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Ok, it makes me laugh every time I read GrowLab. The only way it could be better is when someone describes the GrowLab companies as “GrowOps”. They really did a great job in creating a corporate name that has a set of nuanced meanings (well maybe it’s not so nuanced).

Our friends from GrowLab are heading out on tour to find their next cohort. They are coming to:

• Toronto - February 13, 2012 Register
• Waterloo – February 14, 2012 Register
• Montreal – February 15, 2012 Register
• Edmonton – February 22, 2012 Register
• Calgary – February 23, 2012 Register

Sounds like an interesting night with Daniel Debow (LinkedIn, @ddebow), Debbie Landa (LinkedIn, @deblanda) and Jason Bailey (LinkedIn, @YVRJason) talking about startups, entrepreneurship, building companies in Canada, getting connected in the Valley, GrowConf, incubators and other fun things. The panel conversation is:

Are you an Entrepreneur or a Wantrepreneur?

What makes you different from other entrepreneurs trying to build start-ups? You are competing with thousands of entrepreneurs for the same resources, talent, and capital. How are you going to make sure that you attract the best people and funding? Is it about who you know or is it about how great your product is or the reach you have in the community?

In Toronto that I get to host the above conversation, it means that I’m going to have to represent for the “Wantrepreneur” side. Because there is too much awesomeness with Daniel, Jason and Debbie representing the “Entrepreneur” side. It should be a fun event and a great time for entrepreneurs to get or stay connected with each other. This is a great group to provide deep insight into the experience of building companies in Canada and selling them to Silicon Valley powerhouses.

Given the tour includes stops in Bucharest and Budapest, I can guarantee that someone will mention Summify (congrats guys).Also excited that Debbie and Jason will be joining us on Feb 16 for Founders & Funders.

I can’t believe it was back in 2008 that #HoHoTO started. For the past 3 years instead of a Holiday DemoCamp or Festive Founders & Funders, we’ve sponsored and attended HoHoTO. (We’ve even helped document the shenanigans). So why the fuss about a holiday party?

Toronto’s High Tech Holiday Party – #HoHoTO

“Fortune favors the connected entrepreneur.” @jcal7 #trueuniversity via @hnshah

We talk a lot about what is going on in Silicon Valley and how to make Toronto better. We can look to Helsinki, Israel, New York, Boston, Austin, and other places. But we have a strong emerging high tech culture in Toronto (and across Canada, just check out the efforts in Montreal and Vancouver). There is a strong vibrant community in Toronto that actively seeks each other out. Maybe because it’s cold and we like to snuggle, maybe because in dark of winter it’s best not to drink alone. But there are entrepreneurs that are trying to do it in Toronto and they like to get together.

 Some rights reserved by smack416 (check out the Flickr Pool for #hohoto)

We have a great community that knows how to have a great time. And with HoHoTO the great time also supports a great cause.

What is HoHoTO?

We often joke about startups being “ramen profitable”, but for many this is not a choice. We are working with HoHoTO and the Daily Bread Food Bank we hope to improve Toronto. HoHoTO is a Holiday party to raise sorely-needed funds for Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank. It brings together the hyper-connected tech, marketing, PR, social media and startup communities  to raise attention and support around a core idea:

“People in our town are hungry – damnit – and we can make a difference.”

Here is the call to all Toronto startups, you should attend HoHoTO and support the Daily Bread Food Bank. It’s a great way to initial meet and connect with other readers of StartupNorth and give back to those less fortunate in Toronto.

It’s easy to sponsor, it’s easy to attend, it’s easy to donate.

Get Tickets Now!

PS this is a call out of our friends to match or beat our sponsorship/donation:

• Rob Lewis (LinkedIn, @robertslewis) at TechVibes - You know you want to beat us at something ;-)
• Erin Bury (LinkedIn, @erinbury) & Sarah Prevette (LinkedIn, @SarahPrevette) at Sprouter - We heard you’re flush with PostMedia cash…
• John Ruffolo (LinkedIn, @ruffoloj) and the team at OMERS Ventures - Really you haven’t sponsored this yet?
• Roger Chabra (LinkedIn, @rogerchabra) at Rho Ventures - I know you’re really a Toronto boy.
• Duncan Hill (LinkedIn, @dunchill) & Robin Axon (LinkedIn, @robinaxon) – Don’t call me the day of the event asking for a ticket…

This morning Rick Nathan, Robert Montgomery, and Chris Arsenault announced the 20 Canadian technology companies that have been selected to present at this year’s CIX conference. Many you’ve heard of, a few are well on their way, all definitely worth connecting with December 1.

