This past weekend was the first Startup Weekend in Canada, held right here in Edmonton! About 30 local developers, designers, and idea people got together at Enterprise Square for the event. As I mentioned last week, Startup Weekend’s mission is to teach entrepreneurship in a fun, interactive way. It’s also a great way to see first-hand the talent that exists in the local tech community.

The weekend got started on Friday evening with the pitches. Anyone with an idea for an application or product was invited to write it down on a flip chart. After all the ideas were collected, each one was given 60 seconds to make an elevator pitch, trying to attract people to the team. When that was done, everyone spread out and slowly but surely teams formed. In the end, six teams came together for the weekend.

For all of Saturday and most of Sunday the teams were hard at work on their ideas. There is no required deliverable at the end of Startup Weekend, but each team was working as quickly as possible to get as much done as they could in time for a demo. Startup Weekend forces teams to focus on bringing an idea to life quickly, which is an important skill to have. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but being able to execute on them is much more difficult. Starting with just the seed of an idea and less than two days later having something workable to show to others is incredibly valuable. Another great thing about Startup Weekend is that it provides an opportunity for individuals to work together, even if they had never met before. It’s amazing what can happen when two or more creative people get talking.

As the teams put the final touches on their prototypes on Sunday evening, members of the local tech community started to arrive. The final part of Startup Weekend was the demo, giving teams a chance to show off what they had worked on for the last two days.

Here’s what was built at Startup Weekend Edmonton:

• HomeCricket, an iPhone application that utilizes Open Data from the City of Edmonton to help you find a house. It shows you assessment information, as well as the nearest police stations, schools, parks, and more.
• Life Radar, a to-do application for the iPad that uses a points system to motivate you to get things done. Neat app, especially when you consider that no one on the team had ever built an iPad app before!
• RightPath, a web-based Q & A style app that connects high school students with mentors from the business world. Students ask questions about careers, mentors answer.
• PaxImperium, a social real-time strategy game for Facebook. With no developers on the team, they focused on a detailed product pitch instead, complete with financial projections.
• GameGigs, a web-based app that connects game developers, designers, and players. It uses the Twitter API for authentication, which made for an interesting (and challenging) demo!
• Green Planet, a Facebook-based app (with an iPhone app too) that builds awareness around environmental sustainability. As you complete real-life missions (like replacing light bulbs in your house with energy efficient ones) your virtual planet benefits.

I’m really amazed at what was created in such a short amount of time! The apps were all polished and well-thought out, and while there were some bugs in the demos as expected, every team completed enough to clearly convey their idea. Many of the ideas changed quite a bit from the original pitch on Friday, and it would be interesting to see how they’d change even more if the teams continued working on them. With the Apps4Edmonton competition now underway, I suspect some of the teams may do just that.

There are loose plans for another Startup Weekend in Edmonton, tentatively scheduled for the fall. Stay tuned here and on Twitter for updates. You can see the rest of my photos from Startup Weekend here.

Congratulations to all the participants for a very fun and successful weekend!

This post originally appeared at MasterMaq’s Blog.

Startup Weekend Edmonton is ready to fly June 25-27th in the Art Gallery in Enterprise Square.  Startup Weekend brings together developers, designers, marketers, inventors, and anyone else interested in ideas and startups to see what they can build in 54 hours. It’s an awesome opportunity to meet and work with people on new ideas and technologies and to turn a thought into reality.  Startup Weekends have been run all over the world (from San Francisco to Sydney to Paris) and have been an amazing way to connect people in their own communities, as well as to other Startup Weekend alumni around the world.  Hosted by Startup Edmonton, Startup Weekend is going to be an amazing time bringing the startup community together to see what can be built in a weekend.

You can find out more about Startup Weekend here, tickets are $99 and include food and beverages for the weekend and a Startup Weekend t-shirt – register for Startup Weekend here.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone out and excited about the cool things that we going to be able to build and show the world.  See you on the 25th!

