Billions With Zero Knowledge

Silicon Valley loves risk taking and failure. Canadian investors are risk adverse and scared of funding real innovation.

-Many Canadian Entrepreneurs

This something I hear from many entrepreneurs who lament the challenges of raising capital in Canada.   It’s a gross over simplification, but a catchy idea when people are having a hard time raising funds.

It’s true that Valley based venture capital firms not only accept that failure happens, they celebrate it by recycling the best parts of the team, idea and lessons learned for a new project.

In Canada we don’t hear enough about our failures and the people who go on to find success with new initiatives.

I was thinking about these cultural differences when I read this post by Wade Roush “When Startups Fail” where he interviews entrepreneur Christopher Herot about Zingdom’s shutdown. 

Part of the reason high-tech entrepreneurs are attracted to Silicon Valley is the perception that it’s a place where risk-taking is encouraged. West Coast venture capital firms not only excuse failure, so this perception goes, but celebrate it: if a high-tech entrepreneur doesn’t have a couple of tanked companies on his resume, he probably wasn’t being innovative enough. By contrast, the perception about investors in New England is that they penalize failure, which therefore becomes a taboo subject.

Both perceptions are probably exaggerations. But whereas West Coast companies come and go like the butterflies in Santa Cruz, it’s still unusual to hear any of the details when an East Coast startup closes down. That’s why a blog post last week by Christopher Herot has been attracting so much attention.

I met Christopher at TED this year and read his post about shutting down Zingdom with a lot appreciation for his honesty in posting the details of shutting down his company.  I’ve had to shut down my share of companies and have had many failures that have contributed to my successes.

If you swap out New England & East Coast with Canada you have the same perception that investors penalize failure and attach a negative stigma to projects and teams involved in them, which therefore becomes a topic not often talked about.   

So it is in that vein that I ask Montreal local entrepreneur, Martin Dufort to answer some questions about his experiences with Kakiloc (a location based social networking web experiment that shut down in November, 2007).  I met Martin in the Barcamp community in 2006 and got to see the hard work that he and his partner Alain put into building Kakiloc.

They were innovating on a number of fronts and I enjoyed introducing them to various investors where they often impressed people, but ultimately were not able to secure funding.  (If you hadn’t seen their demo where you could watch them drive up to your meeting via the web - you missed something very cool).

I really would like to congratulate Alain & Martin for their failure. I can’t wait to see which eventual success they will be able to attribute this failure too. Their willingness to admit a failure, discuss what they learned and move on to new adventures is what true entrepreneurs do and they deserve a lot of credit for doing just that.

First I would like to thank you Austin for giving me this opportunity to tell the Kakiloc story. I’ve learned a lot from this endeavour and reflecting on it and the associated failures and the shutdown could be valuable for anyone trying to startup a business and being faced with the same challenges.

1) Tell me a bit about when you & Alain started Kakiloc and it’s original vision?

The inception and the ideas for Kakiloc were derived from an open source project I created in June 2005: Rufopode. This project still available on RubyForge, but no longer maintained, was a small library enabling the extraction of GPS receiver data in order to properly plot them in Google Earth. My goal was to view and visually compare multiple training sessions and provide insight into my training schedule. The ultimate goal was to provide a realtime view of other athletes riding the same course and compare performance accomplishments.

I quickly recognized this was targeting techno-savvy people and the audience size was very small. I then brainstorm on how to apply this to a broader audience: Locate friends and family members using GPS technology while on the move with your cell phone. After explaining the concept to Alain, Kakiloc was born and we started coding the concept.

2) How far along did you guys get in your development and what were some of the main challenges?

We started prototyping the concept in November 2005 at the same time that the Google Maps API was picking up steam. Within a week, we had a rough prototype using Ruby on Rails for the Web site and Python on the Nokia S60 mobile platform. We were able to retrieve the GPS coordinate from the phone and map it on Google Maps so we could follow our location in real-time. It was quite astonishing at first. We knew we had something interesting with a lot of potential so we went forward with the implementation without thinking about the underlying business model. At that time this was mostly another hobby project.

