.:justwerks software:.

Congress's new and improved bailout bill includes, along with the obligatory helpings of pork, a provision that would increase FDIC bank deposit insurance from $100,000 to $250,000. Should the House pass the bill today, that boost in insurance would let a lot of Americans sleep a lot easier. And that's the problem. When the government provides free insurance for an investment - any investment - it removes considerations of risk from investors' decisions and, as...

Strutta launched the first real customer on it’s new platform yesterday.  I’m saying “real” because we did run the Launch Party contest on it last week, but it was sort of an inside job since we also organize Launch Party.

Check it out, enter to win Free Pizza for a year, and let us know what you think.  Oh, and especially let Maura know if you want us to make something like this for you.

Win Free Pizza for a Year!

I’m here in Banff, at the Banff Venture Forum 2008. I’m here with James from AdHack, who is presenting at 2:45pm on Thursday. We’ve got the AdHack booth set up at #14, and already had a great discussion with Kevin Dahl from Calgary Technologies, Inc.- a non profit that helps grow the Calgary technology ecosystem. Sounds like a great partner for Bootup (and I’m going to hit the Vancouver municipality over the head with your example) - we’ll be trying to make some cross pollination happen.

In any case, for the next 2 days, we’ll be hearing 12 minute pitches from the following companies in the IT Stream:

• StandOut Jobs
• Shopster.com
• Myotis Wireless (placeholder page, no website yet?)
• Semanti Corp.
• Business Infusions Inc.
• Reflex Photonics Inc.
• VoIPshield Systems Inc.
• WideSail Technologies Inc.
• Flixel Technologies Inc.
• Psyko Audio Labs Inc.
• Mingleverse Laboratories Inc. (Techvibes directory link, no website yet?)
• Akoha
• MoboVivo Inc.
• Tribal Nova
• Ph03nix New Media Inc.

I’ll be coming back to this post to flesh out some one-liners about what each company does, and link to any longer posts or comments from my myself and others.

Well, James and I arrived in Banff. We left early this morning from Vancouver and drove out. It was a long day, but was actually a great opportunity to talk strategy and different ideas around AdHack without interruptions.

We checked into our hotel, and then managed to connect with Sandra MacDonald for dinner at the Rose & Crown. Sandra and Mic are working with the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program and are talking to startups across the country. They’ve got a temporary blog up, I’m hoping to see it integrated directly into the SSE Canada landing page  — where’s the RSS feed icon on that page! (that’s a hint in the direction of Sun folks…)

I was probably a little rant-y at dinner with Sandra over what I would LOVE to see Sun do: they feel like my old company Nortel - great engineers, really bad marketing, really bad at explaining / showing their value to the people that want to love them. Write me up some real world solutions / architectures around dtrace, OpenSolaris, ZFS, containers, etc. etc. - if you’re long on engineers, let’s see bi-weekly “solution” blog posts - either cool tech you want to talk about, or responses to questions on how to solve problems real startups are having. From my blog ranting we digressed into talking about how startups don’t really buy servers - they buy hosting. Hmmm, those Amazon Web Services credits sound more interesting, now…

Anyway, as I said before, it’s great that Sun has connected with such great people, I’m interested to see the stories they discover.

I’m going to be Twittering a few reactions to other companies in the IT Stream (Life Sciences and Cleantech are also presenting here in Banff). I’ll be using the #bvf08 tag, looks like a few other people using Twitter as well. More on the other companies in another post.

Amazon and Microsoft are about to be partners - and competitors. Last night, Amazon's Werner Vogels announced that later this fall developers and companies will be able to run Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which up to now has been limited to Linux or other Unix-based systems. Given the broad popularity of the Microsoft operating system, the move promises to considerably expand the usefulness of the EC2...

Clive Thompson recently pointed to a post in which Amherst College's IT director provided some stats about the school's new freshman class. The students' tech habits are pretty much what you'd expect - everyone's on Facebook, no one has a landline, laptops have almost entirely supplanted desktops, and the Mac's beating the PC. What I found most striking, though, were the stats on email. About 180,000 emails are received each day at the school (which...

