Tech

Finding spaces for your business can be a tough thing in Vancouver. Price is always something people are weary of and a lot of the times it seems nearly impossible to find a spot. Recent GrowLab cohort graduates, Bill MacEwen and the rest of the Spacelist team are simplifying that process by listing available office, retail and warehouse spaces in the city of Vancouver and the rest of Canada. 

HootSuite, Vancouver’s tech darling, is a rapidly growing social media management company with over six million users worldwide. The popular dashboard is used by 70 of the top Fortune 100 companies, and boasts a number of awards and accolades from the Mashable Awards, Shorty Awards and more. The growing company needs more owls in the nest and is having a Hootsuite Job Fair (search hashtag #hoothire) today, March 5, 2013 at their new head office in Vancouver.

Boris Wertz is the real deal.  His original company Just Books (eventually Abebooks) sold to Amazon. That was back in 2008 and since then he has tacked on six more exits in the successful transition to angel investor. I had a chance to sit down with him at his Yaletown office and talk a little bit about what he looks for in investments, what it is like on the other side of the desk and his perception of the Vancouver start-up community.

If you’re into networking with media industry professionals, drinks and mingling, DigiBC’s Spring Networking Event is the place to check out!

Erik MacKinnon, owner of Gravytrain Marketing Ltd. and full-time student at the University of British Columbia, has been named British Columbia’s 2013 Student Entrepreneur Provincial Champion. Provincial Champions were named by national charitable organization, Enactus Canada and proud program supporter, the John Dobson Foundation as part of the Student Entrepreneur National Competition.

A couple of weeks ago, TELUS dropped 40” Samsung TVs around the city, free for the taking! Naturally, some Vancouverites freaked out, some ran the other way, but most couldn’t wait to get the FREE TV into their living room. The reactions were priceless – pun intended! TELUS gathered the best of the best and created a highlight video you can check out here.

It’s no secret that Vancouver is fast growing tech hub. It’s also no secret that Amazon is looking for office space in and around downtown Vancouver. According to Amazon, “the Amazon Vancouver team will initially focus on helping to develop tools and applications that enable all Amazon engineers to deliver the best, most scalable and efficient technologies.”

Earlier this month, Yworld hosted its first-ever Hackathon “to celebrate the upcoming Beta release of their professional networking platform.” The Hackathon’s a contest involving real-time messaging using Yworld’s WebSocket library, which allows multiple users to communicate in real-time on the same project(s).

How many phones have you or one of your close friends or loved ones lost in the last year? Be honest. We had a chance to get the initial scoop on this groundbreaking technology over the summer, and now, the ultimate anti-loss solution has finally released its version for iPhone (the Android version is out): Linquet Mini. Linquet gives people an effortless way to keep tabs on everything important to them by allowing them to ‘linq’ their valuables to their smartphone. Using Bluetooth technology, Linquet can be added (‘linqed’) to a phone via the free Linquet app.