Earlier this week we held the very first Launch Party Edmonton at the Matrix Hotel. It was a huge success, with over 250 entrepreneurs, investors, developers, designers, and interested people from around the city came out to celebrate our tech startup community! It was way beyond our expectations and everyone we talked to was pretty pumped to see an event like this happen in Edmonton.

It was a great time and our featured startups got plenty of love and attention during and after the event (and the kudos continue to pour in). We can’t wait to get going on the next Launch Party!

Edmonton Journal: Tech startup umbrella group shines spotlight on Edmonton (front page of the Business section!)
Global TV: News Hour Final
Edmonton Sun: The Kids Are Smart
TechVibes: Launch Party Edmonton A Huge Success
Chris LaBossiere: Edmonton’s Rockstar Tech Community
FotoJournal: Launch Party Recap
Mack Male: Recap Launch Party Edmonton
Twitter activity at #startupyeg

Some pics from the party:

Rob & Lauren from FotoJournal also put this awesome time lapse video of the evening:

A huge thanks to our event partners who generously supported this first event including Microsoft BizSpark, Venture Alberta, Cardinal Venture Partners, Robots and Pencils, Yardstick Software, Mailout Interactive, Digital Alberta and artsScene Edmonton.

Check out more photos of the event here!

Launch Party Edmonton is only one week away!

We’re proud to announce the first set of companies who’ll be featured at our inaugural event.

We sought out ten of the hottest startups in town for the first Launch Party Edmonton. Some you know, some you don’t, but all up to some exciting things in our city. Next week, you’ll get a chance to meet the founders, demo the products, and celebrate our startup community and entrepreneurs! Startups featured at Launch Party Edmonton I:

We’ll have full bios and profiles available at the event and video features on our site after Launch Party. We’re also excited to announce our lineup of event partners who have generously supported this first event including Microsoft BizSpark, Venture Alberta, Cardinal Venture Partners, Robots and Pencils, Yardstick Software, Mailout Interactive, Digital Alberta and artsScene Edmonton.

Buy your tickets today!

A Canadian Startup Story

Anyone familiar with the complex and often turbulent relationship between Canadian VC’s and entrepreneurs should get a chuckle out of this one.

Comic by Jevon MacDonald originally posted on StartupNorth at http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/07/16/how-startups-will-save-venture-capital-in-canada/

We’re excited to announce the next big event from Startup Edmonton. It’s called Launch Party Edmonton and it’s happening on March 3, 2010 at the Matrix Hotel!

Founded by local entrepreneurs, Launch Party Edmonton isn’t your typical networking or tech event. No formal presentations, no panels. It’s all about giving you the opportunity to meet our city’s brightest entrepreneurs and developers, demo their products, and celebrate everything that our startup community has to offer. And do it in a way that’s creative and interesting, celebrating with drinks, demos, and DJs to set the mood. Find out more about the event and buy your tickets here.

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

Tonight was our tenth DemoCamp here in Edmonton if you can believe it, and we’re still going strong! Our last DemoCamp was a little over two months ago, so it was definitely time for the community to once again get together. Cam asked the audience for a show of hands to find out who was new to DemoCamp, and a surprising number had never attended before. It’s fantastic that more and more people are finding out about the event, and are coming to support local entrepreneurs. Thanks everyone – keep it up!

Before and after tonight’s demos.

