Posts tagged with barcamp

What would happen if a handful of ex-RIM employees started up new companies? Food for thought. Thousands have been laid off, we could get dozens of new startups. The groups would be experienced, knowledgeable, compatible, the ideal for a founding team. They would be connected to former colleagues wealthy from stocks from RIM's early days, making it easy to raise seed capital.

On the other hand, the RIM "diaspora" could drift away, getting jobs in the US, seattle, silicon valley… pulling valuable human connections, knowledge, and experience out of the local loop.

It's not hard to see that the first scenario is better for the region. The existing cluster grew because individuals, once they get a taste of the industry, cycle through many companies. In fact, this region has been an entrepreneurial centre since the industrial age. Electrohome for example, a major electronics company in the mid-20th century, was founded in Kitchener. While Toronto has more tech and sheer scale, KW has a greater concentration, and it's concentrated groups of entrepreneurs that create the upwards spiral.

I can't go without mentioning silicon valley, because I spent a significant part of my formative career time there. Around the time of Electrohome, there started a lovely chain of diasporas and virtuous cycles in the bay area. Shockley left Bell Labs to start his new company. The "Traitorous Eight" left Shockley to form National Semi. More left to start Intel and AMD. At SRI, Engelbart's employees skipped out to join PARC. PARC people left in many directions–including the Mac division at Apple, as well as Adobe and 3Com. Ex-3Com people are all over the place. More recently, there's the Xoogler effect, leading even to specialized ex-google-only VCs.

My point is this: if we can keep the xRIM in the area, then cool tech will be created, the cluster will expand, and new startups will grow. That's a good thing. So, let's see if we can see the silver lining in the cloud and open up some doors.

Oh yeah, and come out to StartupCampWaterloo12.

StartupCampWaterloo6 will be... is ... was. Yesterday in fact.

In presentation order:

1. Ultrasaur RM kicked things off with a great 30-second pitch "Your sysadmin is hacking your server. How do you stop them?" ... they tried last time and were denied, so the moral is, try, try again. They were first pick this time.
2. Thinkpanda with coolest logo and a demo you can't get into right now... an interesting tool for social bookmarking (my words, not theirs) which reminded me a bit of delicious and looked like it would be great as a part of groupware like Base Camp.
3. Neverboard Studios... these guys had a pretty cool looking iPhone game and were like, how the hell do we get attention for this thing? They want to charge $$ for it but are worried that they'll never break through the attention barrier. We bounced that one around the room for a while... hopefully had some useful advice... Afterwards at the bar I suggested that they lace the sound effects of their game with profanity in the hopes that Apple will ban it, and ride on the publicity from that. And if they do let it through, people will want it— for the same reason.
4. Kaimera Media with a concept for a theme park ride video capture system—like the thing that captures a photo of you on the roller coaster, but video. kiosk that burns a DVD for you on the spot. Definite win for simplest, best developed business plan of the evening.
5. Primal Fusion, definitely known around the Waterloo startup community for being pretty well funded and definitely brainy. Demo, which I've tried the private beta on their first product, and while it's interesting, I think there's a lot of what they've done that's not exposed in this version that needs to be in the next before it's clear what they are achieving. By the way, I cheated on including Primal Fusion in the sequence because Mark missed the 30 second pitches. I've been power corrupted. But I suffered accordingly, as my discussion topic was pushed off the end of the agenda. I won't give up though... I'll have another one next time.
6. Pager Duty was I think my favorite of the evening, although obviously they didn't do so well on the 30 second elevator pitch or they would have been farther up the presentation order. Very simple, to the point—if you need to have people on call, they will make sure that people are effectively notified with a simple service-style web system.
7. Giftah has what looks to me like a solid plan, allowing you to buy/sell excess gift cards and they take on the guarantees. Interesting discussion, including acknowledgement that they do have larger, better funded competitors in the USA like Plastic Jungle ... how to get traffic, etc.

I suspect you'll be seeing some of these companies around in the future doing cool stuff.

Oh yeah—and if you were there remember to take advantage of the Communitech Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program definitely—just call them. Say I sent you :-)

Also, we REALLY need a single unified calendar of events and it looks like watcamp.com might provide.

Possible idea for next time: handing out red cards to anyone who says "Facebook". Also, giving a prize for provoking the best discussion.

Thanks to the Accelerator Centre for providing space, and Tech Capital, Sun Microsystems, and Communitech for food & drinks. This is a totally non-profit venture and all labour is volunteer :-) My posse is Jesse and Mic.

So last night was StartupCampWaterloo5—the Original Startup Camp with the Best Format(tm). We had on the order of 60-80 people in attendance. We didn't do formal count of startups this time, but there were 12 proposed demos on the whiteboard, and I know of at least 3 other groups that were represented. As usual we had a keynote speaker: Mark Evans, who among other things runs the mesh conference in Toronto. He usually talks about social media, but he focused for us on communication, highlighting good and poor first impressions and public communications strategies of various websites.

Twelve people/groups put themselves up for doing a session, and gave 30 second pitches about what they wanted to discuss on the theme of starting up. We did our approval voting, ate food (thanks sponsors!) and had time for the top 4:

• Kareem Shehata showed us his new Aeryon Labs Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—sadly he did not yet have government clearance to fly it, but it's a serious piece of kit and he had some kick ass videos. It's controlled via a Google Maps style interface. We talked about business models. http://www.aeryon.com/

• I led a discussion on the subject of where to get Free Money from the government. Suggestions included SR&ED, NSERC USRA, Various OCE programs, Youth Employment Strategy, Ontario Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit, MS BizSpark, Youth.gc.ca - $15K for employee < 30, OMDC, Ontario Interactive Tax Credit, Services Canada (summer jobs)... and to look at the recent techcapital blog post.

• Avery Pennarun "eql=data" a project he's working on to make MS Access databases web accessible. Business model was a bit of a question mark but interesting technology and Avery gives good talks. http://eqldata.com/

• Grigory Kruglov—a UBC student current on co-op at RIM - talked about his business venture Outwick.com. It's aimed at collecting information about events like concerts, cultural events, public parties etc. and making it easy for people to find events at the time & place of their choosing using data mining, tagging etc. Very interesting, and we had a cool talk about viability, how to commercialize, etc.  http://outwick.com/

We also ran a live twitter stream on the main display using #watcmp. Afterwards many of us adjourned to Molly Blooms to imbibe the beverages of our choice.

Thanks to my co-instigators Jesse Rodgers and Mic Berman, and to our sponsors: Accelerator Centre, WatStart, Sun Microsystems, and Tech Capital Partners who provided space, support, and food!

PS And I almost forgot—Graham Hardie shot video and promises to put it online!