Billions With Zero Knowledge - Austin Hill, Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

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

One of the demo’s at TED 2007 that really impressed everyone was from Adam Shepard and Microsoft Research.  I wrote about the Seadragon and Microsoft Virtual Earth demo from the conference, but I also got to sit down with Adam during the conference and get a demo on film.

This is impressive stuff that is visually stunning.  I give Microsoft a lot of grief over their marketing, but it is good to see them showing some of the great research and technology development occurring there.

Jay Goldman at Radiant Core did a great series of posts about his Microsoft User Experience Roundtable recently which are worth a read. 

Robert Scoble just posted a video of some of the tours he did at Microsoft Research recently. Microsoft does have a lot of research going on, but they have not proven themselves able to commercialize or bring this technology to market.

On Tue 20 Mar 2007. [2] Comments

Two different Microsoft employees just showcased some new research coming from Microsoft including Virtual Earth with rich 3D models with hi-res photo’s to help build richer textured models, Photosynth and their Seadragon projects.

This stuff is groundbreaking and visually stunning. They are showed a Flickr mash up that grabbed all pictures on Flickr for the Notre-Damn catherderal and automatically mapped it to a digital model with point of view references to create a collaborative photo mash-up of the building by analyzing point of view and pasting the right pictures to the proper part of the 3-D model.

Absolutely phenomonal stuff. Any pictures you share on the Internet (via Flickr) could start to be linked together and applied on a rich digital reference model of the earth.

I’m glad to see Microsoft sending out some ambassadors who are showing how some of the billions they spent on R&D is being put to good use. Both employees got a warm reception and were funny and self effacing about Microsoft presenting during the Simplicity session at TED.

It will be an interesting couple of years to see how this rolls out.

It is my firm believe that when we begin to visualize the earth as it really is, we will begin to see just how small and fragile this planet is. Perhaps we will being to see how we are all enjoying or suffering the same human condition.

Once this happens maybe the other 6 billion people on the planet will be seen more as neighbours carpooling into the future with us, rather than in the “Us vs. Them” mentality that dominates our cultural egoism in the West.

Perhaps where we are born will no longer dictate our life span or the chance for freedom and happiness.

On Thu 8 Mar 2007. [2] Comments

I just watched a great presentation by Jonathan Harris at TED 2007, where he spoke about how the power of stories to unify the human experience.

While many people look for differences to define our uniqueness (Difference in gender, religion, race, class, wealth etc.) his project We Feel Fine scans the blog world to show how the world can be unified by our common feelings and the stories we tell.

This is an incredible demonstration of the power visualization and storytelling to change the world.

Here are the some of the feelings that he showed that his We Feel Fine project has indexed,

• I feel invisible to you.
• I feel so much of my dead father in me, I don’t think there is room for me.
• I feel I need to be in a small red neck town to appear beautiful.

  

Check out We Feel Fine and look at how the world is feeling.

Yesterday Canadian author Steven Pinker spoke about how violence is dropping throughout the world and referenced last year’s TED speakers Robert Wright’s Non-Zero Game theory and Pete Singer’s Expanding Circle theory as two contributing reasons for this trend.

He pointed out that the reciprocity that comes from the ever expanding shared human experiences is creating new standards for behaviour. These new standards for behaviour are changing our moral consideration through mass adoption of empathy.

These concepts are at the heart of what we are working on with our new project, and in fact it was Robert’s speech where he called for a new moral revolution that was one of the tipping point moments in my thinking of Project Ojibwe. It was shortly thereafter that Alex and I were talking about our ideas for how we could help usher in an age of shared human experiences that uplift and improve the world.

On Thu 8 Mar 2007. 1 Comment

There is so much to post about while attending the TED conference. I’m swamped catching up with friends and having the most interesting conversations. There is so much to post, I’m not going to try to cover it all right now, but will try a few bite size postings throughout the next couple of days and week.

I coudn’t not post this great video that my old friend (he was an advisory board member at Zero-Knowledge Systems) Larry Lessig just showed as part of his presentation on creating a read/write culture.

Fanatastic presentation. A few highlight comments from Larry,

• We can’t kill the remix culture, only criminalize it.
• We live in the age of prohibition where we are teaching our children that epxressing themselves using others media (remix) is illegal but widespread leading to a dilution of the respect of law.
• It won’t last. The read / write culture that our technology has created now empowers today’s youth not to be just consumers, but creators and we can’t go back.

Larry showed a few great examples of the creative remixing culture that I wanted to share.

Hilarious. This video was done by the artist Johan Soderberg.

