Yesterday marked Day 2 of the Mesh12 Conference in Toronto, Ontario. There were some inspiring and passionate presentations during the morning session, with speakers like Rebecca MacKinnon, author of The Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, David Weinberger, co-author of Too Big to Know and The Cluetrain Manifesto, and Canadian Dr. Michael Evans, founder of the New Health Design Lab.

Mesh12 Conference organizers Mark Evans and Stuart MacDonald moderated an afternoon breakout Q&A session entitled “Tales from the Trenches. Stories from Startups” which boasted an impressive list of Canadian startup founder speakers including: Aliza Pulver, Andy Yang, Evgeny Tchebotarev, Dups Wijayawardhana and Heather Payne.

Below are their stories – from getting started to surviving the twists and turns of running a business:

The organizers of the GROW Conference have announced something new for 2012.

Day one of the three-day conference has now been labelled GROWtalks and will be focused on how startups can create simple, actionable metrics, and use them to make better product and marketing decisions for long-term growth.

Two months ago, Techvibes reported that Vancouver's newest superangel, Mike Edwards, would be taking over the helm of Vancouver accelerator GrowLab. We warned Vancouver's startup community to buckle their seatbelts and prepare for "massive action" with Edwards in the Executive Director role.

Techvibes sat down with Edwards this morning to learn more about his first big GrowLab announcement—the cohort selected for their Spring 2012 program which kicks off next week.

Toronto-based accelerator (not an incubator, like some misinformed people suggest) Extreme Startups has selected five companies for the inaugurual round of its program.

The organization saw applications from companies in 18 countries spanning five continents, according to TechCrunch—but ultimately settled with an all-Canadian lineup. Three startups are based in Extreme's hometown of Toronto, while one is from Edmonton and one is from Ottawa.