If you are a recent graduate or someone, who wants to find out more about working for a start-up in the city, you should attend Techvibes first Start-up Career Fair, May 21st at the Republic, 958 Granville Street.  Not like a traditional job fair held in a banquet hall with suits in booths, this unconference event gives you a chance to connect and network with the founders and representatives behind the following cool companies:  Strutta , Carrie & Danielle, Lypp, Tagga, Live Current, MovieSet, Vibrant Software, and 6S Marketing

Register for this FREE event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=48130170656

LPV packed the Lamplighter in Gastown on January 25th for our third event. Recognizing that the Vancouver tech scene is on the rise, Sun Microsystems, our headliner sponsor, flew up from Silicon Valley to launch their national Start-up Essentials program that evening in our amazing city. Just goes to show what we already know - Vancouver is burgeoning with innovation and very cool people.

The featured companies showed up and showed off their latest:

• Kinzin demo’d These are my Kids facebook app
  DailySplice dished on their new version of morning radio made up of a customized selection of podcasts.
  EQO launched their Vibrator Facebook app
  Bean Services showed us they could ease our accounting frustrations with their new site.
  Techvibes live blogged the event and was on hand talking about their Vancouver start-up index.
  Layer 7 announced their products will be deployed under OpenSolaris
• Teampages talked about their social networking and online management site for amateur sport leagues and organizations .
• Sun Microsystems announced their national Start-up Essentials Program
  Super secet, Team Strutta took over the corner section of the stage with some bright lights and a MacBook giving away tees and a few clues for those of you, who were paying attention.  If you were one of the fearless, who strutted your stuff on camera - there may be a RockBand in your future. Winners will be announced on Strutta soon. So, stay tuned.

Big thanks to the talented Duane Storey for snapping some shots of the people on the Techvibes list, Digital Media People to Watch in 2008 and Raincity's Tech Women to Watch in 2008. I will post a link when those are live. Here's a sneak peak of some of Duane's pics that evening :

Roland Tanglao of Raincity interviewing Strutta's Jordan Behan

Woman to Watch, Monique Trottier and AdHack partner in crime, James Sherrett

Chris Richardson demo'd EQO's Vibrator Facebook app

We hope that you enjoyed the mingling, appies and were able to get some face time with the featured companies in the house that evening.

LPV4 is in the works, so if you have thoughts on venues or anything else you would like to see, share your comments.

Until next time...

DemoCamp04, organized by Boris Mann , Meg Cole and Kris Krug was loads of fun last night.

The event started with the ever popular battledecks, which is a series of random powerpoint slides created by someone other then the presenter. Volunteers are chosen to make sense out of the nonsensical slides and present their business model to the audience. You have to think fast on your feet to make a 7 figure income business out of bananas and chaotic flowcharts but that is exactly what Linda Bustos did. Strutta's, Jordan Behan was up next and he did his part to convince the crowd that we all are responsible for "making it happen," to remember to shop local and keep your cash crop out of the mouth of babes. You really had to be there. In the end, Linda took home the prize.

Getting Down to Demo'in

• James Sherrett from AdHack was the first to demo their DIY advertising product, currently in Alpha. James believes that "people can make damn fine ads" and the new iPhone Touch commercial created by Apple fan, Nick Haley is just one of the many examples of how the adscape is shifting from the traditional agency owned model to more user generated creative.
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• Tom Kingston from Vancouver Expert Financial Models discussed the importance of creating a financial model first before setting out to raise money and how his company can help entrepreneurs through the process.
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• NetHooks pitched their free networking site for young, entry-level professionals. Currently in private beta, they plan to make their professional networking site more social by offering personal pages and include more features not found on sites like LinkedIn, such as: additional privacy settings and the ability to share and display samples of one's work.
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• Amy Walker, publisher of Momentum Planet talked about her magazine for self-propelled people, which encourages bike culture, fashion and an all-around healthier lifestyle. They are always looking for advertisers and donations to help them grow and support their cause.
  

After Party

After the demos, many people wandered over to the Flux Bistro on Water Street in Gastown to enjoy Demo beers, eats and good old fashioned f2f networking, made possible by their sponsors - Peer1 and TechVibes.

I was reading Techvibes and saw the post Biggest Web Development companies in BC. First I love that we're starting to see some attention given to the great work that's being done here in Vancouver. I guess "Web Development" means companies that developer web sites for themselves or on contract. For example, Blast Radius is a services company, while Elastic Path sells Java ecommerce shopping cart Software and Vision Critical sets up advisory panels. (A good friend of mine, Rich Simons is on the board of Elastic Path and Vision Critical is funded by one of the same investors that funded my company Strutta.) I've recently been contacted by two different friends (one in New York and one in Palo Alto) to help them find a Vancouver based web development shop to help the build their new sites, which tells me that Vancouver is quickly building a reputation for having great web dev talent. I gave them the names for Robert Scales at Rain City (who isn't even on the list), Boris Mann at Bryght, and David Gratton at Donat Group. If anyone else is interested, feel free to leave comments here. I'd also contact the BIV and get your name on that list --- Scales!

l8r