With all the talk of Canadian brain drain to the United States and the lack of a strong tech startup ecosystem in Canada, it's great to hear about companies like San Francisco-born A Thinking Ape moving the opposite way.
Founded by three twenty-something Canadians who met in the Bay Area, A Thinking Ape relocated to Vancouver in January with the blessing of their three Silicon Valley Angels. A Thinking Ape is "creating the future of social gaming experiences online" and their first title is the popular Kingdoms at War massively multiplayer online game.
Co-founders Kenshi Arasaki, Wilkins Chung, and Eric Diep are excellent examples of what happens when you don't make it easy for talented entrepreneurs to move to a country, start new businesses, and ultimately create jobs.
Arasaki and Chung originally arrived in the Bay Area to work together on Y Combinator-funded Chatterous and met Diep along the way - it's amazing how Canadians always seem to find their fellow countrymen when working abroad.
While Diep's claim to fame is creating the first Facebook App (Quizzes), his recent hassles in trying to remain in the United States are well documented. He was profiled in a video called GeeksOnaPlane: A Tale of Two Erics along with Eric Ries talking about the Startup Founders' Movement.
So what's next for Vancouver's newest social gaming company?
A Thinking Ape is working with Mochi Media and their new social gaming platform that will allow them to build social features into Kingdoms at War and future gaming properties.
Arasaki sees Vancouver as the ideal place to start-up in the social gaming space. He believes that while Vancouver is deep in engineering and programming talent, the convergence of games and social platforms has yet to heat up competition locally for that talent.
And, of course, they're very eager to take advantage of all the government programs that Canada has to offer.
If you're passionate about creating amazing software and working on a team of like-minded visionaries at an early stage startup, A Thinking Ape is currently hiring Engineers.
A Thinking Ape, creators of the popular Kingdoms at War massively multiplayer online game, is a company of young technology entrepreneurs based in... [more]
As a professional in the technology or social media space, chances are that you are an independent contractor or are considered a small business owner.
A new online business solution is now available to those of you whose most dreaded job is accounting and bookkeeping: Wave Accounting.
Kirk Simpson is the President and Co-Founder of Wave Accounting:
There are 1.8 million small business owners in Canada with less than five employees. We’ve designed an accounting tool that will help them understand and take control of their financial management in an easy and straightforward way. Wave Accounting is specifically designed for the business owner and not for an accountant or bookkeeper. We want to encourage business owners to give up their spreadsheets and really take charge of their business.
Unlike many desktop applications, Wave Accounting is web-based. As a result, Wave Accounting offers the benefit of being able to enter data from anywhere and at any time from any computer. An added feature allows multiple users to collaborate on the same account, entering figures and conferring on reports.
For a free 30-day test drive of Wave Accounting please visit their site at www.waveaccounting.com.
Wave Accounting is aimed at small business owners who hate doing accounting. It’s been designed to be easy and to give business owners a view of... [more]
Dylan Brown, the creative director of Pixar Canada, will make a special appearance at Emily Carr University on March 18th at 11:30 a.m. to present a session called "Pixar's Film Making Process". The lecture will emphasize the importance of applying traditional fine art skills to digital work.
Brown has worked on Toy Story 2, Ratatouile, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc and The Incredibles, and took on his new role as Creative Director for Pixar Canada in August 2009.
Now for the great news...it's free! Check out all the details and make sure to attend this sure to be interesting lecture tomorrow.
During introductory remarks for Cloudcamp Vancouver this past Saturday one of the organizers asked the group, ‘how many of you are technical people and how many are “from the business side”?’. The split was about 70/30 for the technical side. The witty rejoinder to this result was something about why having it on a Saturday is a good idea – ‘only the technical guys would think this is a good way to spend a Saturday’. I saw one guy wearing a shirt that said, “I’d rather be surfing”, but the picture was of an open laptop. Okay, so I’m joking about that last bit. But, as a non-techie attending on behalf of Indicee, I was definitely in the minority. Hence the “tourist” designation.
Here’s my thoughts on the day.
For the uninitiated, Cloudcamps are workshop-based events where the participants decide the curriculum at the beginning of the day. Then, they spend the rest of the day talking about their main areas of interest with respect to “Cloud Computing“. This can even include spirited, in fact heated, debate about how one defines Cloud Computing.
For our purposes, we can define Cloud Computing as what Indicee does! We deliver our software online through your browser. And, our back office exists pretty much entirely on Amazon Web Services (EC2). The Cloud. As a side note, I was delighted to hear that EC2 generously donates computing time to University of British Columbia (UBC) students to help build for the future.
That said, like a cloud, the definition is definitely nebulous and within the tech community it’s a moving target (to say the least). On Saturday, Dave Nielsen (Clouderati), stated a good working definition, I think. Cloud is 1) managed, 2) self-serve and 3) on demand. Dave is one of the founders of Cloudcamp.
