It's DemoCamp time in Edmonton again. Thanks to everyone who came out to the last DemoCamp Edmonton. It was awesome to get the community together again and check out some of the awesome things that people are up to. As an extra note it was great to see a number of U of A students out at the last event and we are hoping to see more students from both the U of A and some of the colleges in town (NAIT, MacEwan), out at the next one.
On that note...DemoCamp Edmonton 4 is scheduled to take place on October 29th at 6:30 at the U of A ETLC room E1-017. It will be great to have the community together again and see some more great things that are going on.
As a part of the community building process, we're looking for people to help spread the word. We'd like to challenge everyone to tell a few people about Democamp and physically bring at least one new person to the event.
If you are interested in attending, demoing or helping, you can find out more information and sign up on the wiki at www.barcamp.org/DemoCampEdmonton4
Edmonton Startup Semanti Corp. recently demoed their new product at DEMO 08. Semanti is a Firefox plugin that sits on top of Google allowing users to search based on word's semantic meaning, the results are shown in a box above your google search results and are based on what other sites users have said belong in those categories. Check out their presentation at DEMO 08 (embeded below).
Check out www.semantifind.com to sign up for their beta.
Happy Blog Day 2008!!! Here are 5 blogs that I love to follow and you might find interesting on this fine, sunny (in Edmonton), blog day.
I hope that you find a blog on here that you haven’t heard of before. I would love to hear what blogs you find interesting.
DemoCamp Edmonton 3 is ready to go. After around 100 people came out exchanged ideas at our recent BarCamp we are looking forward to having the community together again at our third DemoCamp.
DemoCamp Edmonton 3 is slated to take place on September 17 at 6:30PM in the Engineering Teaching and Learning Complex (ETLC), room E1 017, at the University of Alberta. You can find a map of where the building is located on campus here. Parking is located nearby in the Windsor Parking Lot on 116 St and 92 Ave.
The second DemoCamp featured demos from companies such as Zigtag, Aviary, Boreal, and others. Come out and find out what other projects and companies people are working on, and meet some of the other people in the Edmonton tech community. You can find more information at www.barcamp.org/DemoCampEdmonton3
After running a very successful Pecha Kucha Night on May 1st, Edmonton NextGen is at it again. The next installment of the Edmonton Pecha Kucha series is slated to take place on September 11, 2008. The event location has moved from the Winspear Centre to the TransAlta Arts Barns at 10330-84 Ave and kicks off at 6:30. Tickets are $5 at the door and you can RSP a spot at the event by emailing them at: nextgen@edmonton.ca
For those of you not familiar with what Pecha Kucha is basically how it works is that there is a series of presenters each with a topic of their choosing (most projects in the Edmonton installment revolve around desing and art projects that they are invovled in). However unlike a typical boring presentation that drags on, the presenters are only allowed 20 slides and their slides are set to 20 second auto advance, thus keeping things fast paced and interesting.
With over 100 people signed up and less than 20 spots left the excitement for BarCamp Edmonton has continued to grow. Taking place this Saturday (July 19) beginning at 10:00 BarCamp Edmonton will be a great opportunity to come out and meet some of the other people that are involved in Edmonton's tech scene, and check out some of the cool things that they are working on. Come on out, meet some people, show something off, and join in.
If you would like to participate in, or check out, the online discussion we are asking everyone to tag any twitter, flickr, blog, or other posts with #BarCampYEG. You can follow this tag to see what's going on, or post using this tag to let your thoughts be known.
For more information go to www.barcampedmonton.com and if you are interested in attending, please sign up here.
I hope to see you there...
The first Edmonton BarCamp is set and ready to roll. After running a couple of successful DemoCamps we are excited about keeping the community growing, come on down and join in the fun.
What is BarCamp?
Barcamp is an ad-hoc gathering of people in and interested in the Edmonton tech community. BarCamp is a series of loosely scheduled 20 minute presentations/discussions about whatever the community is interested in.
How it works?
Everyone shows up in the morning and people write their name on a block of time with a topic, idea, whatever, that want to present, discuss, learn, etc. Everyone should have a topic in mind they’d like to lead a discussion on. Each session is only 20 minutes so you don’t have to prepare a big speech or PPT. The sessions should be interactive allowing for the audience to be a part of the discussion.
Every 1/2 hr a new session starts and goes for 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of hallway talk and deciding on your next session.
