Introducing the StartupNorth Event Calendar

We get emails just about everyday asking for a calendar of startup events across Canada. And it is a damn shame for entrepreneurs to miss a chance to meet up just because there is no event calendar. So without further ado, head on over and check it out. Right now, we just have Toronto events listed, but we’ll be adding Calendars for all the other great regions across Canada as soon as possible.

We are using Google Calendar so people across the country can collaborate on this project. If you already use Google Calendar and would like to occasionally contribute by posting events, contact us and we?ll provide you with this super power.

Updates: Edmonton is now onboard (thanks to Cam)! Montreal coming soon (thanks to Heri)! And Waterloo too (thanks to Thom)! Note: If you also live in these cities and are interested in contributing, please contact us as well!

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Mea Culpa. I pulled the image that originally accompanied this post. Why? Well first off, I wasn’t particularly satisfied with it to begin with. While this Calendar Project is something we?ve been thinking about for a while now, the image to accompany the announcement was just something I rushed out this morning. Yes, of course it was just a joke. No, this was not my finest work with Photoshop. For those of you curious what all the hoopla is about, you can find the image posted here.

My hope is for this Calendar Project to help get more people (men AND women) out to events and as a result working together building great companies. I?d hate for anyone to feel left out. Two of the many things I love about Canada are its inclusiveness and that people call things how they see them. I wouldn?t change either of these things for the world.

I hope you find the calendar useful. See you at an upcoming event.

Jonas

praized.com – Local, niche, reviews and communities

Lets say that you run a highly successful online community of blond vegans who have a penchant for Prosciutto. You would like to manage local reviews for that community, but you do not have the technical ability or the data you need to get it kick started.

Montreal based Praized is an innovative solution in the heavily contested local listings and review space. Praized is designed a white-label platform that integrates seamlessly with editorial content by using either an API or plug-ins that are compatible with SixApart?s MovableType and WordPress. Bloggers and site editors can embed snippets of merchant information within posts or news articles to drive traffic to their Praized-powered local section. Praized also designed its platform to be available to Facebook application developers and others through an API.

Praized communities enable users to search, discover and discuss places with like-minded people. Users benefit from discovering the ?long tail? of places via discussions on lesser known local merchants that struggle to be found through Web search. End-users also get real value from social tools that allow them to tag, comment, bookmark, share and vote on places that matter to them.

Praized is bringing a really novel and sensible approach to local listings. Realizing that you can bridge the gap between the hype-local and centralized business models can bring opportunities in a lot of markets, and that is what Praized is doing here.

The first Praized-Powered community is now active at Mocolocal and they also recently announced distribution agreements with Yellowbook in the US and Yellow Pages Group Co. in Canada.

Other Canadian local-search and review companies include iBegin, who have moved in to the data wholesale business, and ZipLocal (TSX:ZIP) who recently launched ZipDating. Praized does go beyond just reviews and listings, they also have a recommendation system that allows users to suggest places and things to friends in their social network, including Facebook.

It's not you, it's me!

We are working away on a few new things, I have been wrangling some new co-authors and have been generally thinking about the direction of StartupNorth. It feels a lot like what Heri has been thinking about lately.

I’ll be back in action soon, swear.

In the meantime, get your butt back to work. That software isn’t going to write itself, and those pitch decks are terrible, just so you know.