The day after tomorrow, James from AdHack and I will be heading up to the Banff Venture Forum. We’re both foodies, so our trip planning amounts to departure time wrangling so we can make it to Trufflepigs in Field, BC for lunch

AdHack is presenting in the IT Stream, plus will be present on the floor with a booth. I’ll be lending a hand at the booth and getting to know the other companies. I also hope to catch up with Brad Feld of Foundry Group aka Brad of TechStars that my last post was about: he’s the keynote speaker for the IT Stream.

Sandra MacDonald and Michal Berman will also be in town, representing the Sun Startup Essentials Canada program — which launched at the beginning of the year at Launch Party. I think we’ll do an ad hoc dinner in Banff at some point, watch Twitter* and/or blog postings here for updates.

After Banff, James and I will be spending the weekend in Calgary and have a couple of meetings booked already. I have an email out to the STIRR Canada folks to maybe help get the word out about a Calgary Tech Entrepreneur Meetup on Saturday night. For now, here’s a placeholder Upcoming event. Please sign up and let us know you’re interested, as well as suggesting a venue for Saturday, October 5th in Calgary.

*I’m using #bfv08 as my tag for the event. Watch Twemes to just monitor those postings.

Free software activist Richard Stallman is taking a break from his campaign to stop people from buying Harry Potter books to blast the concept of cloud computing. "It's stupidity," he tells the Guardian. "It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign." He's right, of course, about the "marketing hype campaign," but his real beef with the cloud is the same as his beef with corporate-owned software programs. "Do your own computing on your own...

Stephen Colbert and I chat about the Net and the future of man: Give it up....

Programming note: I will be a guest on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central tomorrow (Thursday) night. Tune in....

TechStars is the incubator that we feel philosophically most aligned with. Their successes don’t hurt, either Danny is down in the Valley right now, and attended their Demo Day. Here’s Vator.TV interviewing Brad Feld about the TechStars model.

Danny actually spoke with David Cohen of TechStars a couple of weeks ago. One of the really interesting pieces of information was that 50% of founders / companies decide to stay in Boulder after the program is over. 50% of companies staying and running companies in a city?! Sounds like pretty fantastic numbers.

In other news, we’re putting together the details around a Canadians in the Valley event — if you’re interested, sign up for that Upcoming link and we’ll update the details as we figure it out. Dana Oshiro and Rebecca Reeve are Canadian ex-pats that were going to take Danny and I for beer when we went down for the Plug & Play event, and of course we decided to turn that into something a little bigger. Thanks Dana and Rebecca for playing along so far.

This is the third annual BarCamp Vancouver. This year we doubled the space available, and still “sold out”. It’s a free event, but we suggest a $20 donation which includes a lovely t-shirt.

There is a kick off party on Friday, September 26th, at WorkSpace which starts at 7pm. Thanks to Karen, Tara, and Raul for “party wrangling”, and to Anthony at Farmstead Wines for providing the wine for the evening. We’ll start with drinks and snacks, and can also use the wifi to get straight to hacking out some code.

Saturday will start with sign in at 9:30am at the Arts Club Revue Stage, and we’ll start schedule jamming at 10am, with the first sessions starting at 10:30am — including WordPressCamp and PhotoCamp in their dedicated space at the Playwright’s Theatre.

Check out the All the details page on the wiki for everything you need to know in one compact package, including the “Extended hits” version of this info — maps, editable wiki pages that you can add to, and more.

Those of you attending will be receiving an email with similar information later this afternoon. Now I need to go rest up so I’ll be fresh and prepared to think big thoughts and share ideas with people for 24 straight hours.

P.S. thanks to Pat B from Eventbrite for troubleshooting some email issues with us.

Recent months have brought a burst of innovation in data centers. We have seen data centers in semitrailers, data centers in caves, data centers in Siberia, data centers in the Las Vegas desert, and data centers that float in the middle of the ocean. Today we have word, via Data Center Knowledge, that Microsoft has been testing data centers in tents. (They're calling it In Tents Computing.) What's next? Here's my prediction of the ten...

Another article to back up the trend. This one in the New York Times entitled “A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms”

Thanks Scott Dunlop for emailing the link.