When is BarCamp?
Saturday July 19th, 10:00 am to 4pm with the possibility of an impromptu trip to a local pub should the community desire to continue the discussion.
Where is BarCamp?
The Edmonton World Trade Center, Floor 6. You can find a Google map here.
How much does BarCamp cost?
Nothing. Free. Nadda. BarCamp is a sponsored event. We have arranged a couple of generous sponsors to cover the room, lunch, beer, etc. A big thank you to our sponsors:
Who should come?
You! Everyone! No matter what you interest in technology we can almost guarantee there will be something that you will find interesting, or someone that you will find interesting to talk to.
What are people going to be talking about?
We are planning on having three different presentation rooms, as well as a couple of discussion rooms/areas, a “business” room, a “tech” room, and a “misc” room. Ultimately the topics will be whatever the community want them to be.
What should I bring?
Whatever you want. We are arranging wifi so that you will be able to bring your laptops if you like. Also bring whatever other gadgets you want to talk about, show off, etc. Have a new iPhone, Arduino, Lego Mindstorms, whatever: bring it, play with it, show it off. Or bring nothing at all. Whatever you like.
Where do I sign up?
Given the space limitations on the venue we have 125 spots open based on first come first serve. Please sign us ASAP to make sure that you have a spot, you can sign up here. Rest assured we won’t give your name or email out to anyone, or use it to contact you, without your permission. Please sign up here.
For more info, and to get involved, check out:
Smibs Inc. recently launched into private beta with both its business network and its first software application. Similar to LinkedIn, SmibsNet is a social business network that enables professionals to connect with one another. Smibs is trying to differentiate from other similar offerings by providing tools for small and medium sized businesses to “get things done.”
Peter Urban, the company’s founder and President, said that Smibs was conceived out of years of consulting SMBs and finding a common small business frustration: the difficult balancing act of staying in touch with your network and on top of your sales activities, while working on projects that pay the bills. Urban’s solution to that challenge is Smibs and their first extension: Doorbell, a web-based sales software application for “non-sales people”. Doorbell allows companies to manage their sales process through a slick and simple interface without the clutter of a ton of features. The application seeks to help small businesses track contacts, follow sales leads and keep up to date on who needs to be contacted and for what reason.
“What makes Doorbell unique,” says Urban, “is its ability to tie into the Smibs network. This new kind of integration makes it possible to collaborate on sales opportunities by involving others from both inside and outside a company.” All of this can be managed from the Smibs Lounge, which acts as a personalized dashboard for the user. The Lounge provides easy access to all the companies a user is working with including their Smibs applications, associated tasks and a central search across all personal and business contacts.
Based out of Edmonton, Smibs has been garnering attention in the local community since its demo at DemoCamp Edmonton 1. Smibs plans on making money by selling a “premium” package to users. SmibsNet is free to use and paid plans start at $19 per month. If you are interested in checking out SmibsNet and Doorbell you can sign-up for their private beta at http://www.smibs.com.
If you’re like me and you go through dozens of websites every day, keeping track of the good ones poses a real problem. You can’t possibly bookmark them all (if your bookmarks are like mine they're a mess anyway) and trying to remember the search terms you used to find a particular site is a bit like walking into a library, finding all of the books in a pile and then hoping that you can just pick up the one you want. Enter Zigtag, an Edmonton startup and recent demo at DemoCamp Edmonton. Zigtag seeks to provide a useable way of keeping track of websites and, organizing them in a unique way.
At first blush Zigtag is a tagging service not altogether unlike del.icio.us. But Zigtag offers users another layer that makes it unique; Zigtag uses what it refers to as “semantic tags” to help you save and later retrieve websites. When you add tags to a website you get to choose from the different definitions of each term you are using. For example, you can choose whether you mean Python the snake or Python the programming language. It also allows you to have different tags with the same meaning – in other words, NY, NYC, New York and Big Apple can all lead you to the same place.
This hopefully helps solve the problem of trying to find a good restaurant in New York when you don’t know whether people tagged relevant pages with “restaurant”, “eatery” or “café” or, for that matter, “New York”, “NYC” or “Big Apple”. Zigtag tries to make all of this ambiguity go away by allowing different search terms with the same meaning to lead you to the same place. Bruce Johnson, CEO of Zigtag, describes this as “allowing people to use their own mental models to classify information, which makes it easier for them to find it again later while still allowing someone else to use that information, even if they wouldn’t have tagged it in the exactly the same way.
