B. Mann Consulting

Last night I ended up staying at the Strutta offices until the wee hours of the morning, cheering the team on as they worked towards their launch today.

I worked with Jordan Behan to do a fun spoof of Michael Arrington (and yes, Strutta got a TechCrunch posting) -- I did the Fox news guy voice over. The posting from Jordan is, of course, meant to kick off a competition for the best Michael Arrington impression. Personally, I think someone should get out the sock puppets... :P

We actually ended up dragging Kevin Marks back to the Strutta HQ, in town for Open Web Vancouver. It was great catching up with him in his new role as Developer Advocate at Google -- oh, and a kick ass paper airplane folder, so I expect him and his sons to compete in the Strutta best paper airplane round. Kevin, you wanted me to complain about Google's messed up identity system -- I did this last January and some pieces are better, but the big thing is that I can't use any of my Google Apps for Domains accounts to sign into Google Groups. Since I don't want to use my personal Gmail account to be on random mailing list, this seriously hampers me pretty much every single day. Please fix :P

Congrats to the Strutta team, I know you've got some Beta Bug-lets, but looks like people are having a lot of fun. We've been amusing ourselves flipping the little Flash widgets back and forth -- there are lots of nice touches like this all over the site.

P.S. Yes, it's Drupal. And, oh, look it's multi-lingual: I predict many more interesting multi-lingual sites as people focus beyond North America.

I originally blogged about the local dev center last July when I heard that Microsoft was opening it here in Vancouver.

A lot of this Vancouver / Canada startup / tech hub topics I'm now blogging about on the Bootup Labs blog, which you should follow if you're interested in those topics: Bill Gates talks on NPR about the Vancouver development center

Sutha Kamal just let me know that his company, Ambient Vector, has been asked to write a blog on the Globe and Mail covering what it means to be a startup in Toronto. Here's a bit from Sutha's first post that tells us what Ambient Vector does:

What does Ambient do?

Great question. Got a cell phone? Does it take pictures? How about videos? Ever tried to get that stuff off your phone and onto the Web…to your blog, or a photo gallery? Ever noticed that it wasn't as easy as you hoped?

Have you ever been bored on a train and wanted to see what your friends were doing?

Ambient makes it easy to create, share and view all those moments that are important to you—from your phone or the Web. Pictures, videos, whatever's important to you, whenever you want to share something with the people you care about, or whenever you want to tune in to see what's going on in their lives.

OK, I'm getting a little preachy…I'm the CEO, what can I say? I love this stuff.