Michal's blog

StarupCamp Waterloo - Rockn!!

What an absolutely awesome event. We had 19 start-ups introduce themselves at the start of the event in a round the room intro (I wish I'd taken a photo of our whiteboard with everyone's names). Over 85% of the audience were first time Camp attendees so they had no idea what the un-conference was all about. And, our youngest entrepreneur yet, Grade 11 student Brandon Ces, owner of CES Landscaping. What fun!

Given we had a great audience (see my last post), David Crow did a great job of telling folks how things work and Jim Parsons suggested we do the round the room introductions after which things sky-rocketed with buzz, networking, questions, presentations, and general good times.

Jesse, my co-instigator, wrote a post of the event including some great photo's, especially his last one with two entrepreneurs talking over an OLPC laptop.

Here are some of the start-ups that presented:
* Village Toolbox
* Wimax solution from Khosrow Modarressi of UoW
* FightTube.tv
* Student from the Velocity residence at UoW presenting 3 ideas for mobile apps - can you post your name please :)
* for the other 2 folks, please LMK who you are and I'll edit this post with your startups!

Dan Debow talked about his experience growing WorkBrain and his current start-up Rypple.com. He got lots of tough audience questions, including how you know when to stop trying - what a great question. Dan had told a great story about one of the first start-ups he tried to launch in the music space, think last.fm. He met much great resistance and so switched his focus back to Workbrain, to help them grow to 230 or so million in annual revenues. If you haven't tried Rypple.com yet, I highly recommend the service and have been contemplating using it to find out more about what you all thought about the event. Assuming I get the time to do that this week, I'll post some of the results :)

We had new sponsors this time around too: Sun Microsystems Start-up Essentials program. Launchpadlaw.com a legal service offered by Shibley Righton LLP. And so, we had lots of great food and beverage, Thanks!

Prosperity and Innovation

I recently attended the release of the September 2007 report from the Centre for Innovation and Prosperity in Ontario. There were some great examples of folks in the community battling poverty on the ground and generally working to enhance Canada's capability to compete by focusing on education and youth. As well as improving coordination among government agencies to better support new Canadian Citizens.

My notes follow (fwiw) the highlight for me though was Roger Martin's insight that Canadian corporate elite have a misconception or fear of re-investing profits, amazing as that is.

Prosperity and Innovation September report - Notes

• transfer payment/redistribution has not helped inequality
  is the middle class disappearing? (globe printed this chart) no, not really (slight percentage decrease)
• are poor getting poorer and rich getting richer
  increases in inequality are predominantly a function of rich getting richer than the median Ontarian vs the poorer getting worse off than the median
• corporate profits going up but wages, salaries and supplementary income going down
• fear in Canada that if investing like crazy will be bought by private equity; need to take profits and re-invest
• when we don't grow large pie as well, we reduce our ability to keep up look at 1980-90 at 20th percentile income our gap was out-performing peer states now we're not
• encouraging folks to go to university is a good thing to do as it increases likelihood of higher wages
• immigrants even more likely to be unemployed (below poverty line): immigration policy has changed we de-linked economic performance to allowing immigrants in - invite them in at a time when getting a job is really tough
• only 18% of Cdn vs 25.6% of Americans are educated at University level. immigrants are more educated.
• Pathways example on importance of education - Regent Park in Toronto. This was a pretty profound presentation and grounded in reality. For example, the head of the program spoke about support and holding young person accountable to decision, the fact that you can't just throw money at it, the community needs to want it and participate in it (it has to come from them and be part of them)
• TRIAC:
  biggest complaint: Canadian experience and education
  better connections between departments
  availability of programs
  hire immigrants.ca