• Massive Damage – Founded by veteran app developers Ken Seto and Garry Seto, Massive Damage is building next generation location based massively multiplayer games for mobile devices.

• Arcestra – Arcestra is a new cloud-based technology and business platform that streamlines commercial real estate transactions unlocking tremendous value for tenants, landlords, brokers, designers and suppliers in the multi-billion dollar commercial real estate market.

• Vanilla Forums – Vanilla is open source community forum software that powers discussions on over 500,000 sites around the world.

• Woozworld – Founded in 2010, Woozworld created and operates Woozworld.com, a Web 2.0 innovative social virtual world, specifically designed to answer the needs and expectations of tweens.

• Wattpad – On Wattpad users discover a new form of entertainment where you can interact and share stories across text, video, images and through conversations with other readers and writers.

• Infersystems – Infersystems has developed a proprietary, automatic predictive analytics engine based on non parametric statistics. The Infer RTB Optimizer enables marketers to effectively and efficiently optimize display media campaigns at the impression level in order to maximize CPA, CPC and/or profit.

• Recoset – Recoset is a predictive analytics company that allows marketers to bring 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data together in real time and use economic models to make purchase decisions across multiple digital marketing channels.

• ClearRisk – ClearRisk helps the insurance market by giving them a way to win in the mid market by providing the needed risk management solutions to medium sized companies.

• Achievers – Achievers is an employee recognition solution that helps companies recognize brilliant performance and empowers employees to choose their own rewards.

• Bitheads – An award-winning product development company that is creating a unique cloud-based solution for a large and emerging entertainment market.

• Shoplogix – Shoplogix envisions a manufacturing industry where every manufacturer has access to the right information to make the right decisions.

• True Voice – True Voice Technologies caters to organizations that recognize the importance of live conversation and how it can play a pivotal role in their business.

• Polar Mobile – Polar Mobile provides media companies globally an industry-leading Platform that makes it fast and easy to launch branded mobile Apps across every smartphone.

• Wave Accounting – Wave Accounting is the fastest-growing online accounting tool for small businesses around the world. Wave is 100% free, offers complete accounting made ridiculously easy, and is designed for the real-world needs of small business owners.

• Nexalogy Environics – Nexalogy Environics is a leading Canadian provider of social media/ research technology and consulting services. Nexalogy takes the guesswork out of social data analytics.

• Quickmobile – QuickMobile is a software development company that builds interactive, engaging mobile applications and mobile websites for audiences at conferences, trade shows, film festivals and other events.

• Responsetek – ResponseTek helps organizations see the link between poor customer service delivery and retention and growth problems.

• Nexj Systems – NexJ Systems (TSX: NXJ) is a leading provider of enterprise private cloud software, delivering customer relationship management solutions to the financial services, insurance, and healthcare industries.

• TribeHR – TribeHR provides a Software as a Service human resources management tool for small and medium businesses to reduce the time, cost and aggravation resulting from managing human resources on a tight budget.

• Evoco – Evoco is an enterprise class, software-as-a-service provider that integrates real estate management, project data management, and facilities management solutions for multi-location real estate owners.

Startup Weekend Toronto is coming back for it’s third event in just over year. The city is making a name for itself amongst the global Startup Weekend community, having held some of the highest quality events, including last June’s which turned out to be the largest North American event held to date.

The city has lots of great events but that’s not what gets me excited. It’s the quality, innovation and momentum that Toronto’s entrepreneurs have that is inspiring. Personally, I never had any interest in running events but I liked the idea of Startup Weekend and was inspired by Startup Weekend’s CEO, Marc Nager and his the team… at least enough to agree to run a single event. Once you’ve been involved in one, it’s hard not to keep it going. The energy, enthusiasm and drive of everyone who’s attended the last two Startup Weekend Toronto events is infectious.