From there, we showed it to people and they were really enthusiastic. Our first public demo was at the OGRE meeting [http://location-based.blogspot.com/2007/08/looking-for-windows-mobile-beta-testers.html] and an iPhone version [http://montrealtechwatch.com/2007/03/31/the-future-is-mashups-and-mobile-services/]. Also it’s much harder to raise money in Canada if you are ill-prepared on the financial side or if you business plan is not rocket solid. The large number of VC funds in the US and especially in the Valley, allows you be much more successful and gather interest at a much earlier stage even if you are ill-prepared. We are still missing that initial commitment spark here to ensure very early-stage companies can continue to innovate and move forward within the Canadian ecosystem.

Companies like Loopt (with $12M in funding), Plazes ($2M Euros), and others are also exploiting the location-based aspect. However they started with a very focused goal and built on it. Plazes even tailored down their mobile functionality to respond to user’s criticism about being too complex. However, the market is still open and we are seeing more of these companies shifting their business model: Loopt is now providng Location-Based Ads (LBA) in collaboration with CBS. You have to be agile and follow the market wave. If you have a clear understanding of your roadmap and your capability, that’s easy to do. We did not have that 20/20 vision and that’s why the uptake on our service was pretty low.

6) One of the most important things I see entrepreneurs not knowing, is when to stop and move onto other things.  What went into your decision to shut down the Kakiloc experiment ?

We were maintaining stats about registration versus usage level. We had a very low usage rate. People registered, specified their initial location and then expected something return. For most of them, there was no reaction because none of their friends were in close proximity. The fundamental action-reaction paradigm was broken. We were unable to achieve a sustainable user base. At that point, we needed to take a huge decision. Either we re-launched the site to be more focused and easier to use or we shifted our business model to explore a specific vertical (a business model shift). Still with no funding available and nothing in the medium-term pipeline, if was very difficult to do either. We discussed the future roadmap, the re-shift, we weighted the pros and cons, we read the seminal book by Seth Godin “The Dip”.

After a number of days of insightful introspection and discussions, my partner Alain and I decided to split. We made an agreement that I could continue to use and operate the Kakiloc intellectual properties. This was a very friendly split. However, the service quietly died as a consequence. It is impossible for a single person to handle everything. That’s the reason why, starting a company solo is 95% of the time a big no-no. You have no one to bounce ideas to, discuss issues, promote and demote stuff. Kakiloc was shutdown on November 6th, 3 days after the death of my mother. The official announcement was actually sent on November 29th to all our contacts [http://location-based.blogspot.com]

The Kakiloc technology is still alive and I’m looking at the right fit for it. I’m also evaluating other options in the real-estate business where it could be applicable. Lately, interesting things are slowly starting to surface and I should be able to potentially announce something interesting very soon.

I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for the opportunity Austin.

Happy location reporting - Martin

Thanks Martin for participating in this interview. I’m looking forward to your next adventure as an entrepreneur.

Ben Yoskovitz wrote a post about celebrating failures that also mentions Kakiloc.

On Tue 8 Apr 2008. [6] Comments

In the last two weeks while I was traveling, two Montreal based companies were acquired by large US companies.  In and of itself, this is a great thing to celebrate in our Canadian technology community - but there was something additional worth celebrating in each of these cases.

These companies were co-founded by some of my former employees at Zero-Knowledge Systems.  Small bonus is that I get to scoop my buddies at StartupNorth, MapleLeafTwo and MontrealTechWatch - which rarely happens

Microsoft acquires Montreal based Credentica

In the year 2000, Zero-Knowledge acquired the rights to Dr. Stefan Brands work and hired Stefan to help us build privacy-enhanced identity & payments systems.  It turns out we were very early into the identity game, failed to commercialize the technology - and during the Dot.Com bust cycle we shut down the business unit and released the patents back to Stefan.  This was groundbreaking stuff that Stefan had invented, and we invested heavily in trying to make it real, but there weren’t enough bitters in the market at that time.  We referred to the technologies as the “RSA” algorithms of the identity & privacy industry.  Unfortunately the ‘privacy & identity’ industry didn’t exist.