On Thu 8 Mar 2007. [2] Comments

While in Toronto recently I took the opportunity to sit down with my StartupCamp Canada co-organziers and community instigators Rob Hyndman, David Crow and Stuart McDonald.  StartupCamp Canada is now a go.

We are still finalizing the date, but it will be in the last half of June in Toronto.  (The final date will be announced in the coming weeks). It will be a full day packed with some of the top Canadian entrepreneurs from all over the country and the world.  We are going to mix presenting content, doing small team coaching and providing lot’s of chances for interaction with entrepreneurs, VCs and technologists interested in the Canadian Startup scene.

Here is a quick video I shot while we were having breakfast yesterday in Toronto.

I was attenting the Canadian Venture Forum and frankly the entire situation was depressing.  Even some of the VCs on the nominating comittee for the conference were tellling me they couldn’t get companies without business models or revenues to be accepted and were tiring of the entire futile excercise of doing the conference.

Most of the serious venture investors I know didn’t bother to attend and if they did it wasn’t to look at companies to invest in, it was to say to hi to a few friends and they generally popped in for a few minutes and left the conference.

It was more like a meeting of aging Canadian bankers then anything I’ve come to know as a venture conference.  At every venture conference I go to, there is an engergy in the room, excitement everywhere and you can see deals being fought for in the hallways and companies leave the conference with term sheets. 

This conference was very indicative of many problems of our venture industry.   The program had some good speakers (David Lawee & his wife Lorna were great) and the Toronto Venture Group is working hard to promote Canada but I feel most of the good content was wasted on the audience and the quality of the presenting companies and venture investors to listen to them was dismal.

Instead of just complaining, we are hoping to build off the experience of Democamps, Barcamps and StartupCamp in the Valley to put together a conference based on sharing first hand experiences that helps entrepreneurs succeed.  

Some of the topics and sessions we are considering,

• Private elevator pitch coaching with top entrepreneurs who have succeeded in raising large amounts of funds, and building great businesses.
• Lot’s of panels with entrepreneurs sharing practical lessons on how they build their Canadian companies and the problems they faced.
• A BoF session for early stage entrepreneurs discussing the challenges they are currently facing in building their companies.
• What can the Canadian technology commuity, governments and entrepreneurs do to better support an early stage startup community.
• Entrepreneurs guide to understanding early stage financing & company creation (Love money, angel money, IP rights, partnership & shareholder agreements, first VC round, strategic partners).

These will be multiple sessions and we are still working on the agenda, so if you have comments or things you’d like to see included please let us know.

Please head over the to wiki and sign up, and let any of the organizing group know if there are specific things you would like to see on the agenda.

On Wed 7 Mar 2007. [8] Comments

My original title for thist post was: On the run since CUSEC & Democamp where I had a run in with Google but Montreal’s Mojo is Rising and me without my pants on. But while I started to write a general catch up post about what I’ve been seeing in my travels the last couple of weeks, I started to put it together some thoughts about an emerging technology and entrepreneurship community movement occuring around Canada. I see most of it in Montreal, but it’s occuring across the nation.

Things really picked up a few weeks ago with a few projects I’m involved with. Although I’ve been on the run lately I wanted write about a few of the conferences and meetings I’ve had on my travels and talk about some of what is occurring in the Montreal and Canadian tech community.

My whirlwind schedule of late started at CUSEC conference. I spoke at the event and it was a great time. There were tons of good questions from a great group of students. I also met a few really bright engineers.

I love speaking at schools for students. The air is loaded with energy, new thinking and I end up getting more out of it then most students I think. Some of my best hires in my career have been freshly graduated engineers, and I encourage any enterprising graduating student to join a good startup.

Quick side note:

Any graduating engineering student is welcome to contact me anytime to talk about finding you a hot startup job (with any of my various startup companies or with other hot startups run by my friends & other teams I’ve met across Canada). Help me help you find a position with a small startup. Join a small team and consider it your own startup. You will learn more in 2 years with a small startup then 5 years in any other company. There is a reason some great startups are created by students. Students and startups are made for each other in my opinion.

There were a few nice posts about the conference here, here and finally here. There are a bunch of great photo’s of the event up at Flickr.

I want to thank Kalu and the organizers of the conference for a great event.

This is where I ran into a team from Google who was at the career fair looking to hire for their Montreal office. I spoke with some them and welcomed them to town.

Later that day John Kopanas did a great community goodness and pulled together Democamp Cusec. I was amazed at the incredible display of Montreal talent and community involvement. Josh over at Yashlabs has the best wrap up I’ve read. Great job Josh. Looking forward to connecting soon. Did I mention his great post. Go read it now, it’s shows some of the great projects and people in Montreal.