Last June’s event was a raging success with over half the teams still taking their projects forward and gaining some real traction 6 months later. Vizualize.me is the perfect story of the possibility of a single weekend. A brand new idea gets pitched for the first time. A group of strangers come together as a new team. In under 54hrs, the team iterates, refines, pounds the pavement for customer feedback, signs up over 10,000 registered emails and puts an awesome final presentation together to take first prize. What’s more impressive is what comes next! The Vizualize.me team decided to commit full-time and see where they can take this. As of today, they have over 300,000 registered users, have been covered in Mashable, Fast Company, TechCrunch to name a few, and have gone through a full private and now public beta program. Eugene Woo is actively speaking to investors as they run this startup out of the Ryerson Digital Media Zone.

November’s Startup Weekend will officially close Global Entrepreneurship Week Canada (GEW) and will be part of the Global Startup Battle with over 65 Startup Weekend events happening around the world during GEW. The winning team from each city event will compete against all 65 cities with a chance to win a trip to DEMO in Singapore. Toronto is going to impress the global startup community once again with a world class event. Check out the event details from the site and by following the action on twitter using #swtoronto .

There are still a few tickets left and StartupNorth readers can have them at a discount. See you there!

#DCT30 Details

Date: October 12th, 2011

Time: 6:30 – 9:00 PM EST

Location: Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University: 55 Dundas St. W, Toronto, ON

Register to Attend:

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

Keynote Speaker – Elmer Sotto

Elmer Sotto (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) is the Head of Growth for Facebook Canada, where he is responsible for setting strategy to further grow and engage the Canadian user base. He also helps key strategic partners understand and leverage the Facebook platform.

Prior to this, he was the Vice President of Product and Operations for JumpTV. Mr. Sotto also spent more than five years at eBay Canada as Director of Marketplace Development.

We are very excited to be hosting Elmer as the keynote speaker for DemoCamp 30 and looking forward to another exciting event! Please make sure to register before tickets are sold out.

Amazing entrepreneurs & demos

The goal at DemoCamp is to provide a platform for local companies to launch, get product or pitch feedback, establish a presence for recruiting as well as help with PR and social media awareness. We aim to gather highly connected and talented entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, investors and others to watch and critique entrepreneurs in a safe environment.

We have a list of amazing demos, companies and founders presenting. These are some of the best in the world, and guess what they are all located in the GTA. We have 2 companies that have participated in YCombinator, the first startup out of IAC’s Hatch Labs, a leading e-book platform and a hot social hardware application. It’s a great list of local entrepreneurs.

• Upverter
• Maide Inc.
• Vidyard
• Kobo
• BluTrumpet

Sponsored by our friends at:

• KPMG
• BlackBerry
• VMFarms
• OCE
• StartMeUp Ryerson

Some rights reserved by GibZilla

It’s no secret that Big Data is hot. At O’Reilly’s upcoming Strata conference in New York, a panel of VC judges will be choosing the top firms with a Big Data story, who will present on stage during the Strata Summit on September 22.

I’m one of the organizers of Strata, and it’s a fascinating sector of the industry. New ventures live or dies by their ability to analyze data. Big companies can revitalize ailing product lines with data-driven sales. And elastic computing atop public clouds make new kinds of services possible.

If you’re a startup with a story to tell around data, or an established business that’s disrupting its industry with a new approach, we’d love to hear from you. You can apply at http://strataconf.com/summit2011/public/cfp/176, but don’t delay! Applications close on Monday, August 22 at 11:59 PM.

If you’re chosen, you’ll get access to the Strata Summit, gain exposure to hundreds of industry influencers, and get a chance to launch at the leading Big Data event.

Need a ticket for the Grow Conference?

The generous sponsors of the Grow Conference are continuing to offer a few free tickets to some starving startups over the next week. We call this Conference Ticket – Ramen Class.

Today’s tickets comes from ShinyAds.com and Nokia. These are two very different companies. One is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, the other is a small startup trying to get companies on to their ad serving platform. They see the benefits for startups to attend Grow.

To win these passes tweet the following today:

RT to enter! “Hey @nokia – Please send me to the @growconf #growconf in Vancouver http://startupnorth.ca/ .

Tuesday August 9th, Grow Conference organizers will pick the winners who will get a pass for Days 2 and 3 at the 2011 Grow Conference. *Note that travel and accommodations are not included, pay for your own flights and hotels and drinks you cheap and resourceful founders.

The Grow Conference is a unique three-day conference that brings together the top minds in business, entrepreneurship, technology, and capital to inspire and engage the next generation of disruptive entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter if your business is on or offline, the next-gen entrepreneur knows where their customers are and how to engage them. Today’s entrepreneurs are creating new opportunities, disrupting age-old markets, leveraging technology on their path to being tomorrow’s leaders. The Grow Conference is bringing the best minds of Silicon Valley and Canada together to share lessons learned and inspire action. Be part of this entrepreneurial revolution as we work together to drive innovation for the future. GROW is more than a conference, it’s a movement.

