Category: Tech Community (Alberta)

Out of 19 Young Entrepreneurs featured in the Globe and Mail’s spotlight on Calgary, AcceleratorYYC is proud to be the home of 4 of them! Trevor Gair from theSoJo.net, Joshua Pinter from Community Point, Ziko Rajabali from QuickQueue, and Pieter Boekhoff co-founder of AcceleratorYYC and from Fenture Solutions. Although Lloyed Lobo is not an official member of the space, his and Alex Popa’s company Boast Capital is a huge supporter and we are very please to see them represented on the list. 

Digital Alberta put on yet another excellent event at Innovate Calgary on Monday night: The Mobile innovation Showcase. For my part, I was really impressed at just how mature all these companies are. I'm intimately aware of Kryos Velocity's journey as I helped with their revolutionary Velocity 2 launch. And, even though I thought I knew Poynt, the company continues to make great strides at an accelerated pace – they now have more than 10 million users (Kris wouldn't give us the exact number, but was smiling coyly) and an increasingly developer-friendly focused innovative work environment.

Three in Five accountants are using LinkedIn regularly to advance their careers. LinkedIn is #1 social platform. I think it's indicative of how social media is creeping into B2B vertical markets and how smart marketers can take advantage of those trends. Cheers! S.D.K. --> Article can be found at http://cpatrendlines.com/2009/02/23/survey-results-cpas-join-the-online-social-networking-party/

Empire Avenue out of Edmonton is interesting. Using the stock market as a metaphor, members of the community can buy

Calgary-based Trilogy Software announced today that it has raised $3.3M in private equity with funds from founders and local and North American private investors. Read the full press release. This is CEO Cameron Peters 3rd company. He co-created Cantax Software in the 1980’s (now part of CCH), and and co-founded GreenPoint Software and the ProFile Tax Application Suite in the 1990’s, (I had the pleasure to be a co-founder, as well). GreenPoint was acquired by Intuit in 2000, after which Cameron served as CTO for Intuit Canada and U.K.   $3.3M for a first raise for ...

Empire Avenue out of Edmonton is interesting. Using the stock market as a metaphor, members of the community can buy shares in you using a virtual currency at your going stock price. Using a social aggregator algorithm, Empire Avenue evaluates and quantifies what is now commonly referred to as "social leverage"; counting and evaluating your tweets, re-tweest, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates, Youtube activity, Blogs, Flickr, ... you get the idea. Combine that with your engagement and performance in the Empire Avenue "stock market" platform itself; how often and how much do you invest, etc..., and you get a single score ...

Wicked awesome Startup Calgary Launch party last night. About 350 people filled the Roderick Mah Centre at Mount Royal. Great networking and buzz; it's a continued validation that our tech scene is both exploding in both quantity and quality. Festivities got under way around 5:00. Ninecompanies presented to a select crowd of about 50 V.I.P.'s (C100, A100 and Investors) : Opryx,Minigroup, Hubblr, Kudos, Vision Player, New Panda, Transithub, Community Point, and Core Connect. The three companies selected to pitch in front of the full crowd, who had filled the hall by about 7:30, wereOrpyx ...

        I started writing for Techvibes about the Calgary, Canadian and Global tech scene a couple of years ago. Here's the post I did regarding Calgary's Simmering High-Tech Community Set To Explode from January 2008. To quote myself :) "Calgary's high-tech scene is swimming in a sea of oil and gas" ... and that is still very much true. Many of the things that I wrote in that prior article still resonate: The tech sector is large and contributes significantly to Alberta's economy (is the third largest industry behind Oil/Gas and Agriculture)  No-one outside of the sector really ...

I recently attended a Material Insight event, hosted by VC and author Guy Kawasaki with a panel from noted success stories in Calgary. It’s premise: Calgary-based tech companies includingVoodooPC, iStockphoto, StumbleUpon, Veer and NovAtel have all been acquired by international technology mega-players. We ask Calgary's tech elite if our city is becoming a hotbed of sought-after technology? I experienced a bit of this acquisition euphoria when our company, Greenpoint Software, was acquired by Intuit in 2000. But, nowhere in the stratosphere of the recent iStockphoto $50M sale to Getty Images, StumbleUpon to eBay for $75M, Bioware and Pandemic ...