At the end of April (29th and 30th) the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) and StartupCamp Toronto 2 will give Canadian entrepreneurs a chance to shine and, perhaps, get a financial boost for their ventures.

Will Pate, David Crow, and Jevon MacDonald have talked about this great chance for folks to meet, greet, and probably even get inspired during this event.  Our own Jeremy Wright (da boss) and Rick Segal will be there (as well as Will, Jevon, and David).  If you’d like to be there Techvibes needs a reporter on the ground and is offering a free ticket if you’ll cover the event for them.

Frankly, the Canadian startup landscape keeps getting a hard knock, but we have lots of enthusiastic supporters and events like StartupCamp and CIX can only help us.

Will asked me today to make sure that I blogged this asap because the deadline for submissions for companies is looming in the near future.  Have a startup you want to show off?  Get on it and submit!

Remember luck favours the bold.

Techvibes has updated their cross-Canada startup index for March for various cities in Canada:

• Victoria Start-up Index - March 2008 | Techvibes Blog
• Montréal Start-up Index - March 2008 | Techvibes Blog
• Vancouver Start-up Index - March 2008 | Techvibes Blog
• Alberta Start-up Index - March 2008 | Techvibes Blog
• Toronto Start-up Index - March 2008 | Techvibes Blog
• About Techvibes’ Start-up Indexes | Techvibes Blog

On the Toronto list, iBegin has edged ahead of b5media in the site rankings.  Of course that just counts action on the homepage. Overall I’m sure b5media crushes all close competition in the traffic department.

Enough rah rah from me, props to Techvibes for keep this list going.

Ontogenix, according to their homepage, wants to become something new in the social media ad space: “Ontogenix is focused on becoming the leading, trusted social media advertising company.”  From StartupNorth, now they have some money to help them meet that goal:

Ontogenix is raising the round to go to market with their first product, an Interest Correlation Engine. The technology is designed to increase the relevance of ads presented on social media sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc.) by targeting users based on their individual interests. The company searches for information on the general public’s interests, attitudes, and opinions on hundreds of publicly available sources such as social networks, blogs, and forums. This information, collected in aggregate to preserve user privacy, is then combined with the company’s proprietary data model to form the basis for a predictive engine that can tell advertisers which ads will have high relevance to different types of users. Source: Ontogenix raises funding from GrowthWorks | StartupNorth

GrowthWorks is a good group.  They do take some decent risks, but betting on social media advertising isn’t that much of a risk really is it?  I wonder if their technology will be able to help improve ads on blogs.  Sure Facebook is hot, and so is MySpace but I want to believe that they are thinking of and working on something more generic.  You have to bet on the technologies on the specific tools to be successful.  Facebook is a tool social media is the technology.

I also hope that we can start pushing the boundaries beyond the standard ads into something more interesting and unique.  What?  I have no idea…maybe Ontogenix does though ;).

Update: Just after hitting publish I saw Rob’s coverage on Techvibes … good read as well

Contrary to what folks might think down south (i.e. the US), Canada is has a very hot tech scene.  There is great stuff going on across the country, which btw keeps me busy, but I have to say of the tech cities here in Canada Vancouver and Montreal are the hot spots as far as I’m concerned.

The Montreal Gazette ran an article called Silicon Island on Saturday talking about the growing tech and start up culture on the island of Montreal.  Heri of MTW, Joey at Global Nerdy, and Rob at Techvibes all picked up on it rather quickly and built on the whole Montreal buzz.

A few common threads keep coming up in the articles (oddly enough no one commented on Montreal’s weather, which in winter is pretty harsh).  I’ve talked about the need for more VC funding up here and the need for people to take more risks in trying new startups as well.  But I have this nagging feeling that we’re still missing something.  Some piece of the puzzle just isn’t there.

Maybe we just don’t have the concentration of tech people in one location to get ideas going.  Maybe we need some kind of start up incubator city or something.  Of course I wouldn’t move to Ottawa, Toronto, or Montreal even though they are all lovely cities to visit.

Regardless of these questions and musings, I’m glad Montreal is getting some attention for their booming tech scene.

Speaking of which, you might like my DEMO videos on Intruders.tv Canada, since most of the Canadian companies presenting were from Montreal.  Just because he’s a friend of mine, and a former blogger here at b5media, I have to post my interview with Ben Yoskovitz here.  Ben might cringe at this (he seemed a tad embarrassed on Twitter, but said his hair did look good), but hey I’m proud of the guy!