Follow #growconf on Twitter @growconf

We’re big fans of all of the technical community efforts going on across the country. I have the privilege of going to Vancouver next week for GrowConf, but we want to return the favor to local entrepreneurs and students in the GTA. We have 5 tickets for TechTalksTO.

The effort to encourage participation by local students was led by the team at Uken Games.

Uken is planning on sponsoring tickets for 3-4 students to attend http://underground.techtalksto.com/. We’ll also be sponsoring the event in general. I was wondering if we could promote this giveaway through an article on StartUpNorth. We haven’t figured out the criteria for selection but we’re thinking either a short paragraph of why we should choose you and a short code puzzle.

I have purchased my ticket for the event, but I am unable to attend. We will give away one ticket per day starting today until all 5 tickets are gone. Someone else can figure out when that is.

How to win a ticket TechTalksTO?

To win these passes tweet the following until Thursday:

RT to enter! “Hey @startupnorth @ukengames – Please send me to the @techtalksTO Underground ($INSERT_LINK_TO_YOUR_BLOG/COMPANY).”

This is a great local event. For developers by developers. Must attend, like the venerable events like FutureRuby and RubyFringe. It is great to see Toronto Ruby Brigade, TechTalksTO, TechnologicTO, AndroidTO, HTML5 Web App Developers and others engaging and supporting the community.

Along with the team at FreshBooks, StartupNorth is proud to support TechTalksTO. TechTalksTO previous put together a series of speakers at the Gladstone Hotel on West Queen West that feature some great talks about technology for Toronto developer community. We’re very happy to be a Sponsor and Media Sponsor of their upcoming conference event on August 13, 2011. It’s a great group of front-end, back-end and devops focused entrepreneurial technologists.

What a great way to spend a Saturday before flying out to GrowConf later in the week.

The Details

When: Saturday, August 13, 2011
Where:  Toronto Underground Cinema, Spadina Avenue.
What:  All-day conference + After-Party

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

Speaker Lineup

• Mathias Meyer (@roidrage) – Author of the NoSql Handbook
• Timothy Fitz (@timothyfitz) – CTO at canv.as, master of Continuous Deployment
• Aaron Quint (@aq) – Creator of sammy.js and CTO of Paperless Post
• Ben Vinegar (@bentlegen) – Front-End engineer at Disqus
• Rick Olson (@technoweenie) – GitHub Alchemist and Rails core committer
• Aaron Peterson (@metaxis) – Technical Evangelist at OpsCode, the creators of Chef

After Party

One of the best parts about our previous TechTalksTO events were the unofficial gatherings afterward. They were always a great opportunity to network and have some great conversations. We enjoy it so much, we figured for this event, we’d make it an official part of the day so your ticket will include admission, food, and drinks at the exclusive after-party Saturday evening to be held at a nearby establishment.

Tickets

Tickets are available NOW!.  Alas, due to the size and scope of this undertaking, we have to charge actual money for tickets for this one but we think you’ll totally get your money’s worth. Tickets will be priced at $150, including admission to the after-party, which will also get you a couple of drinks and some food. We also plan to have some food and drinks available throughout the day at the conference venue.

Last night marked amazingly the 29th event of Toronto’s increasingly supernumerative DemoCamp scene. To warm up the crowd we had a little help from legendary Canadian investor and the man with a few more twitter followers than you, @howardlindzon. In case you didn’t make it, here’s my notes for you, of varying coherency, of the course of the evening.

The job of entrepreneurs is to get in the way of trends. You don’t need to predict the future you just need to get in the way of trends. The larger and longer the trend the better. Lindzon is not a value investor, he’s a momentum and sentiment investor.

Lindzon started his company through social leverage. But it didn’t come over night, he met Fred Wilson over the course of a year and becoming friends before starting Wallstrip which they sold to CBS. And gained some more cred. But once you sell your company you lose control of your vision. Then he passed on Twitter at 20M valuation. You don’t always catch the winner. You make mistakes. But he could see when he was wrong so he was, by force of will, able to get into Tweetdeck, Bit.ly and others, the idea was to put himself in the way of the trend. I didn’t understand Twitter but I knew it was a trend and was able to buy everything around Twitter. You have to use social leverage to find investors that understand your domain and understand your passion.

