Vancouver Pixel Crafters

Claude Schneider

(BM: Welcome Claude! This is a self-submitted “welcome wagon” post. Add your own welcome wagon by reading here »)

Website / Blog: http://about.me/claudeschneider (I have too many sites, all listed there!)

Twitter handle: @claudeschneider
Instagram: @claudeschneider

What do you do?
Web app development, UX, product management, dance/model photography

Where did you go to school?
University of Cambridge

What’s the next event that you’ll be attending if people want to meet you in person?
Vancouver Startup Weekend 

Looking or Hiring?
Looking for co-founders for my web startup (especially UI designer and PHP/JS developer).

Also looking for full-time employment to make my move to Vancouver permanent.

Beer or Wine?
Vodka cocktails

Where are you from?
The UK. I grew up in London, then stayed in Cambridge for 10 years after my degree there.

How did you come to Vancouver?
Cambridge was an incredible place because of the interesting and intelligent people related to the university, but it was time to move on, and the geography of Vancouver appealed much more than London. 

Interesting Vancouver restaurant?
Yaletown Keg roof terrace at sunset

What did you do previously?
Various developer / consultant / product manager roles in Cambridge startups.

For the last 5 years I’ve worked for myself, primarily doing long-term contracts for 2 clients, which included massive re-architecturing of their websites; and also creating a complex web-app that is now the management tool that is embedded in their market leading KVM product.

Favourite Vancouver Activity
Walking around the sea wall

Why are you here?
To live life fully, enjoy the outdoors, and meet great people.

(This is a self-submitted “welcome wagon” post. Add your own welcome wagon by reading here »)

Discover why so many top companies are using Ruby on Rails to create the most powerful web applications on the market today.

It’s time now to improve your application and skills by learning a set of widely used gems, tools and techniques that will make your developer more solid, better-tested and easily extendable Rails application. You can bring your current app or start new one from scratch to apply the skills you will learn with the assistance of course instructor.

Early bird registration until May 18th. Being held evenings at The Network Hub. More info / registration »

I am putting together a Processing workshop at the Hive this coming Thursday (April 4th). The workshop will run from 6pm to 10pm.

The focus is to introduce designers, artists and people who are not super technical to the Processing framework. We have a nice group put together so far - a lot of different creative professionals with a few programmers to help out. 

There is approximately 10 seats left. The workshop is by donation to help cover the cost of the space (suggested $20) - if you are broke I would rather you come than give me any money. Any money past the cost of the space will go towards beer and/or pizza.

I will talk and do some demos for about an hour and then we will all build stuff. You will need a laptop to attend.

I think that is it… get at me if you want to come. I can be reached at christopher.luft@gmail.com

The leading event dedicated to enabling companies to succeed in SaaS and Cloud applications. Five keynotes, five tracks, 26 sessions, four workshops. Tracks include “Integrating Analytics and Community into Your Services;” “SaaS Finances and Operatons” (including M&A and key metrics), “Marketing and Selling SaaS and new track, Wearables/M2M and Cloud Applications. Main sessions on key SaaS business benchmarks, pricing and discounting, sales force compensation, selling Cloud professional services, SaaS and the integration of wearable technology and much more.

Complete agenda at: http://www.softletter.com/pages/market_and_selling_saas_agenda.shtml

Register at: http://www.regonline.com/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=1188589

Special Bonus — Every attendees will receive a free copy of Rick Chapman’s latest book, “SaaS Entrepreneur: The Definitive Guide to Succeeding in Your Cloud Application Business.” A $49.99 value. Read excerpts at http://www.saasentrepreneur.com

Front-end Web Developer for Growing E-Commerce Start Up

— 6 month full-time employment; May lead to permanent employment. —

We are looking for a passionate Front-end Web Developer to support ethicalDeal into its next phases of growth. Recent graduates with a couple years experience are encouraged to apply.

ethicalDeal was born out of a mission of making green mainstream. Our flash sales introduce people to greener choices for everyday living. People can discover fairtrade coffee, oceanwise seafood, gluten-free cookies, organic skincare and more through ethicalDeal – at 30 to 70% off it’s easy to try something new! 

Since launching 2 years ago, we’ve made monthly media appearances, including a feature on CTV, were voted as one of the top start ups to watch by Fast Company, and are the recipient of the Better Business Bureau Award for Advancing Marketplace Trust and Innovation. Our social commerce platform has helped almost 1000 green businesses acquire new customers and build their brand in the eco-space. 

We are a small, fast growing team and we have many cool, challenging problems to solve. This year, we want to take it to the next level by developing some game changing features that will reinvent how manufacturers of natural and organic products drive sales and loyalty at the grocery store. We’re also excited to improve the user experience by diving deeper into mobile and personalization themes.

We’re located in the Gastown district in downtown Vancouver, close to local start up events. We work in a friendly, down to earth and flexible work environment that’s focused on achieving goals rather than just putting in the hours.