Ottawa-based overlay.tv launched today with something that I think is pretty interesting and unique–letting users annotate and add to videos.

The idea is pretty simple (after you create an account) you find a video like on YouTube and put the URL into Overlay and then you, well, overlay stuff onto it.

Yeah I had a hard time grasping it too just reading it so here is there YouTube video (how they got the 70’s look I don’t think I want to know):

Okay you should have the idea now.  Once you create the overlay video, you then publish it and share it like any other video.

Here’s the interesting bit, besides getting to put goofy stuff on videos, is that you can embed ads into the videos (like for the song or album) and that becomes a revenue share.

Of course you don’t have to do that, like this rather risque (but very funny) one:

I tried to do an overlay, but I couldn’t get the add for the album to stick in.  Which, could be either a beta issue or PBKAC.  Which makes me wonder about user uptake.  Yes, it’s cool.  Yes it will be fun to goof around for a while.  However the real game-changing part of this is whether can use this to, say, show their favourite songs and earn money from people buying them on iTunes or Amazon.

I’m not so concerned about copyright because it’s very clear that it’s a derivative work and you could just as easily embed the video and surround it with ads on your site.  Will it be annoying to visitors? Another good question.  That will have to be a time will tell thing.  My gut feeling is that the technology is cool, but this application of it won’t last.

Other folks have covered it as well: NewTeeVee, Mathew Ingram, Mashable, and MyMediaMusings, but I’d like to know what you think of the service and the videos.  This one seems a tad large so I wish the player was smaller.

Beta services like this don’t just need us to write about them, they need feedback and users to kick the tires.  Heck they need you to try to kick the tires, hood, bumpers … try to break the thing.  If we don’t push it, if we just say “hey this looks cool” we can’t expect anything to get better or improve.  So, let’s have at it!

Rob at Techvibes and Jevon at StartupNorth have both covered this cool effort by the Canadian government to get more Canadians done South to SXSW next month:

Tomorrow morning at 9am (Friday, February 8th 2008) there will be a meeting at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada’s Toronto offices (151 Young St, 3rd floor boardroom) to discuss their subsidy for any companies who are going to be going to SxSW. From what I understand, there was a meeting about it in Montreal today. I am trying to get some more information and will post back what I can find. Read this PDF for most of the information you need. Source: Want to go to SxSW? You can get $687 in support | StartupNorth

A bunch of us from b5media will be down there.  I still don’t know if I’ll be going or not.  Been doing a lot of traveling already this year, but even if I’m not there here are some of the official Canadian representatives heading down there:

Official Canadian delegates presenting at SXSW include Kris Krug from Raincity Studios, Steve Bocska from Hothead Games, Jennifer Ouano from Elastic Entertainment, Ron Thiele from Xpan Interactive, and Keith Clarkson from Xenophile Media.

Hmm, now I wonder if I should give me MP a call…

I got a ping from FeedHub last night that they are adding a Firefox extension and a raft of new features.  Frank Gruber got the post up today, which is good because I’m still trying to find all my brain cells from blowing my nose all the time from this cold:

The FeedHub update will tackle:

• Streamlining Feedback Interactions - They have added thumbs up / down buttons on every post to let you rate its relevance and launched a FeedHub Firefox extension.   
• Relevancy Improvements - Now is leveraging Wikipedia for the taxonomy of its category memes, and a new meme that recommends posts with significantly more comments than are typical for other posts from that source - read Paul Ogilve’s post for more details.

• Infrastructure / Scalability Enhancements - upgraded its Dojo toolkit to improve performance and position FeedHub for future front-end enhancements.

Source: FeedHub Updates Feed Personalizer : Somewhat Frank :: web tech life :: blog by Frank Gruber

Here is a little movie of what the extension does:

You all know that I live and die by my RSS feeds.  Heck I’m looking at my FeedDemon icon in the corner of my screen and I’m getting twitchy because I know there is stuff I haven’t read yet.

Both FeedHub and my fav aideRSS are doing great things for RSS junkies like me.  Marshall Kirkpatrick’s DEMO feed through aideRSS was awesome last week.  Talk about sorting the wheat from the chaff.

So while FeedHub announced their extension today, I’ve been in the private beta of a similar extension for aideRSS for a couple weeks now.  I won’t tip my hand with their features, but both of them do something very similar … help you tailor your feeds to get the information you want.