Cloud is the essence of Software as a service, and we, Indicee, are the quintessential Saas provider. We get all of our computing power and data storage metered like you get electricity from your local utility.
Destination Cloudcamp
So far over 15,000 people have participated in Cloudcamps worldwide. The events are organized as an “unconference” which means, in short, Embrace The Chaos. The organizers basically provide a blank canvas (within the context of Cloud) and with the help of an impromptu panel some topics are generated to fill up the breakout sessions later in the day.
Everyone involved brought their A-game so we were able to have a lot of fun collaborating on what the day would end up looking like. The list of “official” organizers is here, but the cool thing about an unconference is that we ALL became organizers.
In the end seven sessions were defined:
If I can, I’d just like to pick out one thing from each of the sessions I attended to give you the flavour of the day. Looking at my word count, I’m already pushing the bounds of net-friendly postings. For more info, you can check out the Flip Notes from the day here.
Session #1: Cloud Management & Interoperability
Troy Angrignon kept a blistering pace through this lively roundtable in order to get through the points in good time. The question of Vendor Lock-in was the overriding concern by a wide margin. IT-guys are uber-paranoid of being held hostage and having their data held hostage. It makes sense. Once bitten, twice shy. IT has a ton of baggage from the last generation of computing. I don’t have the hubris to say “it’s different this time”, but I would say the issue is less difficult in a Cloud world than it was in the client/server world. I hadn’t realized how intense these concerns were. Good to know.
Session #2: Designing for the Cloud & Best Practices
Without being too facetious, my main takeaway is probably that I was in the wrong session. This one was more of a how-to with respect to understanding the technology layers that make up a Cloud App; when to expect bottlenecks, and what to do about them. Looking at the Flip Notes I think the Large Enterprises session would have held more value for me. Know for next time. Trevor O and Dave did a good job, it just wasn’t my bag.
Session #3: Scaleable Data Management – SQL or noSQL
I was really looking forward to this session because it had the potential to turn into an epic nerdfight. All it would have taken is the presence of one militant, dogmatic ideologue on either side of the debate. Unfortunately, our group was exceedingly rational and brought nuanced and balanced views. My friend and colleague, Ryan Prociuk, really showed his chops on the subject bringing a ton of knowledge and experience to the group.
I won’t burden you with the gory details of this one. Suffice to say, database are not one size fits all.
For now, just know the complexities of SQL (Structured Query Language) could be compared to writing macros in Excel. Tricky. Here at Indicee, we prefer to let users ask questions using plain English. It cuts down on the angst.
The highlight of the session, and indeed the DAY, was clearly Dave’s anecdote about running 50 million users on only 1 Oracle database. It takes a fair bit of “wizardry” to pull something like that off.
Like the saying goes: “Plan for failure”
Aloha
It was a great day. To everyone who came out, good on ya. To everyone I was able to connect with, good times. And to the sponsors, thanks. Leave a comment!
Last September The Social Agency hosted Appy Hour to great fanfare and they've decided to bring it back with Appy Hour 2 coming up on March 26th.
Appy Hour is a new event series that combines mobile applications and a whole lotta networking. Join us for presentations by innovative application developers alongside noshing and mingling at one of Gastown's hippest spots.
Appy Hour is all about web apps, everything from development and design to marketing. The event is focused on case studies of successful apps in order to provide a behind-the-scenes look at what has worked (and hasn't worked) in app development.
The presenters for Appy Hour 2 are:
Jesse MacFadyen, Developer, Nitobi - Jesse MacFadyen is a software developer at Nitobi. His work has focused on building Flash, Flex and Air applications in ActionScript 3.0 for clients. Recently Jesse has focused on mobile development for clients using PhoneGap to target multiple devices. In his spare time Jesse has developed YuTuplr, a simple, easy to use Air application for uploading videos to YouTube.
Ian Bell, Founder/CEO, AppSocial - Vancouver tech entrepreneur Ian Bell has spent time in Silicon Valley with Cisco and has worked on some really cool services over the years including BuzMe, GeekMail, RingCentral, Internet Call Director, and EQO.
Appy Hour 2 is on Friday, March 26th at the Revel Room at 238 Abbott Street from 4:00pm to 6:00pm with the presentation starting at 4:30pm. The $15 admission includes appies and one complimentary cocktail - register online.
Since 1997, Nitobi (formerly eBusiness Applications) has been providing Enterprise Solutions and web-based software components. With a focus on... [more]
We are a team of seasoned technology marketers, engineers, and entrepreneurs based in Vancouver, Canada. Our company was formed in July, 2009 based... [more]
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