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LPV10 Winners
The results are in and it’s time to announce the winners in the LPV10 Startup Competition. A panel of 7 judges casted their votes for the “Startup Most Likely to Succeed” and awarded Geotoko. From Judge Andre Charland’s comments: “It seems like all sorts of businesses big and small are going to need an easy way to take advantage of location based promos. This is like a quick and easy way to do that.” So, a huge kudos to Geotoko.
Geotoko's Adarsh Pallian receiving Super-hero trophy
The people care where their food comes from and they have spoken. Foodtree takes home “People’s Choice”. Congrats Foodtree!
Foodtree's Anthony Nicalo and Derek Shanahan
A huge shout-out to all the startups, who were busy showing off their stuff all night. Stay tuned for details of our next Launch Party Vancouver event.
Metabridge 2010 or Bust
After having a successful exit, I look back and found that in the early days the biggest challenge wasn’t the great idea we had, it was getting people worth talking too, to listen to what we had. – Steve Wandler, Founder of Metabridge
Last Thursday afternoon, Danny Robinson of Bootup Labs drove a big blue Suburban filled with 6 other entrepreneurs from Vancouver to Kelowna for the 2nd annual Metabridge event. After a late start and a pitstop in Hope, BC to refuel at the iconic Hope Drive in & Restaurant, we were on our way!
Photo Credit : @dshanahan of Foodtree.com
Derek Shanahan of Foodtree, Lyal Avery of Outcome 3, Mack Flavelle of Compass Engine, Cristian Strat of Summify and Dean Prelazzi of BCIC were all brave enough to make the trip with Danny at the helm. Both Derek and Cristian are from out of town so I was really happy they could join us and take in the beautiful scenery on the Coquahalla. No companies were formed but many ideas were shared and my belly hurt from laughing so hard on the road to K-town.
Photo Credit : @dshanahan of Foodtree.com
Day 1
We arrived in Kelowna just in time to catch the bus to the Quails Gate Winery for the Welcome reception. It was great to see so many old friends from Metabridge 1 including Ethan Anderson, Founder of Red Beacon, Peter Haubrich, Founder of ORIC, Jason Richards of Vineyard Networks and Gary Symons, Founder of Vericoder. Unlike the first Metabridge, the room was full with many attendees from Vancouver and I was not the only female entrepreneur in the room.
Photo Credit : @dshanahan of Foodtree.com
Day 2
A pitch breakfast for attending startups kicked off Day 2 before a day of Golf or a Sparkling Hill Spa tour. There were only 8 companies in attendance last year and over 30 startups at Metabridge 2. Since I spent the day catching up on work, I did not get to experience either afternoon adventure personally but I heard that a full round of golf at the Okanagan Golf course was hands down the better choice!
Photo Credit : @stevewandler of Metabridge
Metabridge ended with a networking dinner at Earl’s Restaurant on the water. Various visiting VIPS were assigned seating throughout the venue and acted as hosts for each table. I was paired up with Lars Lekkie from Hummer Winblad and Amy Leger of HuStream and Brent Bolleman from Axel Partners joined us. I can’t sit still for very long so, as soon as dinner was over I was table hopping and mingling. Without naming names, I made many great connections, who I intend to keep in touch with in the future.
Photo Credit : @dannyrobinson of Bootup Labs
Thanks
Many people were thanking Steve Wandler, the Founder and organizer of Metabridge throughout the evening and he deserved all the props he was getting. It takes a lot of hard work to pull an event like this off successfully. Luckily, he had the help of Chantelle Kshyk, Event Manager from Ostec, who is absolutely fantastic to ensure everything ran smoothly and left attendees raving.
Bring Back the Boat!
When I caught up with Steve at the end of Day 2 to thank him as well, he turned to me and said “I don’t want to just hear how great the event was. I want to hear how I can make it better and better.” To which, I replied – “well, I have a couple of ideas…”, which includes a boat, Dale Fuller 
and a few other suggestions I will share with Steve the next time he is in town.
Photo Credit : @stevewandler from Metabridge 1
All and all it was a great event! Kelowna has a growing and very supportive tech community.
Thank you Steve, Robert Fine, Chantelle and the entire Kelowna Tech Community for being such great hosts. You are welcome at casa Bootup anytime.
Mentor Speed Dating Recap
Lyal Avery of Outcome3 was one of the mentors at yesterday mornings first Mentor Speed Dating event. His recap is below, as well as posted on Techvibes.
I think we can count this first event as a success, and we’ll be doing more of them. In the mean time, head over to mentors.bootup.ca to continue the discussion. If you’re a mentor or a company, sign up and add your profile, and feel free to connect with people directly. Just because there isn’t an active event doesn’t mean you can’t reach out online.
This was also the first event that was community suggested AND organized. Have an idea for an event? Head over to wantit.bootup.ca and add your suggestion.
This morning, Bootup Entrepreneurial Society had their first Mentor Speed Dating event. Graciously hosted by Clark Wilson, LLP, the event took place at the ungodly hour of 7:30am… although the finance guys and lawyers seemed to think it was a late start, us technology folk weren’t nearly as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Plenty of coffee and food to be had more than perked me up though (a big thank you to the Clark Wilson folks for that!)
Ten Mentors were on one side of the table, with about thirty visiting entrepreneurs from fifteen companies looking for wisdom. As one of the ten mentors, it was really thrilling for me to see so many early startups looking to showcase their five-minute pitch.
The particular entrepreneurs will give a much better version, but the 140-character summary pitch of the companies I had a chance to speak with are:
- Scallable – A quality/location/other-metric based brokerage system for medium-sized VOIP providers.
- CompassEngine – A geolocation platform service for mobile developers in the gaming space.
- FoodTree – A directory service providing point of purchase information on the ethics and other consideration of food providers.
- InnovationCamp – A consulting service providing guidance and training in the area of personal expertise for departments in business organizations.
- Viira – A Getting Things Done consolidation application for the Blackberry, spanning projects through contact management.
- SpottedDoing – A middleware component for mobile cause marketing.
- ReadFu – A link preview system to provide a summary of a link’s destination on roll over without having to leave the linking page.
- Redrovr – Helps artists and speakers book more gigs by connecting them directly with their audiences through an auction system.
- Contextual Search Inc – An innovative search model that “brings the content to you.”
- Bitmain Studios – Pointkit is half Unfuddle, half Freshbooks – a project management tool with invoicing built in.
Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I didn’t have a chance to meet with all of the entrepreneurs, but if they were anything like the eleven I did get to meet with, I’m sure they were fantastic.
Overall, the event was a huge success. I believe the structure as presented was really clear – particularly the overall session question of “What are the 3 things you need help with.” Both the mentors and potential mentees I surveyed after-wards had a fantastic time. The good news is that this event will likely be happening again in a few months. In the interim, there’s a social networking site built around the topic that is anything but static. If you’re a mentor looking to talk to early stage entrepreneurs, or a founder looking for business advice or support, register at mentors.bootup.ca and start connecting!