Stefan went on to found Crendentica to continue the work of commercialization of his invention. Today he announced that Microsoft has acquired his company and he and his team are joining Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Identity Architect Guru Kim Cameron has more on the deal on his blog (he mentions the RSA for privacy concept as well).

Adam Shostack (former Zero Knowledge Evil Genius, who also created a startup & currently works at Microsoft) has this post up.   George Favvas, CEO of SmartHippo (also another Zero-Knowledge/Total.Net alumni - entrepreneur) also blogged about the deal as well.

Congratulations to Stefan and the team.  This is a great deal for Microsoft, the identity industry and his team. (I know we tried to get Microsoft to buy or adopt the technology back in 2001 :) 

Stefan has been an entrepreneur working on commercializing this technology for almost 15 years.  He has persisted in the face of many downfalls and this is a great day for him.

EMC acquires PI Corporation

Almost five years ago, one of my top employees, Alexis Smirnov came to me to inform me he was leaving and joining a new startup called PI Corporation.  Although I was sad to see him go - I gave him my enthusiastic support.

At the time Alexis Smirnov was Lead Architect and Product Manager for Synomos, a spin out of Zero-Knowledge Systems that I ran (and ultimately shut down) which was working on personal data protection policy systems.  Alexis was one of the founding architects of PI Corporation where he joined Paul Maritz to build an innovative & secure personal information data store.

Also part of the founding team was former Zero-Knowledge scientist and cryptographer Dr. Adam Back.  (You can still see the founding team page for PI Corp at Archive.org since it’s been taken down from the PI Corporation website).

EMC is now building a cloud computing service with Paul based on this technology.   Much of PI Corporations founding team was in Montreal and grew to include 5 former Zero-Knowledge team members (Props to Adam, Phil, Andrew, Alexis and Roger) working on a diverse international development team.

EMC’s VP Technology Alliances Chuck Hollis has more on the details of the privacy related acquisition and what it means for EMC on his blog.

Congratulations to all the PI Corporation team.

Startups Birthing Startups - It’s Startup time & do you know where your FairChildren are?

When speaking about the benefits of joining a startup during my speech last week at StartupCamp Waterloo, I mentioned the great number of former Zero-Knowledge Systems employees who have gone on to be part of founding teams of other startups. (I currently track 12 former employees who have created their own startups or been the on founding team of startups since leaving Zero-Knowledge - I’m sure there are more.)

This cycle of entrepreneurship was something my brother, father and I fostered @ Zero-Knowledge.  We made entrepreneurship a key part of our culture, promoting employees thinking and acting like mini-entrepreneurs. We had ‘Startup 101′ courses at our Zero-Knowledge University employee orientation week.   We taught employees about venture rounds, cap tables, stock options and we shared details about how we were planning on growing & funding the company. This was based on the belief that knowledgeable & empowered employees would be better able to understand the how’s & why’s of the companies operating decisions. We believed it would help them weather the challenges of startup life while identifying and executing on opportunities. I think this was a contributing factor to the culture of entrepreneurship that grew out of ZKS.

I won’t dismiss the other contributing factor could have been employees getting a front row seat to many of our mistakes that might lead them to have said “if these guys can do it - why not me?” - which is just as valid a reason to join the startup game.

John Stokes at MontrealStartup asked about companies birthing startups recently.

David Crow highlights the ‘Fairchildren‘ principle in a recent post about Toronto’s startup culture. 

The concept Fairchildren hasn’t been defined tightly, but I think if you were among the first hundred employees of startup, or where a senior executive at a pre-revenue startup and go on to be a founding member of a new startup then you can consider yourself a ‘Fairchild’.

I can’t keep track of all my former colleagues but I hear from more and more of them who reach out for advice on startups, financing and to leverage the alumni network for introductions.

The simple truth is that startups give birth to other startups.  Employees meet each other, great teams get experience working together and lessons are learned that lead to other ideas and startups being formed.

Both of these deals are great examples of what happens when startups birth startups, and I’m very proud of my former colleagues success with these ventures and hope that their time at Zero-Knowledge helped contribute to their startup adventures & success.