My friend & teammate Sebastien did a great job presenting Sugar and got a lot of positive feedback.

My friend Fred has a great post up about Democamp Cusec as well.

I then spent a couple of days in Toronto doing some business with investors, friends and meeting my friends from Cambrian House who were in town.

I met with my friend and StartupCamp co-organizer David Crow. I always enjoy my conversations with David. I’m learning a lot about how to build community from David.

During our conversation I told him I thought Montreal’s bohemian culture gave us a distinct edge in creating a ground zero for social & web innovation in Canada (web deux.zero for those with a taste for bad buzzwords translated). He of course felt that Toronto had a fair chance at this ground zero role. I would say he has a lot of reasons to be confident. Check out the work he is doing in Toronto and Alec Saunders post on the recent Toronto Democamp which was packed.

David continues to do an incredible job with his community involvement and I would say has a lot to be proud of. His post on Economics of Abundance and the Wealth of Barcamp is required reading in my opinion. David and I had a discussion of the economics of abundance when I told him what Project Ojibwe is cooking up. He’s one of the few people I wanted to share the whole idea with. He’s sworn to a DNH agreement - (Do no Harm) so he can’t disclose recklessly. Only when helping me recruit

The only reason I think Montreal has a chance to show our strengths is because we are learning in realtime from the great examples, initiatives such as Democamp, Opencities and sharing he and the community there are doing.

I’m not sure but I believe Toronto has the most active unconference community and it shows. Canada’s version of the Web 2.0 expo the Mesh conference is organized by David, and other great members from the Toronto tech community and not some tech conference company. They worry about how to keep the event affordable and high quality by bringing out the best speakers and showcasing Canadian projects. This is a full year before similar ideas are being discussed by Arrington and Calacanis. Talk about Canadian innovation. That’s shows the power of what is going on in Toronto.

Then we have my friend Tara and our Canadian Citizen Agent who is spreading community lessons while on a peakkeeping mission to Silicon Valley (once again, it takes a Canadian). [Read her recent posts on community building, community diversity and community pt. II]

You can also see fellow Canadian and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield talking communities on CNN.

I hope throughout the year, we’ll be doing some interesting things in Montreal (and Calgary where I’m going to be spending more time) that we can share with other communities. I have a number of projects I’m supporting and sponsoring that I believe will contribute to helping Canada’s technology community grow.

So imagine my surprise when I returned to Montreal and Google was back on my radar. A couple of days after Cusec the news broke in La Presse and was picked up by my friend Seb and the blog community that Google had opened a Montreal office and was hiring.

This is great news for the Montreal technology community. I think there is a change occurring in Montreal, and a little shake up on the local market for talent will be healthy for everyone.

When my friend Julien complained about the need for Montreal to show our brains, lamenting not having a hot startup scene, the community responded loudly (check out all the comments, and the follow up post).

When YULBiz showed up later that week the community show up in force and there were probably 20 local entrepreneurs that came out.

My friend Ben Yoskovitz responded when he posted this great idea for an entrepreneurs networking breakfast and got a great response. I’ll be in attendance and the event is up on Upcoming.org (Subscribe to the Montreal tag for events, I’m going to be listing more community events there shortly.)

Clearly the Montreal community is starting to come together around these events.

Fred has announced the dates for the upcoming Democamp Montreal for February 27th. Register on the wiki to attend and please come out and support the community. The event has already filled up with Montreal projects that will be presenting. Come out and see these five presenters at the great location that Fred arranged with the help of René Barsalo from SAT. It was great to see the schedule fill up so quick, just like it did at Democamp Cusec.

Democamp Montreal2 is scheduled for March 29 and surprise surprise, it has already filled up with presenters as well including what looks like 3 stealth projects being presented.

When I was at Garage Canada’s great Startup Canada event (which deserves it’s own post soon) Bill Reichert and I spoke about how in the Valley there are community events every night where entrepeneurs and engineers meet and interact, practice elevator pitches and get introduced to each other. These interactions help you improve your network, your skills and in many cases your pitches. In fact in the valley because of the density of people working in the technology field you don’t even really need to go anywhere. Everytime I walk down University Ave. in Stanford, or stop by Bucks in Woodside I’ll run into someone I know and have a chance to catch up.

Something similar is occuring in Montreal.

I think there is an incredible void in our city that beginning to be filled with people starting to discover what an incredibly rich technology community we have here. I intend over the coming weeks to begin to post about some interesting people and projects that deserve some attention.

