B. Mann Consulting

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Rob Lewis from Techvibes and I talk about the Strutta launch. Or at least, the super sekret alpha launch. It's been fun to see the buzz build, and start to see the first initial pieces of the Strutta story come out. I'm looking forward to the whole story being revealed.

Disclaimer: I'm an advisor to Strutta

In just 9 days, DemoCampVancouver04 takes place at the usual location - WorkSpace.

We've now grown to the point where any of the local watering holes or eating establishments in Gastown have trouble housing the hordes when we leave at the end of the evening, so we've arranged a set of sponsors to pay for some drinks and appetizers at Flux Bistro, just down the road along Water Street.

I'd like to thank Communicate.com, TechVibes, and Peer1 for sponsoring this post-DemoCamp gathering. At only our 4th event, we're already reaching out for sponsorship. In contrast, check out David Crow's update on the 2 year anniversary of DemoCampToronto -- the space alone is $2000 per event! I can only hope we can continue growing our community over the next 18 months as they have in Toronto.

I'm really looking forward to more BattleDecks (well....along with a great set of people, ideas, and companies to present!). Please do spread the word to have people attend -- especially if they haven't attended an "unconference" style event before or are outside the tech industry: connect the tribes!

Add this event on Upcoming and on Facebook.

Last night saw the first Launch Party event here in Vancouver (background write up by Rob Lewis of TechVibes here). Maura Rodgers, Danny Robinson, and Dimitri Sirota joined forces to put on what I can best summarize as being a social gathering for Vancouver's tech community, from entrepreneurs to marketers to interested potential investors.

I've come to know Maura and Danny quite well. They've come back up from the Valley and have now settled back here in Vancouver, with a commitment to make Vancouver's tech community -- including a healthy ecosystem of investment -- really shine. Conveniently, that's completely in line with what I want to accomplish as well. I quizzed Maura ahead of time to compare/contrast Launch Party with DemoCampVancouver. Here's what she had to say:

Moving here from the Valley, where there is no shortage of fun events for people to attend, I thought an event like LP for entrepreneurs, techies, marketers was missing here. There are lots of great events like democamp, barcamp, VEF, and they fill a need too. After work, I am just looking for good mingling and want to bring the people together in and around this city, who are sitting on great ideas but not everyone knows about them. Every month, we hope to showcase about 4-5 cool, early stage companies in the city. It will be very informal and fun and give the people, who are not competing in the decibel competition ;), a chance to warm up and be involved.

We have connections to Silicon Valley. We know investors, marketers, companys there and want to make them aware of the Vancouver scene. Our next LP will most likely be in November. I will be collaborating with the people of the very popular event Twiistup of CA, who are interested in the scene up here to put on a bigger, more involved event than our first called Launch Party with a Twiist. We hope to get more people from South of the Border up for that one.

So, there you have it. Launch Party fills a more casual, social role to meet and catch up with what folks are doing. I think the attendees had a good time networking with each other as well as sitting in on demos/pitches on the startups that attended. It was great to see everyone out, meet some new faces, and get to learn more about some of the great companies and products that folks are working on. I wanted to especially send some congrats to Sun, who stepped up as one of the main sponsors. I just got back from DrupalCon Barcelona, where I met Scott Matoon from Sun -- I'm impressed to see Sun stepping up to different communities, from local ones like Launch Party, to global communities like Drupal. Other than that...go Maura Go!

And now that you're all partied out, head on over to WorkSpace next Thursday, October 4th, for DemoCampVancouver03.

(Photo by Roland Tanglao, of Victoria Revay and Dave Olson)

A late meeting I had last night ended early and I was at loose ends downtown, so I ended up swinging by the Third Tuesday event, since Rob Lewis' post at the TechVibes blog reminded me that there were a couple of events going on mid week.

Tonight (Wednesday) is the nPost Entrepreneur Meetup*. I'm not too sure about nPost. I mean, it's great to have more people highlight and promote tech in Vancouver, but there is such a thing as too many different events and focus at some point... The focus for nPost seems to be startups, and highlighting the people and companies in cities where they have events. Rob and the gang at TechVibes are sponsoring, so I'm sure they'll do a good job of guiding them into the Vancouver scene. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it, I've got the Granville Island Night Photowalk to attend.

Back to discussing the Third Tuesday event...this was a sort of "kick off" event, so there was no speaker or discussion, just mingling at the Soho Cafe in Yaletown. I think there were as many as 30 people through out the course of the evening. I ended up mind melding with Rob Lewis as we talked about the rebirth of TechVibes.com and tech / events in Vancouver in general. Soon the martini-wielding Jenn Lowther** from Invoke Media and Mike***, a Comp Sci / Cognitive Science student from UBC, joined us bad kids by the bar.

One of the things that we discussed is "where to post events?". Third Tuesday itself is the perfect example for this. Rob posted about it on the TechVibes blog, and linked to the listing he created on TechVibes.com. That, in turn, linked to the Meetup.com page. On the Meetup page, we find that a CollectiveX group has been created. I created an Upcoming entry for Third Tuesday, but I actually originally found out about it through the Facebook group.

Yeah. That *is* ridiculous in case you were wondering. I won't go through this time and analyze the usefulness of each of those listings, but as two data points, I believe Mike and Jenn both found out about the event through Meetup.com. Oh, and why did I create an Upcoming.org entry? Because there is a widget for Facebook, so posting to Upcoming automatically gets it into Facebook. I just did the same thing for the Granville Island Night Photowalk -- the upcoming entry can be a public Internet URL, but it shows up inside the walled garden of Facebook as well.

The ideal event listing platform would allow you to do two things:

1. aggregate event listings from all platforms in a management queue
2. publish those events you want to talk about / promote / etc. with a local permalink, which in turn would all you to cross post to those platforms that don't yet have a listing

For bonus points, aggregate back all the media that gets created to your permalinked event entry. Merging attendee listings might be fun to try and tackle, but approaching impossible until we get closer to the whole portable social network concept.

In any case, thanks to the organizers of Third Tuesday. I'm looking forward to a more structured 2nd event with a speaker. Just let me know where to look for event announcements :P

This was originally part of my BarCamp Vancouver 2007 wrap up post, but that turned into a monster and this is really about what's next.

So, you're still flying high on the good vibes from BarCamp Vancouver, and you're trying to figure out "What next?". Some things to watch for...

A DemoCamp Vancouver event some time in mid September. Need to spend some time talking to Rob Lewis / TechVibes about helping out with organizing these...I'm trying to shed as many organizing roles as I can, while still promoting / attending / etc. I love all this stuff, but it don't pay the bills...

Also on the plate....when are we going to do a Startup Weekend (once again, nod to TechVibes for kicking off discussion)? Late October, maybe right after a sort of "organizing" DemoCamp Vancouver on the Thursday before? This may ideally be the kickoff for a new take on the Innovation Commons that I hinted at in my other post.