ontario

There are 8 posts tagged ontario (this is page 2 of 3).

Ontario Startup Train Meetup – June 10, 2013

Update: The event date has changed to June 10, 2013.

In partnership with Via Rail consider this your official invite to our Ontario Startup Train wine and cheese on June 10th at Union Station in Toronto. We hope to get all our train attendees, alumni from last year and anyone considering coming this year together to start connecting and meeting before we even board the train. If you haven’t bought your ticket, come out and meet us.

If you don’t have your train ticket yet, grab one now as we will sell out again this year. Our early ticket purchasers get dibs on spots for our on-train mentoring with the likes of Jim Estill, Zak Homuth, Brian Kobus and many more.

You remember the roadtrips of your youth, some with your parents, some with just friends. For our greatest roadtrips, we remember the journey the rest of our lives but often pause and think “where were we headed?”

“Sometimes it’s a little better to travel than to arrive”, ZAMM, Robert Pirsig

Last year we organized a roadtrip for startup founders and funders. We reserved our own car on a Via train and packed it full of entrepreneurs. Our destination was The International Startup Festival in Montreal for three full days of meeting, conversing, learning and working with a truly international audience of startup people.

This July, we’re aiming to have three cars, two passenger cars along with a bar car that we’ll use for our on-train events.

Startup conferences are very different beasts compared to their corporate cousins. People aren’t attending “because my boss sent me”. Instead the majority have spent what little pocket change they have to get there. The result is a conference filled with hustlers motivated to get a ton of value out of being there. We hope to help.

Instead of wasting your travel time, join us on the Ontario Startup Train and let’s get organized before we’re even registered for the conference. Our hope is to get you thinking and sharing what you need to get out of attending this conference before hand. Sharing that with other people on the train means it won’t be just you hunting for an introduction to Dave McClure or speaking to that potential partner you want to invite into your new project.

Beyond Toronto: State of Halton Tech Scene

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Rick Stomphorst who is a co-founder of Silicon Halton . Halton Region is in the West end, it includes Burlington, Oakville, and Milton.Population is >500,000 people. I would have called it a bedroom community, but there is a strong set of tech companies like Ivara and Awareness Inc. We focus on Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal, Vancouver and Halifax but there are strong communities around Canada that have emerging tech startup communities.

Five years ago the state of the tech community in Halton was “virtually non-existent”. Polite conversations about tech startups would have met by shoulder shrugs, glossy eyes and guessimates of the number of startups in the low single digits (if not zero itself).

Asking those same questions today, and you’ll get a wildly different answer.

Number of Tech Companies in Halton RegionWe have been committed to connecting high-tech entrepreneurs, companies and enthusiast. Two major vehicles for connecting the community are Silicon Halton (full disclosure: I am a cofounder of Silicon Halton) and HalTech. Silicon Halton was launched in 2009 by 2 people with 2 events. In 2012, it has grown to almost 800 members and 80 events. Silicon Halton is a grassroots hi-tech community of people who make a living, make meaning, and make things happen in technology in Halton Region. HalTech is an Ontario Network of Excellence Regional Innovation Centre providing education, advisory services and industry-academia collaboration programs and hosted an additional 35 events for entrepreneurs in 2012.

The primary focus of the events been education, building local connections and increasing exposure to local companies. At the Silicon Halton’s monthly meetups, one activity is to “get to know your members” where two entrepreneurs introduce their company. These two intros per month have translated into 24 tech companies connections per year enabling collaboration, shared resources, recruiting and other local opportunities. Additional events have been added to the calendar including DemoNights and PitchNight. Feedback from participants it that the ability to connect with other entrepreneurs and professionals has helped accelerate local companies and local ecosystem. Other Halton region events include contests like Pythons Pit.

The early stage nature of the community has included a focus on shared resources and co-working. The goal being to help connect early stage companies to the broader ecosystem and reduce the risks often associated with commercial leases and real estate during the initial startup phases. The discussion around co-working spaces including 2 at concept stage and a member created app, SpaceSurfers, for finding and sharing workspaces.

