Tech Startup scene in Vancouver seems to be very promising these days.  The past long weekend there were TWO events that drew great crowds for working on some cool projects. The more famous one of the two is Startup Vancouver, which seemed to get quite a buzz from local social media. The one that I went to was called Vancouver Hackathon (#hackyvr) – and  was hosted by The Network Hub.

Apparently the two events had quite a different crowd –  hackyvr being a free event and was promoted in the local hacker community (which I must admit I never knew too much about), got many independent programmers, and bright students in the audience.

Over 50 people signed up, and over 25 showed up on a rainy Friday night.  After some beer and networking, each person went around and introduced themselves, and at the same time pitched their projects to the crowd.  Some projects were currently in development, while some were great ideas that the group helped refined.

Some of the cool ideas/projects discussed:

• Mr Toad – Remote console for mobile devices
• A remote management software for consultants and trainers
• Video pitching platform for startups
• education management software similar (but WAY BETTER) to webCT
• Facecred – that’s the project I worked on!

The magic happened after all individuals pitched their ideas – people were supposed to form groups to help out in different projects.   However, staying true to the name of the event, I think most people there had a very strong mind of what they wanted to do already, and hence we see many small teams had formed and most people just worked on their own project that they had started with.

photo courtesy of  @hummingbird604

A few of us – Sean, Paul, Tim, and I – were discussing in the lobby of The Network Hub, pondering what projects to join.  Several ideas were pitched – travel deals curation service (haha that’s mine), and then Sean was like, is there anyway to display achievements?

Hence, the basic idea of  Facecred was born.  The idea is that,

Everybody has some achievement – whether it’s being the MVP of  your volleyball league,  or being a volunteer with the Cancer Society  - and having these achievement awards hidden in a bookshelf or in the basement is not very cool.  We create a service that lets any individuals or organizations to create their awards and recognitions, and be able to award to the person.  The person can then choose to display it on the  Facebook wall and profile.

So with that idea in mind – it was white board time. We spent the rest of the night discussing the architecture, use cases, and how to split up the work.  Sean is a superstar – he took care of most of the backend logic.  Paul is great with Facebook application designs so he was in charged of that.  Tim and I work on the UI that allows the front end website that acts as a dashboard for sending out awards.

Because the past few years I was involved into more business development, my technical skills has actually been quite outdated –  so I wasn’t much help besides the big picture white board diagram and UI design.  I did get some chance to mug around with the JQuery stuff – which is really cool since the last bit of tech work I have done was mostly WordPress or Drupal and some CSS.

So my long weekend was spent with my team mates – Friday night until midnight, Saturday from 10am – 11pm, Sunday from 10am-7pm.  At the end of the weekend, we were able to give a demo of how it works, and everybody who lasted until 7pm got a HackYVR Badge to display on their facebook profile!

I want to thank Mike (@yurechko) for organizing the event, Minna (@thenetworkhub) for hosting us and sponsoring coffee (I think I have half the cannister), Adrian (@AdrianEden) for buying us pizza, and HoweSound Beer (@howesoundbeer) for providing us beverages!  Also nice to meet some cool speakers: Kenshi from Thinking Ape and Colin (@cperciva) from Tarsnap.

At the end of the weekend, great friendship was forged and we will continue to work on this project.  So keep a close eye on  Facecred! (@facecred)

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1. The Concept of Appswap meetups
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This is interesting. Government of BC is putting a competition for sustainability software development.

I have got some ideas,  if you’re interested to get into this competition as a team, give me a shout!

Design fun and innovative climate action apps using government data

The Apps for Climate Action Contest challenges Canadian software developers to raise awareness of climate change and inspire action to reduce carbon pollution by utilizing data in new applications for the web and mobile devices.

A leader in climate action, the Government of B.C. created a public catalogue of its best climate and greenhouse gas emission data.

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After coming back to Vancouver, I had a great aspiration to be more green in my life.  One of the areas in focus is the transportation.  Having lived in Beijing the last few years, and without a car, I am very used to traveling by public transit.   Of course, it also helps that the Beijing public transit is very cheap (0.40RMB for bus ride, 2RMB for subway, 7RMB = 1USD)

Anyways, the past month after taking public transit in Vancouver, here are some of my suggestions:

1. Start putting on some gates on Skytrains – I have always bought tickets, but I also “heard” that many don’t. For over 1 month of public transit, I was only being checked ONCE at a skytrain station.  Hopefully this can make the public transit system getting its fair share of revenue.

