Erin Blaskie, Founder, BSETC
Marc-André Lanciault, Founder, Inbox International

It’s a great training event for developers in Montreal. Thought I might be biased, I keynoted the 2009 event in Toronto. It is great to see continuted support of interoperability and developer choice. Joey and I joined Microsoft after doing most of our recent web development on other platforms (Rails, PHP, ColdFusion and Java2). I still have a deep interest in understanding the impact of emerging technologies (lately I’ve been looking at noSQL and scaling solutions).

If you’re going to be in the Montreal area. Or better yet, if you want to make your way from Toronto to Montreal. Join Joey and the gang on the DEVTrain. For $50 you get a subsidized train to Montreal starting on Tuesday May 25 at 9:00am and leaving on Friday, May 28 at 11:25am. Nothing like power, wifi, food, a beverage, and NERDS ON A TRAIN. I think Joey will be playing the role of Samuel L. Jackson on this train ride.

“I’ve had enough of these muthaf***in nerds on this muthaf***in train” – VIARail employee

MeshU – It’s worth the price of admission

by davidcrow

It’s time again for MeshU. I wrote about why startups should consider attending MeshU over on StartupNorth. This is a great opportunity to learn and connect.

Learning

There are a lot of smart, talented, successful and engaging people at MeshU. You want my list of who I can’t wait to see:

Bill Buxton
Bill is a colleague of mine at Microsoft. He also had a profound influence on my career. I was training to be an academic. I wanted to do research like my idols (including Bill Buxton), but Bill’s session at CHI’97 in Atlanta is where he espoused that we’re all designers. We’re all designing and building and shipping software that people use. Imagine that. He is an exciting, engaging speaker that any startup, executive, designer, developer should listen to.
Sean Ellis
The #leanstartup thing has become a movement. Whether you’re lean or you’re fat, you there’s something to learn about product development and marketing from the guy that brought Xobni, EventBrite and Dropbox to market. I think every startup and every marketer needs to at least listen to what Sean Ellis is saying.
Aza Raskin
I’ve never met Aza, but he works with 4 people that I think are top notch at Mozilla (I’m looking at you Beltzner, Shaver, Lilly and Surman). I’ve written about his work at Humanized, I used his product Enso as my launcher in Vista. And one of my close friends actually worked on the Canon Cat with Aza’s father, Jef. Aza is the creative lead for Firefox. If you were looking to learn from someone that is helping to build the fabric of every web experience (well technically 24.69% of all web experiences ;-), there’s a good chance that Aza will teach you something.
Diana Clarke
Diana is a developer rockstar. She’s moving the entire backend at Freshbooks from PHP to Python. This is a crazy project. Switching languages in real-time with the application still running. This is like performing a heart transplant with the patient still conscious. You can learn something about engineering complex systems from Diana.
Dan Martell
Profitable in 2 months at Flowtown, that’s crazy. Hopefully that includes founder salaries. But you get to hear from the trenches about building a startup using customer development. You’ll learn about “customer development, feature prioritization, split testing, product metrics and agile development as approaches to increase your probabilities of succeeding”.
Joe Stump
Geolocation infrastructure startup with “the” set of investors (Ron Conway, First Round Capital, Chris Sacca, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferriss, Shawn Fanning people). He was the lead architect at Digg. So if you don’t think you can learn something from the guy who built the infrastructure that created the tsunami that spawns “The Digg Effect“. Then forget about scalable architectures and ask him about raising money.

And this is only 6 of the 13 speakers. There are world class people coming to Toronto. Hopefully everyone from Montreal to Waterloo realizes that this a big deal. The speakers are of the calibre that you’ll find at a conference in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York , Austin, Vegas, where ever.

Connecting

MaRS only hold 400 attendees. This is an incredibly small conference venue. If you’re smart, lucky, outgoing without being douchey, you have a pretty good chance of meeting the speakers and other attendees that are pretty awesome.

The thing to remember is that a chance meeting at a conference with any of these individuals isn’t going to change the course of our startups. You’re looking to make some initial connections. I feel like I tell a lot of entrepreneurs that you don’t have to get everything about your startup on the table in 30 seconds. None of these people have the power to change your life in 30 seconds. It’s like dating, as much as you want to “hop on the good foot and do the bad thing”, it does require a little bit of conversation. (If you really need instant gratification, there are a lot of consultants/charlatans/snakeoil salesmen that will take your money and tell you that if you do these 3 things you’ll be more awesome).

