B. Mann Consulting

A Vancouver based company where the blogaholics used to work. Another one of the two sites that I initially tried.

The company that runs this, Upside Wireless, also has Developer APIs. I need to look into this further.

Referencing Caterina's It's a bad time to start a company list, Jeff Griffiths figures that being in Vancouver actually helped with Flickr's success beyond the not-in-the-valley stealth mode that being in Canada imparts:

I would go even further and say that one of the critical success factors for Flickr *was* that they were not just 'toiling in obscurity', but that they were IN Vancouver. Up here we have lots of talent, a relatively low cost of living ( compared to the valley at least ), and all sorts of added lifestyle bonuses that San jose will never beat ( climbing / biking / snowboarding / music ).

And for Flickr in particular, a major part of their early success was a loyal local following of users; witness the hugeness of the Vancouver tag. I would smugly theorize that Flickr's ability to find their users was helped in a large way by their being in Vancouver, a city that seems to breed tech-obsessed shutterbugs more than most places.

I dunno, I think it's probably a bad time to start a company in San Jose, but it's hard to say when that would ever be true given Caterina's qualifications. Vancouver, on the other hand, seems to be a fine place to ( re ) start a company...

Jeff is currently toiling in obscurity over at the newly re-vivified Active State. They've got new offices lined up in the UK Building right above our de-facto Innovation Commons at Take 5 Cafe.

Re: talent. This is one of my major concerns: make it clear to worldwide talent that Vancouver is a great place to live (not hard) and that there are lots of companies doing interesting things here (harder). This is something I've talked at length with Zak Greant of EZ Systems, who's in the process of getting a larger EZ presence set up here in Van-groovy. Looks like he's still looking for a Sales Director and a Senior Project Manager (Matt Everard, the project manager position is one that would be a good fit for you...bug Zak about it).

Andre said something about wanting some more AJAX-y JavaScript experts for eBusiness Apps, makers of fine AJAX components. And you'll probably learn how to take Fridays off and go skiing.

The guys at The Level combine many of my most hated distasteful words: Java, Enterprise, Portal, and Proprietary. BUT, I met with them the other day, they have a killer office looking out over the Granville/Burrard bridges, are great guys, and are working on some seriously cool stuff. Java/XSLT experts, apply within.

Identity 2.0? SXIP has work.

So, just a selection of cool Vancouver companies doing interesting, cutting edge stuff -- I'm sure there are more. Now all we need is a Sun research center overseen by Tim and Lauren, or maybe a Google North.

Move up to Vancouver and start a company, already! (or join one of the ones above).

It looks like the ICANN Vancouver meeting is bringing several cool people into town...including Gervaise, whom I met at BarCamp Amsterdam, and Joi Ito, who I've never met but would like to (Joi: here are a few other people that want to meet you).

The ICANN meetings don't start until Wednesday, so maybe Tuesday night would be a good night? I'm going to try and get in touch with Gervaise and Joi, and of course ping organizer extraordinaire, Roland, to find us a good place to eat in Vancouver.

Update: looks like Wednesday night (tomorrow) is going to be better...Richard, long time #joiito denizen, spent some time polling and Steamworks might be the easiest choice. I've put the event on upcoming.org, so please indicate if you are attending so I can give Steamworks a heads up on how many people to plan for. This is definitely not limited in any way to only ICANN attendees of course...just come on out and we'll (as usual) talk about building the next version of the Internet as per usual :P

The New Enterprise Development team from UBC is nearing the end of their class, and are about to do a final presentation. They're asking for people to submit video clips explaining why they want something like the Innovation Commons to exist. Of course, my interest is seeing this actually happen here in Vancouver, but I think the model would work well in any city in the world: throw a bunch of smart, independent, motivated people together in one space and let collaboration and innovation blossom. Hmmm...too schmalzy? Perhaps, but tell us why you want something like this in your own city -- the students are going to put together a video montage. Time is short: their presentation is on Thursday morning, so your post pretty much needs to be up by tomorrow. A podcast would probably work, too.

-- I'll be updating this post later with my own video clip --

Update: Aargh. The video is sitting at home in draft mode. I'm uploading a video filled with a high number of "ums" per minute that I took with my cameraphone just now. Here's the 3gp file.

This is the official first post announcing planning of the Open Source CMS and Blogging Tools Summit. I'm taking the opportunity of the Northern Voice conference (and especially the spirit of Moose Camp) to try and put together a mini-conference of a variety of open source communities.