2. Make less bus stops – To make the buses run more efficient.  It doesn’t help when there are TWO stops at one intersection (look at Fraser and 49th).   Also, between city blocks there are too many stops.  Between Main and Cambie along 49th Ave, there are 4 bus stops, each ones within 200m of each other.  A normal person can usually walk a little bit, this can create a healthier lifestyle too.  I suggest simply take those stops out, people will be ok with it after a while.

3. Less runs to the Airport, more runs to Richmond on the Canada Line – It makes no sense to have a train every 6 minutes to go to the Airport.  I believe Vancouver must have the most frequent airport commute IN THE WORLD.  Instead of having one train to Airport and  the next one to Richmond, Translink should make this ratio 1 to 3 or so (3  trains to Richmond, and then 1 to Airport)

4. On the same note with the Airport train, I think the fee is TOO CHEAP.   It must be one of the cheapest transportation from city center (downtown) to airport IN THE WORLD too.  Beijing Airport,  with the low cost of living, has shuttle buses at $3USD and subway at $5USD, and Vancouver’s system is $3USD departing every 6 minutes. If cost of living is calculated, the Vancouver system’s cost should be 3 times as much as the one in Beijing.   (Note to self, my next article will be researching on the price)  One suggestion is to combine the ticket that goes to airport with the 24hr All-zone Pass.  This way, people who go to airport can pay around $10 and still feel that it is not overpriced.

5. The Olympic Line should stay – the connection to Granville Island and Canada Line is great for environment and business in Granville Island.  Now Granville Island became a place that is easily reachable, which is also how the Canada Line is to businesses in Yaletown.

6. The zone system is stupid – This one is tougher to implement.  I live in Vancouver, about 2 bus stops from Burnaby.  I think it makes no sense that I would pay a much cheaper rate to go to downtown, which is 20km away from where I am at, than to Metrotown, which is 5 km.  Most countries and cities would have the distance of travel be the only aspect to calculate the fare.  Of course, implementing this system requires changing the entire payment system – i.e. smart cards, readers, etc.  So I don’t see an easy way.

Here are some of my ideas.  If you have any more good ideas, let me know!

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I went to the Cloudcamp Vancouver event last Saturday – a little bit technnical to my taste – but here are what I learned for the day:

• cloud computing has existed as long as the internet existed. Gmail, hotmail are long using the cloud technology.
• Why was it called Cloud computing? Because in any network maps, we don’t really care how the data outside of our world is like, and we always draw a  big cloud indicating that “things just works!”
• There are 3 layers of the cloud  computing:

1. Infrastructure as a service (Amazon S3, Rackspace)
2. Platform as a service (Google App Engine, Chrome OS?)
3. Software as a service (Gmail, facebook)

• Things do blur between infrastructure, platform, and software.  For example, Facebook provides API, so  it technically can be  called Platform  as a  service too.

Here are the following meeting notes from the organizers:

Meeting Notes

We have put together a Google doc containing the flip charts and we need your help to fill in the notes. To read them, you can view this document. To edit the document, click here. We’ll give you permission and we’d love it if you’d share your notes with the rest of us by putting them into the appropriate place in the Google document.

Other resources:

Here are some other relevant links:

• View the Flip Chart Notes
  • ask for permission to edit the notes here
• Flickr Search
• Twitter Search
• Troy Angrignon’s Comprehensive BC Cloud Computing Ecosystem article is here
  • the associated list is here
• Boris Mann (@bmann) is collecting cloud companies in this wiki

User Group:

There was some discussion of how to “keep the energy going” after the fact. For those of you who would like to discuss setting up a cloud computing user group here in Vancouver, why not sign up for the Cloudcamp Vancouver Google grouphere.

Bonus Gartner report

For those of you who attended, you can download a free not-for-redistribution-or-copying-a-zillion-times PPT presentation by Gartner’s David Michael Smith. This is an excellent high-value deck that I think you’ll all get a lot more out of now that you’ve been through Cloudcamp.

OPTION 1 EXPIRES MARCH 21, 2010. You can watch and/or download it here. Please do not share, redistribute, reupload, or republish that link anywhere. This was provided free of charge by Gartner to our attendees.

OPTION 2: GOOGLE GROUP: We have also uploaded it into the Google Group for longer-term storage so you can sign into that here.

Donate to help Cloudcamp

Thanks to those of you who donated during registration. If you haven’t yet donated but would like to do so, you can still do sohere. Anything you can donate helps to keep the events going. 

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