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 …read more

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 …read more

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 …read more

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 …read more

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 …read more

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 …read more

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 …read more

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, …read more

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 …read more

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 …read more