Raising money is an art. We’re in a great environment to raise money but that doesn’t entitle you. You have to have a great angle of attack against your competitors, you have to be great at telling your story. You have to explain the benefits of the product not the features.
Dashboards, I want to get my life down to as few screens as possible. Also I read Hackernews and TechMeme in order to understand the sentiment of my industry.

On to the Demos:

500 pixels – Oleg Gutsol @500px
There are many picture websites like it, but this one is ours. Very pretty pictures. We promote the best pictures in the world. Recently closed funding, getting some media buzz. Also a premium themed galleries for photographers. What we nailed was not just the product but the community. Something that they doing better than Flickr “Flickr has become a dump site” 500px is an art site.

TitanFile
Sending secure files, slick interface. Common demo gods, Soo… “lets assume that you received the email…”. No, wait it’s there, to the adulation of the crowd, stupid Gmail delay. You send an notification email and then it also calls you to IVR read you a passcode. Then everything is tracked. Wants to thank Assange for helping to push their business forward. Accountants, lawyers anyone who needs to make sure their documents get there every single time. And delivery receipt is an added value.

High Score House – turn household chores into a game for your kids
Great playful signup screen that sets the tone. Brilliant super obvious reminders and rewards for doing stuff like making a bookmark and remembering your PIN. App awards virtual currency (stars) that parents can set the price for like what the value of helping to make dinner and what points are worth for tv time or a new toy. The Ah Ha! moment is when kids are running up the stairs to do clean their room. Also great for kindness points, what have you done that’s kind today? Cool! You rock! You earned it! This app really rocks and has so much character. App works great on the ipad. Beta testing is spending just a tiny bit of money a day on facebook to bring on 10 moms at a time. Key dashboard metric number of exclamation points in emails from moms. Lookout ClubPenguin, with a little work, High Score House could will be the next big exit that gets Canada to a billion dollar year. Judging by Twitter response, High Score House wins Democamp this round.

Money quotes: we’ve got moms all over loving us, but like, in the acceptable way
Top question: Can you make a version that works on spouses? [I don't know, but in our household we're already debating who'd the "parent" side of the account...]

Vizualize.me – is a startup that won startup weekend. It’s a 5 day old startup.
Problem is how do you display yourself in a different way than a resume. It’s an infographic that scrapes your linkedin profile and makes really pretty graphs. Sign-up rate they just hi 12 thousand users 5 days after launching the company… [holy crap] Product itself is nicely viral because you post your infographic to twitter or facebook or linked and other people see it and feel compelled to create their own. Feemium businessmodel. We want to be the site you go to brand yourself visually and socially. Could easily expand into other personal visual branding applications… but that can wait at least until next week.

WeAreTOTech - A new community service launched by @Michele_Perras, @LeilaBoujnane & @AprilDunford
A Toronto-based Directory that will profile, showcase, promote and connect profiles of local tech heros in Toronto, to help you make connections, to help you find advisors, mentors and conference speakers. Inspired by WeAreTechNY and “in the hopes of connecting everyone, shining a spotlight on developers, CEOs and founders, executive, hackers who make our tech community what it is, we decided to give you We Are TO Tech.” This is a fantastic idea, and what they need right now is you if you fit the description to fill out this form here.

Xtremelabs – Alpha Slides demoed by James Woods
Remove some of the failings of presentations, by making a simple mobile app that broadcasts slide decks to everyone in your audience’s devices simultaneously. Works in a coffee shop, boardroom or conference. Alpha Slides is in the App Store now. I can cast a mini slide deck from one mobile device to another. When I slide a slide it slides on your slide too. Cross platform is the key (apple now has mobile keynote for iphone but only does iphones). Business model is to sell app space, and freemium features. You can follow a conference when not at a conference or I can follow a conference when I’m at one even if I can’t get close to the screen and take it with me when I’m done. A company like Dell could have their own secure instance if they want to as an internal meeting tool. App has potential, could see this taking off in the enterprise as well as the personal or conference usage.

That’s it folks. Awesome caliber of demos again this round. We’re now looking forward to the big DemoCampTO 3-oh. You know what they say, thirty is flirty.

Further reading: @Sachac’s nifty sketchnotes of DemoCamp Toronto 29