The great thing about open source is that we can all share and learn from each other. Our only goal is to make our own "product" better and -- unlike proprietary systems -- there is a large incentive to work together on shared areas of interest. This is made even easier when there are other areas of overlap, like the standard "stack" of technologies that support these tools, from the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and Python/Perl/PHP coding languages.

I met with Zak Greant on Friday, who is an evangelist working with ez Systems, makers of the ezPublish CMS. Roland is going to be contacting local representatives of the Plone community, like Enfold Systems. Of course, the Drupal community will be here, with Dries Buytaert and other developers convening in Vancouver for our North American meetup (thanks Chad and Angie for kickstarting discussions about that).

I know that Matt Mullenweg is going to be coming up for Northern Voice, so perhaps he can extend his trip and talk a little WordPress.

In part, many of the ideas for this summit came about from a presentation by the Joomla guys to the DrupalCon Amsterdam 2005

No, really, we want people talking. Northern Voice 2006 is pretty much right around the corner. The official deadline is tomorrow* next week, Wednesday, Nov. 16th. So apply as a speaker. Remember, this is a very "open tent", not necessarily über techie conference. Come and share stories with us in Vancouver. It's going to be the same shareable size -- about 250 people give or take, except that day 1 is Moose Camp -- an open day for special interest groups or just old friends to take over the space. This is not a complete unconference -- maybe you want to organize a mini conference of 10 or 20 people that are all interested in the same subject. Head over to the wiki and self organize (and let us know, and we'll help make sure the word gets out).

I may actually extend this conference and try and gather people together for the week preceding Moose Camp/Northern Voice -- a gathering of open source CMS/Blogging tools to talk about cross platform issues and working more closely together on standards and interoperability. Watch this space for more info (think Vancouver/Whistler in February: how could you NOT want to come?). At the very least, there will likely be a DrupalCon Vancouver 2006. Moose Camp will be the culmination of this event, hopefully as fun as the BarCamp Amsterdam event I attended at Mediamatic. What can I say, I might just be addicted to these things...

The second Innovation Commons meeting is tonight, Wednesday, October 26th, at 6:30pm, at Take 5 Cafe.

Bill MacEwen is going to present the work he's done over the past couple of months to develop a business oriented around the same concept, which he calls "WorkSpace".

We can kick around some of the names and maybe take a straw poll on it, get a list of services that people would potentially be interested in, and then start working on a survey that can be posted for others to fill out. As always, add other ideas to the wiki -- hope to see you tonight.

Here's an iCal feed if you want to subscribe to these events, BTW. 

[Cross-posted from the wiki]

Well, things are well and truly moving. I didn't get around to posting a wrap up of the October 5th meeting -- Roland made a post and also took a bunch of pictures on Flickr -- just check the innovation commons tag.

Suffice it to say, we had about 20 plus people show up, Take 5 stayed open late to let us hang out, and there was a great discussion on what people wanted out of this here in Vancouver. The main take away: let's do this thing, and what can we do to make it happen.

There seem to be lots of cranky people about the Web 2.0 meme. I think that used as hype, it's not that useful. As a general label for a lot of things that are happening with technological, social, and business changes, I find it useful. After all, it seems to be one of those things that you can recognize when you see it.

Brent Holliday, a partner in Vancouver-based Greenstone Venture Partners, recently posted an anti-hype rant on the BC's T-Net site. He makes some really good points, but comes across a little bitter about some of the useful aspects of Web 2.0. I'm hoping to help explain some of those useful aspects, in plain natural language at the October 25th Vancouver Enterprise Forum event. Dick Hardt is running the show, and there are some really great local speakers lined up, including:

• Roland Tanglao giving his blogging, etc. talk
• Andre Charland, who has been doing AJAX before it was called that
• Michael Fergusson on user generated content
• Paul Kedrosky, giving a good business perspective on the whole industry and how it all ties together, and who is so well known outside Vancouver that I tend to forget he's a local

Note to Brent: when BC T-Net updates their CMS 1.0, you can get them to fix the mis-spelling of your name at the top of your bio page. :P

The first meeting about building a local, physical space for entreprenuers, as part of the Innovation Commons (see my previous post announcing this, as well as check out the wiki) takes place on Wednesday, October 5, 2005, at Take 5 Cafe space that is being donated after hours by the owner, Dean Punzo.

There is already an impressive list of supporters -- please add your name even if you can't make it to Wednesday's meeting.

We'll be brainstorming on how to move this project forward, and the New Enterprise Development team will ask for feedback on a survey, as well as help in promoting the survey.

Event details:

• on the wiki
• at Upcoming.org

Subscribe to future Innovation Commons events via the wiki's iCal: