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It started off with a simple tweet and suddenly I’m organizing a huge startup event in Toronto…

Back in April, I was planning my next trip out to Actuate’s HQ in San Mateo and my attendance at the web 2.0 conference when I came across Startup Weekend Silicon Valley.  I started reading and, while I couldn’t stretch my trip and leave the family for an extra few days to attend, I thought to myself, why hasn’t this event come to Toronto yet?  So I tweeted that same question.

Next thing I knew, the folks at Startup Weekend were in touch to let me know they wanted to do a bunch of Startup Weekends across Canada – covering all the major cities.  Now I’m not going to bore you with all the details that followed.  Let’s just say that I met the Startup Weekend crew in San Francisco at web 2.0 and here I am, organizing Toronto’s first (well, not quite but that’s another story) Startup Weekend.

Frankly, I’m surprised it’s taken so long to get here.  Toronto has a vibrant tech and startup community and given that these weekends are going on all over the world and gaining tons of momentum, why didn’t someone jump on this before me?  Perhaps it’s because there’s a perception that we already have these type of events in this city.  If that’s the case, I’d have to disagree.  While we have many great events in Toronto covering this space, there is nothing following quite the Startup Weekend model.

Here’s my plug for the event… I hope to see you all there so please check out the site, register and come out with all your great ideas and skills.

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking (oh no, the buzzwords are attacking!), unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in over 100 cities all around the world.

The participants that attend a Startup Weekend decide what they want to tackle over the weekend and come out at the end with several developed companies or projects. Attendees are responsible for bringing desire and passion to the project and walk out of the room with the task at hand, in a short 54 hours. Sound intense? It is.

Startup Weekends continue to build momentum, happening in cities across the globe every week. Toronto is holding its first Startup Weekend September 24-26, 2010 at Ryerson University. The event will be limited to approximately 100 participants and expects to be sold out quickly.

If you read it here and want to attend, use this discount code (lowpostSWTO) to register for a great price.  Yes, there is a cost – the event is 54 hrs long and covers meals and drinks along with prizes and other great stuff.  Startup Weekend is a non-profit and we only look to cover costs and make the event great.

It’s also worth noting here that Startup Weekend has no rights to any ideas, products or companies that come out of the weekend.  We’re only interested in getting people together to build cool stuff and see where it goes.

Follow @startupwkndTO and search #swtoronto for news and updates about the event.

I’m attending the Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco.  Every year, there are a few themes.  Last year it was definitely Twitter and interestingly, even with the massive growth of Twitter since last year’s conference, it feels less relevant this year (or maybe it’s just yesterday’s news).  The big themes this year are: the lean startup movement, mobile, and platforms (everyone likes to say they are developing a platform).

I attended the lean startup intensive session on Monday curated by the man behind the movement, Eric Ries (check out his blog for all info and material on the movement).  I decided to attend this over other sessions because I’m passionate about startups but also because I truly believe that the lean principles can and should be applied inside larger organziations, like my current employer.  I’d like to think that I can apply some/all of these principles in my job now, developing software products and features for Actuate.  Interestingly, while the philosophies make perfect sense:  Define product/market fit, get close to your customers, constantly validate your product with customers and through data, pivot as much as you can or as much as necessary, etc (you can read them all for yourself – this stuff is all over the web), there is little to no information on how to build these practices inside of larger organizations.  I strongly believe that lean principles make perfect sense for defining and building products, regardless of the size of the organization, but in practice, being “lean” is a difficult challenge when many pre-existing structures, processes and bureaucracy are already well entrenched.  These are challenges at most large organizations, at least any that I have experienced through direct employment and through consulting.  As we all know, changing an organizations culture is next to impossible and needs to come from the ground up and likely from the beginning.  My personal challenge will be to do my best to apply the lessons learned from this movement and effect as much internal change as possible inside my organization to work in this manner.  In a startup, it’s much more straightforward, although the challenges are just different. Continue reading »

This year’s web 2.0 expo in San Francisco was all about twitter – not literally, but you certainly couldn’t ignore twitter this year whereas it was relatively insignificant at last year’s event.

As a recent twitter user (have had an account since last year’s expo but only started using it in the last couple of months), I find that I use it primarily to follow interesting information but it has absolutely no “social” value for me at this point. Largely because I do not have a network of friends who use it – at least for now. As a result, I would say I’m 99.9% information consumer and 0.1% contributor. I do actually post frequent updates but it’s unclear to me at this point if anyone reads them and, for the most part, they are not tweets that would be classified as useful. Still, much like this blog, I think that it’s important for me to take part to be involved in the technology and possibly even find new and different social interactions.

While I continue to play around with twitter on a day-to-day basis, it was at web 2.0 expo that I saw the value of twitter in a conference setting. By using the search feature, I continually tracked all tweets tagged as #w2e which gave me a real-time insight into the all the various goings on and commentary at and around the conference. Furthermore, most speakers used twitter along with a keyword/tag to take questions in real-time during their presentations. Of course this went further then simply questions and allowed people (including myself) to post supplementary information about a given topic to other attendees and/or make comments throughout. I found this to be extremely valuable and it allowed me to “virtually” attend certain sessions that I couldn’t get to.

The twitter eco-system is certainly evolving rapidly. It will be interesting to see where it goes. Will twitter become the facebook of 2006 in Toronto where, in a matter of weeks, the entire “connected” city opened accounts 2 years ago? in 2009, I believe the value and long-term viability of facebook is still unclear. Will twitter take the same uncertain path?