StartupNorth

Tag: event

  • 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.

  • Lean Startup Day @ MaRSDD on Dec 3, 2012

    Lean Startup Day Toronto - Dec 3

    The team at MaRS and JoltCo are providing local access to The Lean Startup Conference Livestream. Sure they’ve been crazy enough to invite me to host the event and a panel, but that shouldn’t keep you from attending. This is a full day event, it starts early (because we’re EST) and continues late (because the conference is PST).

    The event is divided into 2 streams:

    1. Stream 1 – Hands on stories, workshops and discussion with people in the local ecosystem
    2. Stream 2 – Livestream of the conference from California and the program looks outstanding with Matt Brezina, Danny Kim, Jocelyn Wyatt, Stephanie Hay as well as the usual luminaries (Eric Reis, Steve Blank, etc.)

    Great opportunity to connect with other founders and entrepreneurs. Talk about what is working, what hasn’t worked, and what else you can try. The benefit of having a strong community like we do in Toronto, is that we can get together and share. The community is not an end in of itself, it is a means to an end. And while entrepreneurship can be lonely, there is an accessible community of other entrepreneurs, mentors and others that can help.

    First, you need to put yourself in a path for these unexpectedly good things. Second, you have to be able to see these serendipitous events — you have to make the connections. And third, you have to be able to act them. The definition of luck is that you were willing to do something.” Lane Becker

  • Event – Mint Chip Challenge & David Wolman #mustattend

    Interested in changing financial services, identity and the changing role of currency. The folks at the Mint Chip Challenge are hosting their awards ceremony this week. I was fortunate to be a judge for the submissions. And the awards are happening in Toronto this week. The event is open to everyone. There is a chance to talk with submission developers, the judges, and the folks at the Royal Canadian Mint. The group of attendees is unbelievable!

    It is going to be a very interesting night. The invited guest speaker is David Wolman who is a Contributing Editor at Wired and author of The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers–and the Coming Cashless Society. It is going to be an awesome night talking about the future of currency, digital technology, and identity.

    Guest Speaker – David Wolman

    David Wolman

    David Wolman is a nonfiction author and a contributing editor at Wired magazine. He has also written for publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Nature, Outside, Time, Newsweek, and Discover, and his work has been anthologized in the Best American Science Writing series. His long-form feature about revolutionaries in Egypt, “The Instigators,” was nominated for a 2012 National Magazine Award for reporting. Wolman’s latest book, The End of Money, is a globetrotting exploration of a topic that many readers have always taken for granted: the cash in their pockets. His previous books are A Left-Hand Turn Around the World and Righting the Mother Tongue. He is a graduate of Stanford University’s journalism program and a former Fulbright journalism fellow in Japan.

    BTW how did I end up on this panel of judges:

    The group will be in Toronto at this event. It is a small intimate event. If you are interested in commerce, currency or mobile tech, I’d attend just to get access to these people.

    Reserve your spot!

  • Win a Ticket to GrowConf 2012

    We at StartupNorth are huge Grow Conference fans. We’ve been lucky to be involved since it’s inception in 2010. There are great industry events around the globe (think Mesh in Toronto, ad:tech in SF and NYC, OSCON in Portland, Dreamforce in SF, SxSW in Austin, etc.) there are only a few events aimed at enabling Canadian emerging technology companies (Grow, StartupFest, CIX). It’s not to say there aren’t events focused on emerging technology entrepreneurs: Under the Radar, Launch, Disrupt, Demo. It is the focus on empowering and enabling Canadian entrepreneurs that make Grow special.

    As part of this we’re working with Debbie, Clare and the Dealmaker team to give away a ticket to Grow Conference and a Nokia 800 phone.

    If you want a shot at winning the phone and a free ticket to GROW2012 on August 23rd, all you have to do is the following:

    1. on Twitter
    2.  on Twitter
    3. this post (including the hashtag #GROWNokia)

    This contest starts now and ends August 13th at 3pm PT.

    Winners will be notified via Twitter on August 13th at 5pm PT.  Your ticket and Nokia 800 will be waiting for you when you arrive at the registration table at GROW 2012. Good luck! (*You must be in attendance to get the phone, will not ship).

    The GROW Conference is one of North America’s leading technology conferences and is the place to meet your future business partners, investors, and mentors. This year’s speakers include Cheezburger Network, Box.net, Modcloth, Zendesk, and more speaking about how they’re keeping up and staying relevant in a new era.

    If you don’t win, we have a $100 discount using the promo code: SN when registering for Grow.

  • Atoms are the new bits

    Today seems to be an Upverter kind of day, don’t believe me. Check out Zak’s post on the Toronto startup ecosystem.