I haven’t checked my FeedHub feed in a while, mostly because aideRSS has been giving me better results.  Will I compare them again?  Sure.  Cause I’m all about the information…

Tonight, I was sure it was later in the week, is the Founders & Funders dinner in TO.  Jevon posted these questions on StartupNorth as discussion points for the evening:

Do Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists get enough recognition for the deals they do in Canada?

Do Canadian universities inspire and support entrepreneurship? Could a “Startup Co-Op” program help?

What is the minimum amount of funding a startup should be able to deliver a product with?

Is the Dragon’s Den the most visible face of Canadian Entrepreneurship right now? What is wrong with that? Source: Founders and Funders Toronto Kick Off Questions | StartupNorth

Coincidentally, actually I doubt it’s a coincidence, Will Pate wrote a guest piece on StartupNorth about our national need to get our butts in gear and start kicking some serious startup ass.  With this kind of environment:

If you have any illusions that our major media and technology conglomerates are going to take care of this job for us, please give up your fantasy now. Dinosaurs don’t know how to innovate. Our mobile data rates are worse than third world countries and they’re spending money to slow down your internet connection. That isn’t innovation, that’s strangling the golden goose before it can lay eggs. Startups are starving while they get fat on high prices for mediocre services.

You can’t be too surprised at how things are.  It’s hard to get startup funding.  It’s hard to get something going.  At Qumana we had a great idea, I think, and a real opportunity to do some cool things but…

The biggest change has to be in our attitude. We need to become bold, we need to embrace risk, we need to aim for the stars. We need to take big chances, learn the lessons from failures, and have some great successes. The only thing holding us back is the size of our own dreams, and our determination to see them fulfilled. Source: Canada Needs to Realize The Technology Business is a Race | StartupNorth

We couldn’t get the folks with the money to embrace our own risk taking and boldness.  Is this a chicken and egg question?  Is it the lack of good ideas?  Are Canadians too timid?  Or is it that it’s too hard to get the money and convince folks to take the risk?

Of course there isn’t an easy answer to this (Occham’s Razor be damned).

Can we light a fire like Will is hoping? Can we really make a Silicon Valley North?  We certainly have the smarts.  We certainly have great ideas.  What’s missing?

I got the tip on Friday that my favourite anti-spam plugin for WP was getting a major update… they announced it yesterday/today (Heri got the jump on me)

Big day for Defensio! Why? Because we’re rolling out a boatload of new functionality: Source: Defensio, the blog » Blog Archive » Defensio Does OpenID

The big news is that Defensio now supports OpenID, which I didn’t at first realize was a big deal until I read more about it in the Defensio post and Heri’s post as well:

Mat Balez also explains this will increase the accuracy of the algorithm — I guess he means Defensio will aggregate comments left by a same OpenID user on various blogs, thus allowing their system to compute the level of spaminess of the user much easily. Source: Defensio now supports OpenID | Montreal Tech Watch

OpenID in a spam plugin?  Gimmick right?  Why?  Just ’cause the other cool kids are doing it?  Clearly my first impression was dead wrong.  With OpenID tied to the anti-spam plugin then comments you make across the Net can be whitelisted faster (approved, maybe depending on the bloggers feelings).  There is huge potential there.  Just huge.

Oh and yeah Defensio is just plain better too.  They, like Akismet, added the separation of comments from trackbacks (trackback spam is getting pretty bad of late isn’t it?).  Still the better, imho, presentation of spam by just hiding the really spammy stuff.  Love it.  And, like Heri said in his post, it’s doing a pretty darn good job (this is from my personal blog):

Here’s my advice to Automattic: Buy Defensio.  Really.  Nothing against Matt and Akismet, it is a great plugin and system, Defensio is just doing a better job and has some great ideas for spam management.

So if you have Defensio installed, upgrade it, if you don’t, try it.  I’ve been using it since its pre-release days and haven’t had a second thought about it.  Yeah I’m biased–I really like stuff that works!

Heri posted these slides-Sylvain Carle sets CUSEC on fire | Montreal Tech Watch-earlier this week, and honestly I didn’t make time to check them out until this afternoon.  I didn’t even get halfway through the deck (it’s 223 slides) before I knew, just knew, I had to post them here:

| View | Upload your own

Wish there was a self-playing version of these, because the series of comments and text (even without Sylvain’s commentary) are engrossing.  You just want them to flow.

Maybe I can get Sylvain’s powerpoint and make a movie for him of this.  Sylvain has the songs in his post about the presentation, along with a PDF version of the slides.

Okay I’ll leave you to click through now. Enjoy.