Sean Ellis Speaking at meshwest
We seem to be living in the midst of a startup renaissance with a flurry of entrepreneurial activity. Heck, it’s even happening Canada, including the emergence of a growing amount of seed capital to turn ideas into companies.
Given all this activity, we’re thrilled to have Sean Ellis speak at meshwest. An entrepreneur, startup executive, one of the leading startup thought leaders and popular blogger, Ellis will offer valuable insight for startups and entrepreneurs looking for an edge in a highly-competitive landscape.
Ellis is the founder and CEO of CatchFree, an online service that makes it easy to find and compare the best free online solutions to meet your needs. CatchFree has raised $5.5-million in venture capital, and launched in May 2011.
Before founding CatchFree, Sean ran marketing at LogMeIn and Uproar from launch to NASDAQ IPO filings, and helped bring Dropbox, Lookout, and Xobni to market in interim marketing leadership roles. He also helped accelerate growth at Eventbrite, Socialcast, Webs, World Golf Tour, WordPress.com and Songkick.
Tickets for meshwest can be purchased here.
Tags: meshwest, sean ellis, startups, vancouver
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Vancouver, Here We Come!
Coming off a successful meshmarketing last week, we’re getting ready to host meshwest in Vancouver on Dec. 5 at the Salt Building.
Vancouver is the third leg of our Western Canadian tour that started in Calgary in June, before hitting Edmonton in early-October. So far, it’s been a great ride with some terrific speakers and, as important, an engaged group of attendees. As much as compelling programming is part of the mesh DNA, it’s the connections and networking that make help make mesh more than just your typical conference.
We’re excited about Vancouver because it not only does it give us a chance to hit the “Left Coast” but we finally get to follow through on the requests we’ve received since mesh started in 2006 to take mesh a cross-Canada affair.
meshwest kicks off with a keynote from Stewart Butterfield, who has moved into the gaming world with Tiny Speck, whose debut title is an ambitious massively multiplayer online game called Glitch.
We’ve got a great “Standup Panel” with Erik Blachford, Carl Schmidt and Jason Bailey. You might be wondering what “Standup” means; it’s a look at companies that have moved beyond being startups but still have to tackle key growth challenges and issues.
Janice Diner is going to deliver valuable insight into what to do with a Facebook Page to make it an effective marketing and sales machine.
We’ve also got Alexandra Samuel, Caroline MacGillvray and Elijah van der Giessen doing a panel on social media and political activism, which will be moderated by Darren Barefoot.
And Zite CEO Mark Johnson is going talk about the fast-moving world of tablet computing and how it’s changing how content is created and consumed.
For anyone interested in how the Web is impacting how we work and live, there’s something for everyone at meshwest. And we’ve got a great end-of-day social to wrap things up.
Tickets for meshwest are now on sale, including a block of tickets for $249 (a $40 discount) available through our friends at CIRA.
Tags: meshwest, stewart butterfield, vancouver
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meshwest Vancouver: The Standup Panel
For all the talk about startups and how to establish, finance and grow them, what about companies that have moved to the next stage – something we describe as a “standup” because after establishing themselves as businesses, they are ready to go to the next stage.
To dig into the standup and what’s required to take it to the next level, we’ve put together a panel of entrepreneurs how have been there done that, or have been and are doing that.
The panel, moderated by Stuart MacDonald, includes Erik Blachford from Technology Crossover Ventures, who was a key player in the growth of Expedia. Since 1995, Erik has been active within the startup world as an advisor, investor and entrepreneur.
Carl Schmidt from Unbounce will provide key insight into what’s involved in running a fast-growing business. For people not familiar with Vancouver-based Unbounce, it is a self-served hosted product that lets marketers build, publish and test landing pages without IT or software.
Our third speaker is Jason Bailey, who bootstrapped Super Rewards from no revenue to a $100-million run rate before it was acquired by Adknowledge, one of the largest online ad marketplaces. A founder and principal with GrowLab, Jason has invested in and is mentoring many local companies including DES Games, Compass Engine, PayPhone App, CrowdFanatic, and OverInteractive Media.
Early-bird tickets for meshwest can be purchased now for $239, while student tickets are available for $49.
Tags: carl schmidt, erik blachford, jason bailey, meshwest, vancouver
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mesh Vancouver keynote: Stewart Butterfield
Has it really been nearly seven years since Flickr was acquired by Yahoo!? At the time, it was one of the largest acquisitions of a Canadian online company, thrusting the spotlight on its co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake
Butterfield, who stayed with Flickr until 2009, has been working on a number of projects, as well as speaking about design and technology. He also co-founded Tiny Speck, a startup that is “building something enormous…that will blow your minds”. Tiny Speck’s first product, a multi-player online game called Glitch, launched last month. (see the video below.)
“”We wanted to make something very specific that hadn’t been made before,” Butterfield told the Guardian after Glitch made its debut. “Because it’s played in the browser, people superficially think of social games and expect a particular dynamic both in terms of how it makes money, and the experience of playing it. But people are playing live and synchronously with each other, and the monetization mechanics aren’t based around speeding up the gameplay in exchange for real-world currency.”
Given Butterfield’s involvement with Flickr, which was based in Vancouver, and how games are becoming increasingly more popular online, having Butterfield as mesh Vancouver’s keynote speaker seemed like a natural choice.
We’ll be interested in getting his view on online games, design, social media and how the world of online photography has changed over the past few years given the rise of new players such as Instagram.
Here’s where you can see the schedule and speakers for mesh Vancouver. Early-bird tickets for the one-day event are $239 until Nov. 4.
Tags: flickr, glitch, meshwest, stewart butterfield, tiny speck, vancouver
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mesh, mesh and more mesh
It used to be that mesh happened once a year. It was an annual “party” that we threw and then invited all of our friends.
As mesh has grown, we’ve expanded the mesh “footprint” by launching meshU, meshmarketing and, most recently, meshwest, which kicked off in Calgary in June.
In the process, mesh has gone from happening in May to happening thorough the year – with the exception of the summer when we try to get off the grid or, at least, be on the grid less often.
Over the next three months, there are three mesh events happening. The list includes:
1. meshwest (Edmonton) on Oct. 4, which features a keynote by Well.ca founder and CEO Ali Asaria. Well.ca is one of Canada’s biggest e-commerce success stories, and established itself as the leading online health and beauty store.
meshwest also features a great start-up panel featuring Jevon MacDonald (GoInstant), Maura Rodgers (Strutta) and Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana (Empire Avenue). We’ve also got Ashley Casovan from the City of Edmonton talking about its embrace of open data. And then there’s a social media panel that will provide great real-world insight about how to execute operationally on a day-to-day basis.
2. meshmarketing in Toronto on Nov. 15. We’ll be unveiling the updated Web site and speakers soon so stayed tuned.
3. meshwest (Vancouver) on Dec. 5. Janice Diner will be doing a presentation that will deliver great insight into how to create a successful Facebook Page, along with lots of case studies of companies doing things right. Hiten Shah from KissMetrics will talk about digging into data to pull out intelligence needed to make smarter business decisions.
Needless to say, it will be a busy fall for the mesh gang but we’re looking forward to a great slate of speakers and programming.
Tickets for meshwest (Edmonton and Vancouver) can be purchased here. Tickets for meshmarketing will go on sale soon.
Tags: edmonton, mesh, meshmarketing, vancouver
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