We had five demos this evening:

• Dave Bodnarchuk from EventIQ started things off by showing us InviteRight. He spent most of the demo showing the slick table organization features of the tool. Event organizers or venue managers can arrange registrations by table visually, using a simple drag & drop interface, kind of like seat selection on the airlines. They’re currently working with McNally and Spruce Grove high schools to test.
• Our next presenter was Kent Tong from eQube. He started by explaining that eQube plays in the gaming sector – gambling, bingo, etc., not video games! Kent focused on something called Lil’ Gecko, which is a mobile gaming device rented to casinos and other customers, but they also offer a complete end-to-end solution. They’re trying to come up with games (casual things like Bejeweled) that get the average person visiting casinos again.
• Next up was Brian MacKay from Tooq, a tool focused on the contractor and small business sector. Currently a few weeks away from beta, Tooq right now helps you create and manage invoices. Eventually Brian and his team hope to create a job market based around the people using Tooq for invoices, estimates, and other tasks.
• Fourth tonight was Dave Chan from pureLIGHT. He demonstrated preLIGHT and pureLIGHT, applications his team has written to help designers light scenes. The key difference is efficiency – pureLIGHT produces the same kind of quality as similar solutions, but with significantly improved workflow and on-the-fly tweaking (not to mention a far lower cost). I wrote about the other side of the company, 3DI, back in December.
• Our final presenter of the evening was David Quail, who showed us Attassa. Reminiscent of Xobni, Attassa is focused on improving organization and context in email. You can view messages by conversation, and can see a list of related people for any given thread. You can also find attachments really easily. Attassa works with Outlook and the iPhone, and was developed in just two months!

All of the demos were quite well done tonight, with only minor hiccups along the way. Having said that, I’m not sure that people were buzzing as much about the demos at RATT as at past events. I think my demo of the night goes to Dave Bodnarchuk. Though he ran out of time, the app looks good and he’s already got customers signed up, so that’s always a positive! I also really liked Attassa, and I think it has great potential.

Here are some upcoming tech events to watch for:

• Social Web Meetup on February 1
• Lightning Thoughts on February 2
• MediaCamp Meeting on February 3
• Pecha Kucha Night 6 on February 4

Stay tuned to Startup Edmonton and GameCamp Edmonton for updates on their events too! You can always see the latest tech events at ShareEdmonton.

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight. See you at DemoCampEdmonton11!

Welcome to Startup Edmonton and our new website! We’re an experienced and connected team of young entrepreneurs passionate about growing a world-class tech startup community in our hometown. We’ve been involved in a number of other next gen initiatives in town including DemoCamp and artsScene Edmonton, so we’re pulling together our expertise and networks to put on great events aimed at connecting entrepreneurs, investors and developers. We believe that Edmonton possesses many of the key elements for a great startup ecosystem. But we think we need better ways to harness our collective intellectual capital and transform it into successful and sustainable next gen companies. That’s where we hope Startup Edmonton will come in. Stay tuned over the coming months for more details! In the meantime, be sure to sign up to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter, and friend us on Facebook!

Reposted from kenbautista.com: Great post this morning on Techvibes asking “Does your city have the 5 things necessary for a Local Startup Ecosystem?” The five necessities were social density, great workspaces, events, proximity to money, and creative diversity. I think this was bang on and is definitely something many passionate people (myself included) here in Edmonton are working on through initiatives like Startup Edmonton, artsScene Edmonton, ENTS, Democamp and more. We’ve still got a way to go, but if we can get everyone working towards a common vision for a great startup ecosystem in Edmonton, we’re on our way.

Social Density – The success we’ve had with our startup has been the result of having a solid supporting network of peers and mentors that have provided us with the guidance, experience, and honest feedback that every entrepreneur needs to have around them. But for us, that network has composed primary of people outside of Edmonton – people I’ve met in other cities and through conferences. I’m starting to meet more entrepreneurs in town (which is awesome), but I think what we still need are more local mentors who have the (relevant) experience we can all draw from. Note: we’re working to get more of these kinds of mentors up to Edmonton through events like Startup Weekend and Startup School.

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Thanks to everyone who came to our first Startup Drinks event at The Hat on December 16, presented by Startup Edmonton and Digital Alberta. We had a great turnout with about 50 or so people who came to network, eat, drink and socialize with fellow entrepreneurs and developers in the community. Good turnout too considering the weather and proximity to the holidays! Startup Drinks will become a regular event, so stay tuned for details over the coming months.