Zigtag consists of two separate parts; a sidebar you install as a browser plug-in and a website. The sidebar provides an easy way of tagging pages without switching context. (For those that don’t wish to give up the real-estate taken up by a sidebar, there’s a bookmarklet that you can install which provides most of the same functionality, although it is more of a process). It also allows you to quickly retrieve tagged pages and provides a convenient way of accessing Zigtag’s social networking functionality which is mainly on the Zigtag website.
Each user has their own personal homepage where they are able to access their news feed, see what their friends have recently tagged, look at hot sites found by the community, and so on. Zigtag’s President, Scott Montgomerie, indicates that this “social side of Zigtag allows your friends to pre-qualify sites for you, extending your reach into the internet by finding pages you may otherwise never have found.” In other words, your friends are likely to share your interests so why not let them do the hard work? Let them find sites for you – the more friends the better.
Another social aspect that Zigtag is trying to bring is its Groups; anyone can create a group and groups can be public or private. They allow users with similar interests to tag and discuss pages that are particularly interesting to the group’s members; something the Zigtag team believes is “really useful for research projects or other collaborative efforts which involve a large number of websites.”
Zigtag also allows the voice of its users to be heard when it comes to ranking websites – users can vote a site up or down in a manner quite similar to Digg. Sites that are commonly tagged and given a “thumbs up” will rise to the top, and, like Digg, no special interests can unduly influence things as its one vote per user.
Zigtag is presently in private beta (they’re working through a couple of technical issues with IE as well as working on some new features, including an iPhone version I got a sneak peak at). They have provided 500 private beta invites for TechVibes users on a first come, first served basis so if you use Firefox and are interested in trying this out, sign up here – Feel free to add me as a friend :)
STIRR Canada ran its first Founders’ Table event last night in Calgary and it was great to be able to attend and join in. The goal of the Founders’ Table events is to bring founders of newer tech startups together in an intimate social setting with people who have gone through the startup process before, and are potentially looking to advise and invest. The hope is that newer founders, and pre-startup innovators, will be able to connect with and learn from the more seasoned entrepreneurs and investors.
The event was kept fairly small and was invite-only. This was done so that quality "up and coming" founders would be able to get the most benefit. The seating at the tables was pre-arranged so that people would interact with others that they might not have met before. Most of the attendees came from Calgary, however there were about five or six people from Edmonton who were invited down.
The first part of the evening featured Garrett Camp, the co-founder of one of Calgary's most successful startups, StumbleUpon. The first few minutes of Garrett's talk was about how StumbleUpon came about and grew. One of the most interesting things that came out of that talk was that his first angel connection actually contacted him because he was a frequent user and loved the idea.
After Garrett's brief talk, he opened the floor to questions from the attendees. Perhaps the question that most people wanted to have answered was: “Would he have been able to take StumbleUpon to where it was had he not moved to the Valley?” Garrett figured he would have been able to but "it would have been much harder, and required more travel back and forth from the Valley." Ultimately he felt as though the connections and mentoring that he was able to get from Silicon Valley were vital to the success that StumbleUpon has had. This is one of the biggest reasons that Pat Lor, Claudia Moore and the STIRR Team have worked so hard to bring STIRR to Canada. They hope that the connections, mentoring and startup experiences that exist in Canada will be able to be shared with the next flock of startups.
After the talk, dinner was served and it gave a chance for everyone to interact. It was great to be able to hear some of the people who had run successful startups talk about what had taken them there. Also for those who would potentially become investors they were able to learn more about both the founder and their idea, and it gave the newer founders a chance to find out what investors were really looking for. Each table had a STIRR organizer facilitating the conversation so that everyone was able to discuss some of the topics that they were interested in.
Overall the event was great. STIRR has done a fantastic job in the Valley and it is great to see it here in Canada. Hopefully the event will continue to grow and the format will be expanded to other cities. It was really awesome to see the conversations that were being had, and the relationships that were being developed. STIRR Canada will be running more Founders’ Table events, as well as larger Tech Mixers. If you think that you should be invited, contact them and let them know why; likely you will find yourself at a future STIRR event.
STIRR Canada is a networking community for high-tech startup founders, founding teams, former founders, angel and VC funders, and technology... [more]
