B. Mann Consulting

The answer is "probably yes". I just wrote up a description of our Vancouver Drupal Users Group event over on Bryght, but saved the provocative title for here.

I think that maybe I'll lift my stance on only adding Facebook apps that have a "public Internet" face as well. Much as I hate locking data into Facebook, I do want to support local developers: ActiveState's Up4, DabbleDB's DabbleDo, and the soon-to-be-released Opus Player by the Donat Group / Project Opus.

But don't think I won't be continuing to push folks to figure out ways to nicely push and pull data in and out of Facebook in a way that benefits the open Internet as well as respects the privacy and security of user's content within Facebook.

Finally I wanted to share with you that yes, we did indeed continue to chat over beer. The strangest phrase that came up was camel cheese. Nice.

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.