This is not unique to Zero-Knowledge, nor were we the start or finish of this.  Many companies have been formed from the employees of SoftImage & Discreet, Megatoon Studios in Quebec City grew into divisions @ TotalNet & and gave birth to A2M the gaming company - there are countless examples of Corel employees starting new startups.

Canadian Fairchild Unite

We need support & showcase the Canadian Fairchildren of startups.  So if you are a Canadian Fairchild, a founding member of a startup that grew from another startup - please introduce yourself (Leave a comment, or contact me privately).  I want to hear your story.

On Fri 7 Mar 2008. [5] Comments

Instead of trying to answer the Aquinas like epistemological question of how many angels fit on the head of a pin, this post is about the changes that are occurring in the Canadian angel community for high-tech startup funding.

For a community of angel investors to be effective, there needs to be a density of intensity that creates, attracts and supports healthy deal flow and investment activity.  This density of intensity acts like a vacuum drawing entrepreneurial talent, mentorship, other investors and VCs providing a series of experiences and market data on what is working.  We see which deals & people attached to deals are worth re-investing in and it helps create the proper farm system for later stage investing and success.

Done right it creates a system that achieves escape velocity and can continue with its own momentum giving birth to many high tech success stories, that in turn feed talent, capital and mentors back into the community.

Historically there have been a lot of problems with the various attempts to organize the angel community in Canada.

While not the only example, a visible sign of these problems was the Toronto Angel Group and Toronto Venture Group suspending operations.  I only had cursory run-ins with these groups, but I know from many other angel investors and entrepreneur friends that these organizations failed to galvanize the community and service either the angel or entrepreneur communities effectively (despite a lot of volunteer effort by many people I respect and consider friends).

A healthy angel community that provides such a farm system for venture investors is becoming even more critical in todays market where rapid development and the lower cost of building web applications puts most deals below the venture capital radar. 

There is currently an oversupply of early stage capital in Quebec, with more then a billion dollars of new venture capital going into VC coffers in the last 5 years targeted at early-mid stage investing. Despite this we do not have enough companies reaching the threshold of being ‘venture ready’ to access this capital.

There are many exciting developments occurring in the Canadian early stage technology community, with Montreal seeing it’s fair share of that activity.

Beyond Montreal across Canada I’m seeing the seeds of an active community of early stage angel investors. One such example is the new Toronto-based angel group Maple Leaf Angels who are building a community of angel investors and have been quite active in doing deals in Toronto.

The National Angel Organization is working to focus some of this activity and last year published a great reference document on creating angel groups. Bryan Watson and Daniel Mothersill are actively helping seed and advise networks of angel investors on banding together.  People interested in angel investing (either from the point of view of an entrepreneur, or investor) can check out their document of best practices that explains many of the in’s and out’s of angel investing.

The role of angel investors is critical in Canada’s innovation ecosystem, and one that has been often overlooked.

Randy Komisar (entrepreneur, VC partner with KPCB and author of a great fable on high tech startups, The Monk & the Riddle) in this interview with Brown Hen points to a critical aspect of the Silicon Valley culture of innovation.

Successful people also reinvest in innovation; they want to be a part of the next big thing; they want to help mentor, guide and support aspiring entrepreneurs. This reinvestment is probably the most significant reason Silicon Valley is so prolific in terms of innovations.

To create this community we need to bring together the entrepreneurs and angel investors from successful companies that feed the density of intensity (i.e. Lot’s of deals with experienced mentors occurring quickly within the same geographic area).  Some of these deals with fail, but if the pace continues and a few succeed we will begin to see more of a cohesive investment, talent and technology community emerge with all the benefits that other geographic centers of technology innovation have created (NC-Raleigh, Denver, Israel and some of the activity out of Europe all come to mind).

This ecosystem also requires successful exits.  What would happen if Canada had a bunch of exists like Club Penguin (In the Gaming industry, Canada has a critical mass of talent and an ecosystem that we should be seeing more independent web-based game developers going out on their own)? What if we had a number of web-based exits like Flickr & StumbleUpon that find the mentorship, capital & management talent in Canada without choosing to go to the Valley?