Events like MeshU aren’t tradeshows. You’re not likely to find customers. You’re not going to find booth candy. You’re probably not going to find an investor (though if I was a Canadian angel or early-stage investor I’d be there just to meet the entrepreneurs and maybe learn something to help my portfolio). You’re there to meet potential hires, other entrepreneurs that you can share war stories and lessons. The whole point of an ecosystem is to enable the exchange of value. The value can only be exchanged between connected nodes in the network. The ecosystem gets strong and more valuable the more connections we build.

My advice is to start thinking about the connections and the learnings that will justify the price. Then go register for MeshU.

I’ll see you there.

MEIC and NextMedia

by davidcrow

I realize that I sit on the Board of Directors for the MEIC and on the Board of Advisors for NextMedia, however, I didn’t know about this great partnership and opportunity. It’s a contest focused on taking early concepts for tablet computing and media consumption, the goal isn’t to build the technology, it’s to get people to sketch and explore new opportunities enabled by mass penentration of tablets.

This is a fun contest for designers (and aren’t we all designers). All you need to submit is an outline of the value proposition, the initial design concepts including IA or prototype screens, the audience and the business model. It’s a great

goal of the application, and specifics of functionality

audience target

intentions for development

information architecture or up to five screen shots

The prize

The winner will recieve a development deal worth $25,000 in development services from Trapeze to go from concept to reality. And business development, strategic relationships and incubation with the MEIC.

Open. Participatory. Distributed. Hackable. Special.

by davidcrow

I ran into Mark Surman this morning and he reminded me about the upcoming Mozilla Drumbeat event in Toronto on April 24, 2010. I like the Drumbeat events. Get everyday people who use the Internet and web technologies involved in new ways to understand participate and take control of their lives.

At a practical level, Drumbeat community members use web technology to make things that improve and protect the open internet. They run local events where people propose and work on these practical projects. They encourage others to get involved. Mozilla helps find contributors, funds and advice for the most promising Drumbeat projects. It also directly leads a number of Drumbeat projects of its own.

It’s all about making and building. Getting regular people to understand the impact and the potential the open web as a generative tool on lives, careers and information. It’s about taking the tools, methods and techniques developed through the collaborative development process used at Mozilla and extending it to help support the open web (it reminds me of the evolution of Mozilla as described by my friend David Eaves). Check out Mark’s blog posts about Drumbeat or his presentation below

What are potential Drumbeat projects?

Some of my favourites of the currently submitted projects include:

Universal Subtitles

Subtitles bridge linguistic and physical barriers to video. Help create an open lookup standard that lets any video client find matching subtitles in online databases, along with free and open source tools to enable users to easily create subtitles and translations, a Firefox extension that will look up and display matching subtitles, and an open community subtitle database.

Privacy Icons

This project has a very simple goal: to develop a series of graphical and machine- readable privacy icons that companies can use to convey important elements of their privacy policy to users and that developers can build applications on top of to enable users to make choices based on the disclosures in the policies.

You should check out the projects. Think about how you might get involved. And more importantly, who are those people that are peripheral to our little web technology community that you know that should be participating? Open government folks? Media company people? Real estate technologists? Teachers? Artists? Share Drumbeat with them. Invite them to join you. Invite them to participate.

DemoCamp Ramen Edition

by davidcrow

It’s time again for DemoCamp. There are a few tickets remaining. But this is DemoCamp Ramen Edition. Why ramen? Well it’s pretty easy. The first is an homage to being ramen profitable. The last event with Gurbaksh Chahal was great, my only complaint was that by 9pm I was hungry. The great folks at Liberty Noodle have offered to help us out. They are providing take out boxes of noodles or rice as part of the DemoCamp registration. Hopefully this should make it more tenable to spend time watching a stellar line up of local startups and a keynote. This is all made possible by our friends at SIFE Ryerson, who have recently launched StartMeUpRyerson to be the SVASE of Canada, go have a peek.

April Dunford is keynoting. April is one of my favourite marketers in the world. She has lived in big organizations (IBM, Nortel) and at small organizations (DataMirror, Infobright, VersePoint). She has a wicked grasp of customer development and this #leanstartup thing. April has agreed to talk about the myths of product market fit. Well at least the challenges about figure out if you’ve got product-market fit and how to know when to begin to transition to go-to-market. This will be a must attend discussion for startups about products, marketing and corporate development. (Don’t worry if you miss April at DemoCamp, you can see Sean Ellis at MeshU).

There is an outstanding line up of startups:

I’ve seen a few of these demos, and they are fun. It’s exciting to get to see world-class technologies and startups here in Toronto (Ottawa and Montreal). I’m looking forward to hanging out with everyone, learning from April and watching the best demos.

We’ll be heading out for beers afterwards. We’re heading over to the Imperial Pub. And if you haven’t figured this out, let me help you, The Imperial Pub is a great place for a couple of beers, it’s not the place to go for dinner.