About you, the ideal candidate:

• You are excited about our mission and must be able to fall in love with your work

• You are self motivated, a fast learner, and can get stuff done

• You are excited by turning ideas into exceptional user experiences

• You can code and design (your left and right brain can talk to each-other)

• You are interested in Web and Mobile development and design

• You know JavaScript/jQuery, CSS, HTML like the back of your hand

• You are familiar with CSS3 and HTML5

• You can squash cross-browser issues, including IE7/8/9, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox

• You are familiar with Photoshop or similar tools for working with graphics

• You keep up to date with industry trends and emerging technologies

• You are comfortable working in an agile development environment

• You have stuff or portfolio to demo and can prove your design & coding skills to us

Bonus

- You have some experience with server side programming languages 

The Position

This position involves working closely with designers to convert static designs into working browser based web pages. If you have a knack for Photoshop then you could also do some of the design mocks yourself. You’ll also work closely with our server-side developer to implement their server-side code in order to develop a high traffic, database driven e-commerce website that aims to make it easy and fun to discover eco-friendly products. You will end up doing a lot of other stuff as we are a startup.

What’s in it for you?

• Base salary of $50,000/year, 6 months full-time employment, which may lead to a permanent position with stock options

• You will be working on something you are passionate about and will be changing the world for the better

• You will experience the fast paced startup life and product lifecycle

• You’ll be working in Gastown alongside a passionate, smart and supportive team

• Unlimited supply of fair trade coffee, organic tea and healthy snacks

• Friday happy hours with the team!

How to apply

To start the conversation, send us a well-crafted cover letter/email along with a relevant resume to careers@ethicalDeal.com. Please include a link to your portfolio. Start date: February 2013.

Do you own a start-up?  Would you use a web-based service to streamline your corporate governance? Invite founders, shareholders, directors, advisors, early stage employees?  Would you benefit from inviting your lawyer, to upload and review documents?  Would your lawyer do this?  
 
Please help us out by answering a few questions in the following two surveys:  
 
Do you own a Start-up?:     http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JZCNR7N
Deeper Start-up Insights:    http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JZMJCG7  
 
Thanks tons!  
The MiCasa Team

Organizations worldwide are realizing the benefits of openness. Many have open data projects in the works. As organizations adopt open data, they are developing solutions to a number of legal, privacy, technical and resourcing challenges and developing policies and best practices in response to the challenges.

What are the emerging best practices for open data? What value is being generated right now? What is next for open data in BC? Join us and participate in the conversation to make open data work for your organization. The BC Open Data Summit will feature panels of leaders and innovators in the open data space, opportunities to network, interesting conversations, and a fun social event.

(via @Ed Levinson)

At the barn raising event a small group (Dave Brown, Ed Levinson, Campbell MacDonald, Tea Nicola, Tom Radcliffe (new in town) and Jenn) met to discuss ways that we could improve pitch events in Vancouver.

Our first conclusion was that entrepreneurs routinely make several different types of pitches:

1. to investors. These are usually somewhat formal events where the entrepreneur describes the business, its revenue model, exit strategy, etc. The purpose of the pitch is to get people in the audience excited enough about the business that they want to invest in it. In general the bigger the audience, the better, but it’s important that the audience have a high percentage of people who are actually willing to invest in the type of business being pitched. Occasionally people pitch for advisors/board members/advice instead of, or in addition to cash.

2. to peers. Typically informal events where people talk either about their business or some technology that they are building. These pitches often don’t have an “ask” from the audience, so it’s more of a sharing session. In Boulder this type of event was seen as a crucial part of community-building. There’s no restrictions on the audience for this type of event although there are obvious tradeoffs between big-audience and small-audience events.

3. to potential customers. These pitches focus on the product/service (not the business) and why people in the audience should spend money on them. This type of pitch is very different from an investor pitch.

Pitching to any audience is challenging. The speaker has limited time to tell a compelling story. S/he has to make hard choices about the content (especially what to leave out) and has to maintain an engaging delivery. So practice is important. Improving pitch events means also creating opportunities to practice pitching. Practice events need to include honest feedback from knowledgeable people.

Most of the discussion was about how to improve pitching-to-investor events. There are two glaring problems:

1. not enough serious investors in the audience
2. low quality pitches.

With some concentrated effort, we can probably attract a sufficient number of serious investors to at least one event. But it makes no sense to bring in real investors until we solve the second problem. The consensus was that to improve the quality of pitches there need to be more pitch events and more opportunities to practice pitching.

First Steps

Jenn has volunteered to organize a peer-to-peer pitch event similar to the ones that have been running in Boulder for several years. She would like hold the first event in February and will likely organize it as a Meetup. We don’t have any details yet about who will pitch, the size of the event or a venue. The first one will probably be small.

The consensus was that there should be an investor pitch event once per quarter. The initial ones will likely have an audience composed of the Usual Suspects, which means that nobody will invest. However, if they are properly organized, they could be valuable opportunities to improve the standards for pitching and for pitch events. Our hope is that after a small number of these events it would make sense to invite a number of serious investors to a larger event in the hope that this would lead to real investments in local companies.

There was some disagreement about how quickly the local community would be ready for a “real” event. Some thought as soon as next May; others thought it will take a year. Either way, we would like to have a first investor pitch event (complete with practice sessions) in the first quarter of 2013.

(via @Ed Levinson)