Since today is yesterday was Launch Party, I thought it would be appropriate to launch the new look for our website and blog. I’ve had the theme set live for myself and others on the team for weeks, so I’ve forgotten the rather … basic … nature of the default theme we were using

Dave Shea of Bright Creative did the original logo work. Paul Jarvis of TwoThirty tweaked the logo and did up the overall design plus the WordPress template for this blog. Alexa Booth took Paul’s design and did a Drupal template for the main site.

Why do we have two sites? Well, this is our social blog space. In general, we think it’s best practices for companies to have a corporate blog. Some see fit to integrate it into their main site, but especially when your “main site” is a web application that actually IS your business, we think it’s a good idea to run your blog on a separate system. It becomes your status spot if something goes wrong with your main site, so you can keep people informed.

As well, we have the challenge of wanting to present a fair amount of information. Some of that has to be easier consumable as “static” content, easily guide people to the right information, and so on. We can continue to be more conversational here, as well as showcase many of the other social tools that we use — here is the full list of tools that we use.

Lastly, since I’m a raving Drupal fanatic, I ended up building Extranet features into the main site. Our portfolio company members, mentors, and other advisors have access to some additional features and information when they’re logged in.

I know there are lots of bits and pieces still to tweak — from wording and clarity to graphical fixes (the auto complete throbber looks crappy on a black background). Leave a comment or let us know what you think on Get Satisfaction.

I was trying to flip the switch on the new design before Launch Party last night, but called away to do ‘networking’: you know, the kind that has you lasso’ing ethernet cables over a bar’s rooftop We’ll see if the switch does in fact get thrown today — at left a fun image that is going to be on the new home page.

In any case, the clock has flipped over to September 19th, so we are officially in Talk Like a Pirate Day. And of course, our oh-so-staid parent site, ye old Bootup Labs, has gone piratized in celebration! The about page is a nice demo:

A Vancouver-based startup accelerator designed t’ help founders build tech startups an’ take them t’ their first round o’ fundin’ o’er th’ course o’ a nine month placement.

The nine months be split into three trimesters - because we all know that growin’ a startup is like raisin’ a child! Each three month period has different deliverables in th’ areas o’ business, marketin’, an’ product. Founders will come in with different strengths an’ weaknesses, bein’ matched with th’ right set o’ scallywags at Bootup Labs or external Advisors t’ reach each deliverable.

Oh, I really never get tired of that …

Thanks as always to Richard, the scallywag at Raincity Studios that created the pirate module for Drupal.

YITIS + City of Whitehorse lunch, October 02, 2008 - 12:00 pm at SDC

Keith Spencer is part of the organizing committee of a very cool event called the Canary Derby. He’s making sure I’m going and I’m passing the order on to everyone else I can.

Steam clock picture by TheGoodReverend

 

It’s for a good cause. Funds raised will go to the BC Cancer Foundation. So come out, have some fun, watch some cool companies compete to WIN.

 

Here’s a book I’m looking forward to checking out. Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.  Obviously, I’m a Guy fan, but what entrepreneur isn’t

 

 

 

 

 

So, I was mentioning last week some of the international incubators that are out there, in reference to meeting with Zac Boon from Thymos Capital in Singapore. Today Stefan Korn from Webfund in New Zealand stopped by our office, Vancouver being the first hop on the way to a conference in Montreal (of the Denturist Association of Canada — as we find out in the video, Canada apparently has the most denturists in the world).

As another aside, Singapore, New Zealand, and the province of BC all have approximately the same population: close to 4.5M people.

Here are the companies that Webfund is currently incubating:

• Base Diary, the practice management software for denturists
• Book Habit, sell your ebooks, early buyers pay the least, as you the author get more popular, sale prices go up
• DIY Father, positive parenting community for new and young fathers, to go alongside the legion of resources for moms
• Global Registries (not launched), productizing the current New Zealand software for doing business registration online to other governments around the world

We’re working through a couple of ideas on how to cross pollinate. With various connections to governments in different countries floating around, look for something maybe the middle of next year. In the more short term, there is Canadian government involvement in an event at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale. I added it to the Bootup Upcoming group, and we’re trying to track down more information from the government end of things.

I’ve been experimenting with the YouTube annotation method. We actually like Viddler for “produced” videos (it has great functionality to layer on a logo plus link automatically), but having the computer right there next to the kitchen makes it easy to do these “no editing” videos. Let me know if this is useful or distracting, either here or on Get Satisfaction.