B. Mann Consulting

I just got back from Galiano Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands between Vancouver and Victoria/Vancouver Island. Theoretically it was a Drupal geek thing hosted by Christian Nally, and we did spend a fair amount of time thinking about install profiles for Drupal 6 core.

But really, it was a chance to get out of the city, and it ended up being a great place to connect with a lot of people. Did you know, for instance, that Avi Bryant has bought a place there? I've been doing my own thinking about how to get over Vancouver housing crisis/prices pain without doing a suburb, and Galiano is not a bad compromise.

I was lucky enough to get a ride from Bill of WorkSpace, and it turns out Josli is actually from Galiano. I'm an islander myself, having grown up on Bowen Island.

Actually, the Bill / WorkSpace connection is interesting, since Nally would really like to have a "WorkSpace Galiano". So, how do you grow/spread/franchise the concept/name and have it continue to succeed? Do alternate systems a la OpenCoffee plug into this? I have more on this rolling around, and I hope that something real/with money behind it comes of it. More soon.

P.S. Dear blogosphere: what's happening in Facebook is very important. More of the bits over there need to be dragged out here...and a lot of it is about this identity layer that's just not quite built yet out here.

P.P.S. Another great find over the weekend was Unfuddle. Raincity Studios have been using it for a while and have found it good (we use Trac, which is a lot like it only...harder for humans). I'm still kicking tires, AND I wish the codebase was open (just do the hosted service thing, guys....) but it seems very good. I still need to write up and/or do a training course on "Best Practices for Drupal Development using Subversion", and Unfuddle would be a good part of it. 

Congrats to Avi and Andrew for getting funded. I'm saying congrats to Vancouver's innovation with this post as well, and it's great to see that local Vancouver VC firm Ventures West did this deal.

Paul Kedrosky points to Om's scoop, and calls DabbleDB the first Enterprise 2.0 company. I suspect Paul's position at VenturesWest had a thing or two with making this deal happen.

I planned to post on this tomorrow, but I see the news is already breaking, and Om has the scoop: the venture firm Ventures West in Vancouver has closed a Series A financing round of Dabble DB. He has it mostly right, including the huge opportunity for Andrew Catton's and Avi Bryant's startup. Let's call this the first truly "Enterprise 2.0" company.

One small correction/comment: The investment size is only Om's guess, and the actual dollars will not be announced -- whether larger or smaller. 

Can the local venture and innovation communities continue to churn out winners? I hope so :P

I met Avi over 2 years ago when I had just come back to Vancouver, at Roland's Geek Dinner (yes, where I met Roland for the first time in person). Avi promptly moved off to Amsterdam so I didn't see much of him for quite some time.

Then he and Andrew were back in Vancouver, getting interested in the Innovation Commons, hanging out at our local "third place", Take 5 Cafe, and generally being part of the very interesting Vancouver scene that continues to build.

Avi wowed the computer science nerds at the Open Source CMS Summit talking about Smalltalk/Seaside (see the video by Roland), and then thanks to coming out to Northern Voice's MooseCamp, landed a spot on Under the Radar. And then winning best in show at UTR, showing that made-in-Canada can easily go down to the Valley and kick butt.