After taking mesh on the road for the first time in Calgary in June, we continued our Western swing this week, with a one-day version of mesh at the Shaw conference centre in Edmonton, and it was great to see so many entrepreneurs, startup advocates and others embedded in the web and technology community connecting with each other and “meshing” both during and after the conference.
We led off with a great keynote conversation with Ali Asaria, founder and CEO of Well.ca, who talked with Stuart MacDonald about his vision for the company, and how he sees a bright future for e-commerce in Canada. Some video of the keynote is embedded below (apologies for any shakiness and low audio quality — I took it on my iPhone).
After that, we had a rousing debate about entrepreneurship in Canada, with Maura Rodgers of Strutta, Jevon MacDonald of GoInstant, and Empire Avenue founder and CEO Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana. The panel talked with Mike McDerment (who of course has his own views on the topic, as the co-founder and CEO of FreshBooks) about starting and running companies in smaller centres like Halifax or Edmonton, as well as what the government should be doing to encourage the startup community.
Another panel talked about the value of “open data,” with advocate and Edmonton blogger Mack Male, and Ashley Casovan — who helps to run the city of Edmonton’s open-data initiatives. And then we had Stuart moderating a panel with Allyson Simpson of Osum Oil Sands, Scott Walker of HootSuite and Doug van Spronsen of DDB Canada talking about practical lessons on using social media for communications purposes. I followed that up with a conversation between Boyd Neil of Hill & Knowlton and Christina Rontynen of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers about using social media such as Twitter and Facebook for crisis communications.
And to end the day, we had a quartet of local game developers — including Victor Rubba from Fluik Entertainment, Jason Suriano from Rocketfuel Game, Patrick Weekes from Bioware and Andrew Czarnietzki from 3DI — who talked with Owen Brierly about their favorite games and how the nature of game development is changing thanks to new tools and new game platforms.
Of course, it wouldn’t be mesh without some great food and great conversations between panels, at lunch and afterwards at a social event near the conference center. Most of the people I spoke to said that they felt Edmonton’s startup and web community was on the brink of really exploding, thanks in part to ventures such as Startup Edmonton — a non-profit run by Ken Bautista, Cam Linke, Sam Jenkins and Tiffany Linke-Boyko that provides advice and support for startups, and has just raised a fund that will help provide seed capital.
We’d like to thank Marketwire and the Edmonton Journal and Homestars and all the other sponsors and friends who helped us get the word out about mesh, and helped make the conference such a great experience. Thanks for meshing!