StartupEmpire – New speakers and tickets are selling fast

Things have been coming together quickly for StartupEmpire. I am excited to announce some incredible new speakers, and we will keep announcing others as they are confirmed.

The interest so far has been pretty amazing. There have been so many speaker submissions that we have had to completely revisit the agenda for both days of the conference. You still have a chance to submit your proposal in the next few days, and we will still take a look for anything that we think we need to get on the program.

We have just confirmed that Don Dodge, Hugh MacLeod and David Cohen will be joinging us as keynote speakers.

Don Dodge is currently the Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team and was recently a panelist at the TechCrunch50 conference. Don calls Microsoft ?the biggest start-up in the world? and his job is to work with VC’s and start-ups to help them build great companies.

Hugh Hugh MacLeod has been an inspiration to many of us. His work with English Cut and Stormhoek were some of the earliest successes in using blogs to communicate a message cheaply and efficiently, which are much needed lessons for new and old startups alike.

David David Cohen is the founder and CEO of TechStars in Boulder Colorado. TechStars has been one of the most successful seed stage funds in the world. David is also the founder of ColoradoStartups.com, a blog focused on tracking Colorado Startups.

Don’t forget to get your ticket before the early bird deadline, or ASAP before we sell out. The venue is small enough that we really can’t add more.

Thanks for all your support, we are working hard to create something that is valuable and that you will leave from feeling energized and ready to do something great.

We would also like to thank our Leadership sponsors, Microsoft and HighRoad Communications.

Have something to say? StartupEmpire call for speakers

We have launched the official call for speakers for StartupEmpire (more on the name change from Dave later tonight — you are going to have a chuckle).

We are looking for great workshop and panel proposals as well as keynote nominations. You can fill out the form here to make your submission. We have already had an overwhelming amount of submissions, so if you have emailed us already, please consider re-submitting through this form. I will try to dig through my emails, but I am bound to miss some.

StartupNorth, the Conference, is off to a great start!

So, we’ve had a bit of a name change, so forgive some of the logos, etc as we make the switch. When you run a conference like your startup, you have to learn to iterate quickly! I am sure it is not the first change we will be making.

Tickets sales have been going on steadily since yesterday, I am really excited about it and if we run out of early-bird tickets before the deadline, we will add some more at the early bird price up until the deadline.

We’ve received a lot of feedback through comments, twitter, email and blogs and it has almost all been really constructive and helpful. If you have emailed us about leading a session or volunteering, we will have more information for you next week. Some really incredible people have stepped forward.

There is still a lot of work to be done to make this a great conference. While it is in Toronto (which is purely logistical for us in doing our first conference), we are trying to make this as national as possible by bringing in more speakers from across the country.

You can get your tickets over on the website and we will be posting more updates next week.