I’m following up on my experiences at the F5 Expo at the Vancouver Convention center. F5 is a business conference for executives on changing technologies in the online space such as social media, search marketing, mobile applications, and future trends. The event took place from 830am with Lindsay Smith’s keynote speech, followed by a broad range of sessions including: Metrics of Social Media, Cost Effective Videio Marketing, The Secret of Success: Avoiding Start-up pitfalls, ending with the keynote speech by Malcolm Gladwell on Innovation and Limitation. The F5 Tradeshow showcased over sixty Exhibitor offering products and services from mobile video, cellphone apps, data backup, broadband phone, to social media marketing and web developments.

I met and interviewed several Vendors in the Exhibitor room of F5. I told people that I was looking more for stories than generic sales “speal”, so that readers might better understand the motivation of the company and it’s team for developing specific products and services.

Exhibitors

HUstream.com based in Vancouver. Nick Kellet – Chief Marketing Officer. User driven – persona based. Tailor content to audience. For web sites, employee engagement ( internal ), Government ( reaching youth community ).

Distige.com based in Vancouver. Brand management and print marketing for small to medium sized businesses. I spoke with Ashkan Azrahimi. Marketing vehicles. Breaking boundaries and trends. He came to F5 to form partnerships, be part of community.

media2o.com based in Vancouver. I spoke with Tristan Jutras, Director of Marketing & Business Development. M2O offers social video marketing. During the F5 Expo, M2O ran a content to win an ipad based on the most testimonials for fave exhibitor. I asked if Tristan if he’d been able to view other exhibitors or sessons and he mentioned encryptinc.com which was provided encrypted email for blackberry. Tristan wanted to see Malcolm Gladwell after reading his “Tipping point” book, because he’s someone that makes you think of things from a different perspective.

M2O was at F5 as a result of being part of Vancouver 2010 and working with VANOC. During the Olympics, M2O worked with Molson Corr to enable their national staff across Canada to view Olympic experience remotely. Sixteen members of Molson Corr’s staff was trained to be social reporters by documenting events using a mino camcorder. The staff shot video during the day, then the videos were edited at night by M2O and were presented the next day on the Molson community blog.

I spoke with Van Eyk Olivier, Owner and Producer of Breakfree Productions who are based in Vancouver. He says that Breakfree provides services that are a mix of an Agency and a Production company. Breakfree was at F5 for the Marketing expo. He appreciated that F5 provided sessions on strategic business. Van Eyk mentioned that audio is now searchable on google, so choosing phrases or words to be found via search engines will become more important as more web users and developers understand this new search feature. Breakfree works with clients on the video script to help search engine ranking.

Mobiry Technologies

I spoke with Mohamed Amirali, Director of Business Development at Mobiry Technologies. He moved to Vancouver from Montreal to be part of the local Tech community and to start a new family here. His interest is in IT, Business, and Strategic Marketing. Mohamed likes how things change so quickly in the Tech field, which is why Mobiry is helping Businesses adapt.

Mohamed explained to me that Mobiry was the 1st company in the world to develop and integrate Optical Character Technology ( OCR ) for the mobile device market. I must admit talking with Mohamed I was a bit confused on their services, but I knew that was due in part to their company venturing on the edge of marketing to the mobile market. A basic description would be that Mobiry enables businesses to offer and track coupons to customers, while helping customers get good deals on products or services – all on your cellphone!

As a customer you could get a promo code via a text message on your cellphone, which you could then redeem when you pay for your dinner, or movie ticket. Another option would allow you to take a picture on your cellphone that becomes a SMS code for another way to get deals.

Alexy Mykhaylov, President of parent company Integrio.net, explained to me that Mobiry was developed after Integrio originally developed a Mobile OCR product for a movie theatre company in Mexico. Integrio.net saw the potential for a new product to digitally manage coupons tfor the cellphone market. You can see the potential when you consider there are over 267 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. Over 213 million are using text messaging on a regular basis, and over 84% of those subscribers continuously have their cellphone within 10 feet of them no matter where their location.

Mobiry is in the process of looking for partners such as CardOne to offer customers an integrated solutions for using coupons and businesses credit card processing and electronic payment systems.

If you want to see a video demonstration on how to use the Mobiry coupon product, then visit youtube.com/integrio/

I didn’t really have patience to sit on the Sessions as I was more interested in speaking with individuals and learning mor eabout their stories one-on-one. For example: I interviewed several speakers individually but didn’t attend their sessions

( John Chow )

I spoke with John Chow runs johnchoow.com and spoke at Booth210 on Blogging for Profit. John Chow is based in Vancouver, but caught web wide attention for publically tracking and blogging about how much he was making from his advertising campaigns. John Chow was able to make money by blogging about making money from blogging – how creative is that! I wasn’t able to find any current income blog posts by John Chow, but as recently as 2008 he was blogging his marketing and affiliate earning of 40,000$ for January 2008. Despite not publically posting earnings on his blog now, the marketing and affiliate business is still going strong if you take a look at Pros such as Jeremy Schoemaker, Joel Comm and others.

