Startup Weekend Calgary Winner Offered $25,000 at Canadian Cloud Showdown
Over 350 people, including Senior VP and C-level executives from Salesforce, Dell, HP, Amazon, IBM and Intel, gathered to watch eight startups battle in The Canadian Cloud Showdown at the Cloud Matters Conference in Banff last week.
Recent Startup Weekend Calgary winner, Parley (performance management made simple), was offered $25,000 along with a spot in Plug and Play Accelerator in Silicon Valley. Additionally, Plug and Play offered to participate in the investment rounds of Kidoodle TV (Netflix for kids) and Growlab alum Mover (platform for moving files) pending due diligence.
“Enterprise is hot right now; more and more startups are cutting the corporate red tape by going to straight to the user,” said Alex Popa, Partner at Boast Capital and Plug and Play Canada. “This was a great platform for enterprises to get a glimpse of Canadian innovation as they prepare their acquisition lists.”
The event also featured presentations by David Morhart, Deputy Minister of Alberta Enterprise and Advanced Education; Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research at Salesforce; Chris C. Kemp, CEO of Nebula and Co-Founder of Open Stack; Wayne Walls, Chief Cloud Strategist at Rackspace; Jeff Barr, Chief Cloud Evangelist at Amazon Web Services; and Doug Jones, Senior Director of Cloud Computing at Blackberry.
“Build an application that solves a real business problem and deliver it using the cloud,” said Robert Hart, President of Canadian Cloud Council. “Socialize and growth hack the living hell out of the use case. Rinse and repeat—exponentially. That’s what our enterprise partners want to see”.