That is what the valley has developed over the last 50 years, a very focused and rapid cycle of innovation & failure that creates expertise, learning and reached a critical mass of activity to achieve its own velocity to support new innovation.

This is not going to occur overnight.  It will take time, and the work of many dedicated individuals willing to put their own money, time and effort into building the communities of innovation that attain their own escape velocity.

This is not something any single person can do (people with more resources, time & experience than I have tried). My own contributions need to be measured given that I have a startup working towards launch and another team I support as Chairman & co-founder having just launched.

On my own part creating successful, high profile projects that our teams, investors and the community can be proud of is part of how I can best contribute to this ecosystem.  Given my focus on these projects, I’m no longer doing any direct new angel financing deals for the foreseeable future.

I am however involved in a number of initiatives to help support this type of ecosystem.

I am involved as an investor, and on the board of directors of Montreal Startup, a new early stage investment fund comprised of angel investors as the limited partners.  I am also serving on the board of directors of Les Anges Quebec, a new angel network being created in Quebec. 

With the help of my friend & local angel investor Patrick Lauzon, we organized & hosted a dinner called Founders & Funders last fall to bring together VCs, Angels and Entrepreneurs. This event was also held in Toronto, hosted & organized by Jevon McDonald and David Crow.  We are going to be hosting more of these across Canada with the help of other local groups.

I’ll be posting more details on these initiatives over the coming months.  Each initiative approaches the problems of early stage funding, creating exciting opportunities in different ways, but I feel they are all complimentary and provide me with an outlet to support early stage entrepreneurship while allowing me to stay focused on my day job

On Sun 24 Feb 2008. [3] Comments

Heri who is doing a very cool job writing MontrealTechWatch recently did two maps of the Montreal Technology Community scene. Very cool to see lot’s of friends and thanks to Heri for doing this (and for the mentions).

On Tue 17 Jul 2007. [6] Comments

I want to congratulate my brother Hamnett, father Hammie and the entire team at Radialpoint who were just honored by Profit Magazine as the fastest growing company in Quebec (measured in 5 year revenue growth) and the 32 fastest in Canada. 

This is a great acknowledgement of a lot of hard work done by the entire team over there.  Radialpoints evolution from its beginings to its position today and the current success as one of Canada’s fastest growing technology firms is one a great Canadian success story.  Not many ventured backed companies succesfully navigated the late 90’s and early 2000’s and large provider of managed services to ISPs during the meltdown that network providers and the industry at large were in the midst of.

Early this week I was at a conference where Profit magazine columnist Rick Spence was doing a case study on what Quebec’s fastest growing companies do well.  He highlighted how Radialpoint has focused on it’s partners business success and has become a critical partner for its customers in helping them earn additional revenue and reduce customer churn.

I picked up a copy of the Profit Magazine that goes on stands next week from Rick and my brother Hamnett is interviewed in an article on serial entrepreneurs;

Most repeat CEOs are creatures of habit, getting into businesses in industries they know and understand. Take Hamnett Hill, co-founder and CEO of Montreal-based Radialpoint Inc. (No. 32). At 35, Hill has owned five businesses, all of them in the technology sector. To help pay the bills while at university in the early 1990s, Hill started a multimedia consulting firm that designed PowerPoint presentations for executives and corporate-training programs. At 21, he and his brother Austin launched an Internet provider in the early dot-com days of 1994, which grew to be the third-largest in Canada. When Hill realized how hard it would be to turn a profit — especially as big telcos entered the business — he sold the company to a firm that eventually became BCE Emergis. Hill then set his sights on the Next Big Thing on the Web: privacy. He and Austin started Zero-Knowledge Systems, an encryption company. When the tech bubble burst in 2001, Hill put the brakes on the privacy service, restructured the company and created Radialpoint, which provides managed Internet services for the world’s largest broadband ISPs.

Radialpoint is continuing a long time tradition of taking the entire company and friends of the company out to see a movie (Ocean’s 13) tomorrow, and they have invited our team at Akoha and Standout Jobs to join them.  