Halton has a strong educational resource with  “the Harvard of animation schools”[1], Sheridan College, in Oakville. Sheridan has a strong history of great applied research in digital media, health and advanced manufacturing. It’s a great local talent pool that is easy for entrepreneurs to access through events like BIZTECH Career Fair or through campus the job posting service. [Ed. – I’m intrigues by the Bachelor of Interaction Design and the Bachelor of Game Design in providing students with design oriented skills].

Incomplete List of Halton Tech Companies & Startups

Halton companies and entrepreneurs have easy access to the activities in Peel (RIC Centre) and Hamilton (Innovation Factory & Software Hamilton) regions.

If you are in Halton Region consider joining Silicon Halton and get connected to other locals interested in high growth, high tech companies. Silicon Halton provides a platform for Halton tech companies and to enable a stronger ICT and Digital Media cluster in Halton Region.

Footnotes

  1. “As Sheridan’s animation department continued to grow, it produced hundreds of animators into Canadian and international studios, at one point in 1996 being called “the Harvard of animation schools” on “a worldwide basis” by animator Michael Hirsh.” on Wikipedia

OCE Discovery + Special DemoCamp + One Day Pass

Editor’s Note: This post is written by Paul Vice. Paul works the OCE team to enable special projects. This includes community outreach with groups like StartupNorth and DemoCamp. OCE has been a proud sponsor of DemoCamp and other StartupNorth events for the last 4 years. We’ve written about OCE Discovery in the past and the support that OCE has offered local startups like Bumptop, Verold, and others is unparalleled. We are excited to be able to offer StartupNorth readers access to OCE Discovery 11 » see below for details about ticketing. – David

The Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) has teamed up with the StartupNorth team to present a special DemoCamp on May 19th at 3:30pm at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre as part of the Discovery 11 conference.  It is a chance to put DemoCamp in front of a different audience, drawing all the Discovery attendees. In 2010 we had a standing room only crowd. We have space for 300+ this year.

Discovery is the annual showcase of the best of innovations in Ontario hosted by OCE. Recently named Canada’s Best Trade Show 2010, Discovery has become the premier innovation and commercialization showcase in Canada with over 2500 attendees & over 300 exhibitors.

OCE Discovery picture of show floor

Some of the highlights of Discovery this year:

  • Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences is the keynote speaker on the morning of May 19
  • A hot panel on the direction of mobile app development in Canada, moderated by Kunal Gupta, CEO and Founder of Polar Mobile.
  • A full track on Stereoscopic 3D technology including S3D gaming development
  • Indra Laksono from Toronto’s own ViXS Systems on the future of digital technology in the home. (btw, ViXS is a very cool company, check them out.)
  • The return of the Elevator Pitch competition – Dejero Labs and Gridcentric were past award winners.

Check out the full agenda.

DemoCamp at Discovery

Moderated by David Crow (@davidcrow), with guest speaker Anand Agarwala from Bumptop (now at Google) kicks things off with a unique “Art of the Hustle” (Street Smarts for the Startup World) presentation, followed by a showcase of 5 unique selected startups to pitch in front of an audience of over 300 participants, including panel members:

Discovery is not the usual DemoCamp venue. But, we are looking to accomplish 2 goals:

  • Put some interesting, exciting new DemoCamp start-ups in front of an new audience; and,
  • Put DemoCamp in front of that new audience and inspire some of them to join future DemoCamps

Want to demo?

We are looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight from a highly connected, if occasionally cynical, crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, and pitch advice and the opportunity to deal with the hecklers.

Apply to Demo

Want join the audience, offer advice, heckle and get to explore the full conference floor?

Discovery is a full conference and trade show at the MTCC with all the typical costs and overheads. We run it on a cost recovery basis with a lot of very generous help from sponsors, but costs are a lot more than your typical Democamp.

But, we want you there. You can join us at DemoCamp and visit Discovery  with a one day pass May 19 for $250 if you use the promotion code DC250 when you register. (The full price for the 2 days is $895, $75 for students with ID.)

OCE Discovery 11 May 18-19, 2011