Even the Montreal Gazette is hoping on the bandwagon and starting a local blog to cover the Montreal tech community. I think this is a great move by the Gazette, and frankly something Canadian newspapers have traditionally been very bad at. With some notable exceptions (Mark Evans and Mathew Ingram who are also not surprisingly part of the Mesh crew and active members of the community they cover), I don’t think there has been a lot of focus on discovering some of our made in Canada projects. Unfortunately most Canadian media like to wait until after our projects get some media attention south of the border, and then too often enjoy taking a skeptical view of the Canadian’s projects chance for success against US players.

I hope that this is beginning to change, but it doesn’t really matter since newspapers aren’t exactely the only media source around anymore. There is enough ability for our communities, podcasters and bloggers to promote each others great projects and gain the attention of those who will support made in Canada innovation - which is the users - not the media.

I invite anyone doing something interesting in Montreal that you feel deserves some attention to come out to one of these events. I have a few startups and special projects of my own that I’ll be announcing throughout the next couple of months, but I’m interested in what else is occuring in our community.

I have one closing question for people reading this, what local Canadian technology projects do you feel deserve some attention?

On Fri 9 Feb 2007. [13] Comments

I am going to be speaking at Startup Canada next week. The conference runs from Thursday to Saturday January 25th - 27th.

This event is being produced by my friends at Garage Canada and the Quebec City Pole Economic Development Agency.

Venture Capitalist, author and evangelism guru Guy Kawasaki is leading a great line up of speakers with an agenda that is based on his great book The Art of the Start. He has done other Art of the Start conferences, but I believe this is the first in Canada.

I recommend entrepreneurs I advise to read a copy of Art of the Start. It is one of the best how-to guides on the basics of starting a company or organization that I’ve found. Simple, clear and jam packed of useful tips on starting something.

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, or a practicing entrepreneur looking to network this is a great event to attend. I’ll be there with a few entrepreneurs who I’m supporting in a new startup.

My friend Tom Sweeney (Garage Canada) who is also speaking asked me to join Patrick Lor, Isabelle Bettez and Ravi Sood on a panel with Guy Kawasaki discussing the state of the Canadian startup scene.

I hope to see you there.

This shouldn’t be confused with the StartupCamp Canada that I’m helping to organize, which will be later this year.

On Thu 18 Jan 2007. [6] Comments

Unfortunately even with my identification of a few incognito Canadians on the Web 2.0 attendee list, Canada was one attendee shy of being the 2nd largest country in attendance at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week.

The top five countries in attendance were,

#1 United States: 915 | #2 United Kingdom: 42 | #3 Canada: 41 | #4 Germany: 16 | #5 Japan: 16

The strong Canadian presence included attendees from the following companies.

Brainpen (Les Cedres, Que.), Business Objects (Vancouver, BC), Cambrian House (Calgary, AB), Canoe/Quebecor Media (Montreal, Que.), Coradiant Inc. (Montreal, Que.), Cre8Object Corp. (Ottawa, Ont.), Flickr (I still consider the team Canadians even though they are in their new office in San Fran), Freshbooks.com (Toronto, Ont.), Geosign Corp. (Guelph, Ont.), Hydro-Quebec (Montreal, Que.), Indigo Books and Music (Toronto, Ont.), Radialpoint (Montreal, Que.), Sympatico/MSN (Montreal & Toronto), Torch Partnership (Toronto, Ont.), Tourism BC (Vancouver, BC), Tucows (Toronto, Ont.), Uniserve Communications (Vancouver, BC), Wanted Technologies (Quebec City, Que.), Yahoo Canada (Toronto, Ont.) and the Yellow Pages Group (Toronto, Ont.).

Radialpoint (my old team) and the team at Cambrian House were both there in force as sponsors representing Canadian companies.

Also in attendance was Wikitravel co-founder Evan Prodromou who was reporting for LinuxWorld, Michael Snider from the Globe and Mail and Salim Teja from Brightspark Ventures.

I was able to sit down and do audio interviews with Mike Sikorsky and Jason Woodrow from Cambrian House (who are great guys - and deserve an upcoming post of their own), Mike McDerment from Freshbooks (also a great guy, who spoke on Paul Kedrosky’s Enterprise 2.0 panel and was mentioned in Mary Meeker’s round up of Web 2.0 companies) and my old friend Elliot Noss from Tucows.

I also interviewed Canadian author Don Tapscott about his new book Wiknomics which looks great.

Paul Kedrosky and I were about to sit down, but our schedules ended up just missing each other. I’ll be trying to arrange a skype call with him in the coming weeks to do an interview for my upcoming podcast.

I am very excited about the startup activity I’m seeing in Canada. It was great to meet so many of you at the show.

On Wed 15 Nov 2006. [3] Comments