Thanks to everyone at Radialpoint for the invite - we are looking forward to it, and congratulations on another great year.

Radialpoint has a number of positions open and has a standout culture of it’s own.  If you are looking for a great company to join, check out the open positions they currently are hiring for.

On Fri 8 Jun 2007. [2] Comments

I spent last week in Toronto where I had the incredible pleasure of doing a keynote discussion at the Mesh Conference with Tom Williams of GiveMeaning and our great friend and Mesh organizer Rob Hyndman.

Our panel was on social change and charity online, and I was a little nervous when I accepted the invitation because Akoha, my main project and current startup, is still under development and has yet to launch anything.

I had plenty of ideas to talk about. I’ve spent the last three years studying and thinking about ideas on how the Internet can be leveraged for social change, and how the emerging gift economy of social media creates new structures for collective action.

Tom was incredible telling his story of how he came to be working on social change & philanthropy and the great work he is doing at GiveMeaning. Someone later that evening would tell me they felt awful for me after Tom spoke first because they felt that no one could follow such a great opening. (He did go on to say that we complimented each other incredibly well and loved our panel)

I also spoke publicly for the first time about how the loss of my brother Morgan after his battle with cancer and my attendance at the TED conference a week after his funeral was a turning point in my life.

Tom’s write up of the panel say’s it all when he mentions we were both grounded and authentic and I think the fact that neither of us were selling anything, just sharing our experiences that shaped our careers and how we are choosing to be entrepreneurs is what resonated with people.

The panel was an incredible discussion that Tom and I continued throughout the next two days with the attendees and other speakers. Tom and I are kindred souls and I think out shared passion for these issues came through on the panel.

There were a number of people who wrote about our panel, including some liveblogging that gives you some feel for how the discussion went. Here is a round up of some of the posts about the panel from Google Blog Search & Technorati. Here are some photo’s I showed up in from the conference. (Yes I am going bald - blame genetics & 15 years of startups :)

I have tons of other Mesh stories that are deserving blog posts, including some thoughts on the incredible number of young entrepreneurs I had a chance to meet. There was an incredible energy in the hallways where I found myself hanging with old friends and new.

The conference was different from many I attend in that there was a large diversity in the types of attendees with entrepreneurs, social media experts, investors and venture capitalists, technologists, programmers and corporate representatives from large and small companies. This created some unique conversations, as people were sharing lessons and ideas in a very co-operative discussion that wasn’t just focused on who acquired who that day.

I want to thank my friends and Mesh organizers, Mathew Ingram, Mark Evans, Stuart McDonald, Mike McDerment and Rob Hyndman.

They did an incredible job hosting a great conference. Thank you all for inviting me to be a part of this fun event.

On Mon 4 Jun 2007. [3] Comments

I’m announcing today at the Mesh 07 conference a small initiative that I am helping Zerofootprint co-ordinate.

DarkGreenPC is a non-profit, community organized open source project inspired by Seti@Home and Distributed.net where we are going enable people to optimize the power usage of their computers collectively and turn energy saving into a social activity.

I’m an advisor to Zerofootprint and my friend Ron Dembo and I presented this idea at an meeting on initiatives to combat climate collapse organized by John Doerr at the TED conference and got incredible support for the project.

We are now looking to hire an open source product leader.

Here is a small Standout Job advertisement for the position.

We’ll be posting more details on an upcoming project blog at DarkGreenPC.org. For more information on the project you can see this information at Zerofootprint.

On Wed 30 May 2007. [6] Comments

I’m in Toronto all week and will be speaking at the following events.

JCI Toronto Entrepreneurship talk: Tomorrow night be speaking about entrepreneurship and my experience starting companies at the Junior Chamber International’s Young Entrepreneurs association Toronto chapter. Tuesday May 29th, 6:30pm - JCI Toronto - Delta Chelsea Hotel. There is a $55 registration fee for this event. You can register here.

Mesh Conference: I’m really excited about the Mesh Conference this week. Many old friends from across Canada, and some friends from the valley are attending. The Mesh organizers have done an incredible job with the agenda and line up and I’m proud to be included among an amazing line up of speakers. Mesh is already sold out.