Ardash Pallian from Pallian Creative was showing off his ipad with John Chow and Brian Wong from Digg.com. The first thing John said to me was that it was amazing there was no WIFI at F5. John clarified that one could get WIFI, but had to pay for it, which he thought was odd for a Tech focussed event. Mr. Chow said he was at F5 for fun mostly, because 80% of his business came from the USA.

John and I talked about his weekly meetups called dotcomPho, which he hosts as way to network with people and share a meal together. Every meetup is videotaped and viewable online. The dotcomPho is another local example of Geeks and Entrepreneurs using Social media to bring the digital and real world connection.

I found out about dotcomPho because his latest video caught my attention. What turned out to be a great viral video, occurred because John and his friends were bored so decided to try out the latest video chat site chatroulette.com. The site was developed in a few months by17 year old Russian tech phenom Andrey Ternovskiy and is getting a lot of media buzz because has become so popular within months of launching. The video chat software generates one-on-one Webcam connections between you and another randomly chosen user, which is likely why every time the other user saw John and his friends they quickly left the chat. I thought it was a humorous story that actually brought to light some real problems with a site like chatroulette.com and the spontaneous fun of a virus video by John Chow.

( brian wong )

I spoke with Brian Wong, Business Development for Digg.com. He presented at the Mobile Marketing – the “App” explosion session. Brian is a UBC Grad who has made the big move down to San Francisco to work for Digg.com. He appreciated the great bustling technology industry in Vancouver, and the mix of new and venture people locally. One reason he moved to SF was to soak in as much knowledge and wisdom as he could from the working in the SF web community. Moving into a tech hub like San Fransisco has been an eye opener for Brian, but he’s likes how it’s a bootcamp for gaining tech skills and experience.

At some point Brian Wong would like to create more of a bridge between Vancouver and San Francisco. In the future, he envisions creating projects that make use of Canada and UBC’s skilled tech community. Recently Birand was in Miami and thinks it’s Tech community is very similar to Vancouver with it’s combination of schools, experience, and passion.

Brian Wong mentioned theC100.org, which is a non-profit, member-driven organization dedicated to supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurship and investment. Most of it’s charter members are located in Silicon Valley while some are also located in Canada. C100’s main mission is to support Canadian technology entrepreneurs.

To encourage various levels of involvement from individuals and companies, the C100 supports three types of membership: General Membership for any qualified technology professional supporting Canadian technology entrepreneurs; Charter Membership by invitation only to accomplished and fast-rising Canadian technology executives, entrepreneurs and investors; and Sponsor Membership for sponsors of C100.

(Daniel Chu)

Daniel Chu, CEO of Silkstart.com, utilizes the linkedin platform and expands on the idea of ‘who you know’ to who you ‘should’ know. In your silkstart profile, which is imported from linkedin, you can fill in extra info to make worthwhile connections with Investors, Service Providers, and other Entrepreneurs. Silkstart.com is in talks with SFU’s Computing Science department ( Natural Language and Processing, and Data mining ) to develop technology to understand and interpret linkedin.com, facebook.com, and twitter.com information.

The site is currently in Beta after getting launched from funding by the Government program IRAP and personal funding. It took about 3-4 months from developing a prototype to show IRAP to launching the Beta site. Consider how many Investors and VC people talk disparagely about the difficulties in getting Government for technology development, it seemed that Daniel was very quickly able to get funding and launched to market. Hopefully more examples of active Government support for the Canadian tech community will come to light.

Daniel Chu was at F5 to promote Silkstart.com’s goal of helping people realise their dreams.

I spoke with Ryan Holmes, CEO of Invoke media and product Hootsuite, who spoke at “The secret of Success: Avoiding Start-up Pitfalls”

Session – Video Conferencing and Mobile Management

Interesting points on working on projects remotely with teams or internally over internet:

– Use skype for communication. Ability to share screen with other user, which is helpful if you are working on project or tech issue with remote team members.

– Wesley Chan, Entrepreneur & General Partner Google Ventures, said that he often uses a combination of tools to share notes and documents. Wesley uses Google Docs because it allows him to collaborate in real time. Another product Wesley used is Manymoon, which is a free Project Management tool that is heavily integrated with google.

Vanessa Leigh – Publisher/ Fashion Director ( ionmagazine.ca )speaks at Pecha Kucha.

Bankground on Pecha Kucha

The Flash slide show of my photos on flickr.com/pixelate