    CC-BY-20 Some rights reserved by oskay
    Attribution     Some rights reserved by oskay

    Hardware startups are back with a vengeance. Thomas Tunguz (LinkedIn, @ttunguz) of Redpoint Ventures talks about his investments in hardware startups Sonos and Electric Imp. There are new set top boxes, watches, game controllers and entire communities around making and sharing. The rise of the Internet of things, sensors, and open hardware platforms like Raspberry Pi, Arduino and BugLabs are making it easier for activists, hackers and organizations to design, build, distribute and monetize hardware projects.

    We are lucky in Toronto to have HackLab.TO, Upverter, Media Lab Toronto, Site3 and others working on cool hardware based projects. Are you interested in learning about building hardware projects? Curious at designing, testing and building a hardware project?

    Hardware Hackathon by Upverter, Aug 10-12, 2012 in Toronto

    The Upverter team and a bunch of other from around the GTA are hosting a hardware hackathon August 10-12, 2012 at the Mozilla Opensource Space. All you need is an interest in physical prototyping and a laptop (go crazy if you want to try to do circuit board layout on a mobile phone or tablet).

    Should be an awesome time.

  • Founder Fuel Jam Session in TO

    FounderFuel

    Nothing like the last minute planning around here. Ian Jeffrey (LinkedIn, @ianmtl) from FounderFuel is planning on being in Toronto today (June 27, 2011) and tomorrow (June 28, 2011). He is planning on meeting with startups and founders to share his experiences launching FounderFuel, the mentorship and incubation/acceleration plan for participating startups and to talk about tech startups generally. If you are interested in talking with one of the emerging technology company incubators/accelerators you should come and talk to Ian and learn about what is being offered in Montreal. There is a lot of choice in the marketplace for entrepreneurs, and the best way to see the differences are to connect with the people behind the scenes like Ian and the FounderFuel team. This is a great way to evaluate the program, get introduced to the people, and connect.

    FounderFuel Jam Session

    Date:
    June 28, 2011
    Time:
    7 PM EDT – Presentation & Overview
    8 PM EDT – Startup 1-on-1s and discussion
    Location:
    Camaraderie Coworking, 102 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, ON, Canada [map]
    Register to attend:

    From the looks of Alexa Clark’s (@alexaclark) photo exposition at Camaraderie, it is a great space to host a startup. I know that Matt (@mattskilly) and Aron (@defrex) at Hipsell have their startup offices there. It is a great space for startups requiring a great work space, a central location, and the benefits of an enabled coworking culture.

    Beer Station at Camaraderie - Some rights reserved by LexnGer
    AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by LexnGer

  • DEMO Innovation tour returns

    Some rights reserved by The DEMO Conference
    AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by The DEMO Conference

    The Demo Innovation is Everywhere tour is coming back to Canada with stops in Toronto & Montreal. The event includes 2 parts, a chance to pitch/present to local VCs (Rogers Ventures) and a social party. Last years event was fantastic.

    We invite you to submit an application for a 30 minute private meeting with the DEMO team and leading Venture capitals in a city near you. We have ten spots available per tour stop. Each company selected will also have the opportunity to address a larger audience at the DEMO Tour party in the evening open to the entire DEMO community of VCs, investors, media and PR professionals.

    Location Date Register
    Vancouver, BC Canada June 23rd, 2011
    Toronto, ON Canada June 28th, 2011

  • A year in the life

    GuestlistHappy 1st Birthday Guestlist!

    Guestlist has had a couple of weeks. On July 12, 2010 they launched their paid service which finally allows the company to generate fees for the great service they provide. We started using Guestlist for events starting on September 24, 2009 for DemoCamp Toronto # 22 aka An Evening with Yossi Vardi.

    “What began as a dare between three friends to actually finish a software product has turned into full-fledged web service that has helped hundreds of event organizers sell tickets online and keep tabs on their cash flow. Over that period we’ve collected half a million dollars on behalf of our users, a near-majority of which was delivered directly to charities. All powered by word of mouth.” – Ben Vinegar, Guestlistapp

    It’s been a great year for Guestlist enabling over $500,000 in transaction revenue. This is great traction for the small team. Sure it’s only $10,000 using the 2% paid service fee. But this is fantastic traction given that this is a part time project with all 3 team members working other jobs. The demonstrated traction helped the team realize the potential of Guestlist as a business.

    “That’s the story of what our team put together, part time, over one year. We can’t say it was easy; building and maintaining a quality application part-time requires a lot of dedication and free time. That’s why we’re excited to announce that 2/3s of our team has opted to work full-time on Guestlist going forward.”

    If you’re planning an event and you want a great event application, I can highly recommend Guestlist.