- Attention technophiles and TinEye fans!
Hello, fellow nerds and geeks! If you:
a) looooove technology
b) are a STUDENT (proof required)
and
c) live in the Greater Toronto Area
Then you’re in luck! Because we’ve got two student tickets to meshU burning a hole in our collective pocket, and they’re up for grabs!
For those out of the loop, meshU is “…a one-day event of focused workshops on design, development and team management given by those who have earned their stripes in the startup game”. You will get to hear from–and hang out with–some pretty cool peeps in the technology arena.
The TinEye team is all about technology love, and the execution of great ideas. So if you’re interested in scoring a ticket for the big day on May 17th, drop us a line and tell us why you want to go. What tools and technologies are you into? What cool projects are you working on? What are your plans for world domination?
The two most interesting responses (as judged by our staff of robots) will each receive one ticket. We will be accepting entries until Wednesday May 5th at midnight, EST. Winners will be announced the following day! Remember, you must be a student to use these tickets, and meshU will ask for identification.
Oh, and this probably goes without saying, but meshU is a small event and tickets sold out… so if you won’t be able to make it to Toronto for the 17th yourself, please be a dear and wait for the next TinEye giveaway. Thanks!
- HackTO
The first time I attended a hackathon it was in Silicon Valley and I totally fell in love with the idea of getting together with a group of people with limited resources (a laptop, skills and an internet connection), an API and the desire to create an application. Felt pretty similar to what any startup does in its startup days! So when Corey and I talked about a hackathon being held in Toronto, for local developers to work with local APIs, well you know what happened next: HackTO was born.
I am very excited to announce HackTO. The idea behind HackTO is to have a series of APIs made available by local startups. And connect these APIs with local developers to build – in a day – amazing applications.
We are still working out all the details – much planning ahead – but here are the basics:
- DATE: Saturday May 15. This is an all day hackhaton. We will be providing breakfast and lunch.
- LOCATION: TBD. We are still working out the location details. It will be downtown.
- AVAILABLE APIs: Freshbooks, Idée, PostRank, CanPages + more. We will be announcing additions to these APIs in the coming days.
- SIGNUP: Sign up is currently open, there is a $10 fee for registration.
- JUDGING AND PRIZES: We are working on awesome prizes for the best applications developed during the hackhaton. Stay tuned for details.
If you’re with a technology company or startup you think ought to be involved, get in touch lboujnane (at) ideeinc.com or just say hi or ask questions.
- “Honestly, I still can’t wait to get my pants on in the morning”
Well honestly: neither can I! I discovered the Daily Routines website last week and today Rob Haggart reminded me of it with his post. Daily Routine is an awesome read. The quote above is from Thomas Friedman and that’s how I feel most mornings! Ok then, off to work fellows. Enjoy your day.
- Toronto AWS Start-Up Tour
Last week we gave you a heads up about the upcoming AWS Start-Up Tour. Here are a few more details about the Toronto stop.The team from Amazon will be in town on September 15th (that’s been changed from the 16th) and our CEO and CTO will be speaking at the half-day meet and learn event showcasing companies and technologies that use AWS services.
Last year’s AWS Start-Up Tour featured AideRSS, Geezeo, Renkoo, SmugMug, Slideshare, Animoto, Ooyala and more. You can check out a number of their presentations from the 2007 tour over on slideshare.
If you are interested in attending this year’s event here in Toronto, head on over to the Start-Up Tour site to learn a bit more or register today.
Where: MaRS Discovery Centre
Who: Local CEOs, CTOs, founders of start-ups and investors
When: 2pm-5pm, followed by a networking reception
Event Schedule:
2:00-2:20 Opening Statements by Adam Selipsky, VP, Amazon Web Services
2:20-3:00 AWS Presentation by Mike Culver, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
3:15-4:05 Presentations:
Carlos Barrettara, Co-Founder, Polar Mobile
Ilya Grigorik, Co-Founder, AideRSS
Chris Thiessen, Founder, Zoomii
Leila Boujnane, Chief Executive Officer, Idee Inc. (that’s us!)
Farhan Thawar, Chief Software Architect, I Love Rewards4:05-4:35 Q&A
4:35-5:00 Closing Statements by Adam Selipsky, VP, Amazon Web Services
5:00-7:00 Cocktail/Networking Reception
If that doesn’t sound like a slam-dunk of an event for start-ups in the early stages of a project that might benefit from the AWS offerings, I don’t know what would. See you there!
- Cloud computing
Jinesh (AWS) has a great white paper about cloud computing out. The white paper is broken into two main sections:
Building GrepTheWeb in the Cloud, Part 1: Cloud Architectures
Building GrepTheWeb in the Cloud, Part 2: Best Practices and Lessons LearnedThe first section of the paper will help you understand the benefits of building applications in-the-cloud; but if you are already a cloud user, the second section will help you more effectively utilize some of the best practices.
- Help A Reporter Out (and help yourself out too)
Peter Shankman has a good thing going.
His recently launched Help A Reporter Out is a service that connects reporters with sources. HARO started out as a small facebook group with fewer than a thousand members; now it has grown to a very loyal following of more than 16,000.
HARO’s strength is in its simplicity. Each day I receive three emails. Even if Shankman is jet-setting around the world for an interview, rocking out at the George Michael concert, running a marathon or skydiving, the emails still make it to my “things you must read” folder.
Each email has queries from reporters looking for sources on a wide variety of subjects. From the serious (looking for cloud computing users) to the wacky (pet-friendly haunted hotels) the HARO query lists certainly offer something for everyone and folks are getting pretty excited about what Shankman is up to.
There are usually anywhere between 10 and 30 queries per email, organized so you can read all of them in about five seconds. If any work for you, simply scroll down to learn a bit more then email the reporter with your details and why you’re an expert. Done.
Shankman’s tag-line for HARO is “everyone is an expert on something” and he’s right. If you see a query you can answer, you go for it.
It’s that incredibly simple. Like most brilliant things are.
Oh yeah – and it’s all free.
Sources can sign up here or if you’re a journalist and want to submit a query you can submit it here.
- The fail whale
The S3 outages over the weekend reminded me Sarah’s Fail Whale Story on ReadWriteWeb and Avatar’s story a few weeks earlier. How an unknown artist becomes a superstar pretty much sums it up!
- Email: a blessing and a curse
Seth Godin has a great email check list that everyone should read. It is not new. His recommendations are common sense ones, but they are the ones we tend to forget about since we now all live out of our inbox! “the asymmetrical nature of email–free to send, expensive investment of time to read or delete” should makes us all pay more attention to emails before we hit that send button.
- Top 10 startups to watch in Canada
Top 10 startups to watch in Canada from StartupNorth. We are in great company!
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