On Mon 28 May 2007. No Comments

DemocampMontreal2 is tonight.  We have some visiting guest in from out of town including some great guest presenters and my friend, angel investor and tech entrepreneur Patrick Lor.

This week at Democamp the following presenters will be demonstrating tonight at 6:30 at the SAT.

It promises to be a great night and the SAT is opening the bar, so come join us for a late cinq-a-sept and see what is occuring in the technology community.

What : DemoCampMontreal2

Where : Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent [Google Map]

When : Thursday March 29th, 2007. 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

• HughMcGuire - Collectik (Local community project leader, Hugh is a good friend and will be presenting one of his many projects)
• Martin Dufort - Kakiloc : Mobile Social Networking (Kakiloc are a great team of entrepreneurs working on an exciting new mobile social networking technology)
• iotum Talk Now Alec Saunders, Ottawa (winner of a DEMOGod award at Chris Shipley’s Demo and Ottawa entrepreneur)
• Brett Gaylor - Open Source Cinema
• BumpTop – Anand Agarawala, Toronto (I recently met Anand @ the TED conference in Monterey where he wowed the audience with a demo of his project Bumptop.  I’ve asked him to come visit Montreal and present the demo he did that is now among the most popular videos of all time on Youtube. I saw him present at Democamp Toronto last summer. From Democamp to the TED stage in six months. That’s a demo !)

On Thu 29 Mar 2007. [4] Comments

During my recent trip to Calgary my friends Patrick Lor, Claudia Moore & Sarah Blue from Cambrian House and Kemptom Lam helped me organize a local blogger dinner where I got to meet some great local entpreneurs, Calgary social media & tech folks.

In attendance where Patrick Lor, Sarah Blue, Claudia Moore, David Gluzman, Tom West,  Jasmine Antonick, Matthew Dorey, Nox Dineen, Matt Lonsdale, Mark Kornak, Ivan Sierralta, Fred Yee, Mark Rosenberger, and Kempton Lam.

Here is a video I shot with some of the local Calgary technology community saying hello.

Tom West has a great write up of the night.

One of the goals of the dinner was to help instigate (in the spirit of my friend & Barcamp/Democamp instigator grandaddy David Crow and Calgary native Tara Hunt) the Barcamp and Democamp movement in Calgary.

My friend Patrick Lor had these kind words and great announcement about Calgary’s Barcamp and Democamp kick off.

Well, he flies into town last week, and this week we have set a date for Calgary’s first BarCamp. Thanks to Austin Hill for instigating all of this. Also, huge thanks to Sarah at Cambrian House for organizing.

BarCamp Calgary will be Calgary’s premiere unconference, a showcase of Calgary’s technology community. Sign up now!

Date: Saturday, May 26th
Time: 9:00 to 6:00
Cost: Free, IF you promise to spread the word to attendees, presenters, and sponsors.

We’re also planning DemoCamp Calgary for April 24th, which is a 2 hour meeting with 4 or 5 company presentations that are strictly PowerPoint free! Why no PowerPoint? - check this out, and see how great a product presentation can be when there are no slides. Sign up here.

Kempton has written up a great report on our discussion about the Barcamp & Democamp ideas that we discussed.

The Barcamp/Democamp local community technology meetups hold a lot of promise for Canada’s technology community and I’m happy to help spread the word.  I saw some interesting companies while sitting as a judge at business plan presentation session that Patrick invited me to participate in. My take is that innovation in Calgary is like with other cities in Canada where there is more going on in our own backyards then most people realize.

I’m already involved as an angel investor in one startup that was born out of the Barcamp movement and have met two of the teams I’m mentoring through these meetups. 

With the great local entrepreneurs and community members I met in Calgary helping get this going I think something similar could easily occur in Calgary.

Just a reminder DemocampMontreal2 is next Thursday March 29th.  There are going to be some interesting surprises at this Democamp so make sure to sign up and come on out.

On Tue 20 Mar 2007. [4] Comments