Mesh 2010 – Toronto, ON

The fifth Mesh conference took place on May 18th and 19th 2010 (MeshU was held on May 17th but I was not there). I was greeted by the friendly staff at MaRS and a nice little swag package.

The morning keynote by Stuart MacDonald was eloquent and well delivered with a building of anticipation for the sessions to come. Next, Chris Thorpe from The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/) gave a keynote with interesting insight into how new media is being consumed by developers and entrepreneurs. His frank discussion about how the guardian has opened it’s data and news up to developers was very uplifting and sparked some creative juices in my head about a possible OPENapp implementation. Contact me if you have similar thoughts after looking at their api.

After a nice little coffee break in the lower concourse of MaRS – complete with RedBull and tasty snacks – there was another keynote. Joseph Menn (author of “Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who are Bringing Down the Internet”) gave some troubling tales of how we are losing a digital battle with foreign nationals such as the former russian KGB. You can grab a copy of the book from http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com After Joseph came Justin Kozuch who I have known for a number of years and was selected to receive the first ever meshPrize which was $40,000 (Teehan+Lax put up the award money). Justin will be using the money to answer the question: “How big is the Digital Media industry in Canada?”. If you want a shot at the award then check out http://www.meshprize.org

Lunch followed and many wonderful conversations were had. I was busy during this time giving demos of OPENapps to as many media people and business folks as I could gather. The catering at MaRS by the way was awesome – great service and food.

There were several session tracks in the afternoon and the ones I ended up attending were very informative: TVO filmed a live show of The Agenda, The effect of realtime on Content, and the Battle between Crafted & Machine-Driven Content. The last session was an interesting panel for me as it covered some things from an earlier time in my web development days and I had a direct and engaging dialog with the panellists about content and advertising on the web.

This wrapped up the first day but then came the after party at Spice Route (499 King St W) – I have to say the non wine drinks were rather expensive (I ended up with a double shot of rum for $12.50). The h’orderves were very nice and added to the camaraderie of the evening which for me was a collection of small group conversations spanning all kinds of business and technology fields.

The next morning brought a keynote from Scott Thompson president of PayPal. I found what he had to say about the transfer of money around the Internet to be interesting on the whole but over all it was delivered in a very megalomaniacal way. That said, it has not stopped me from using PayPal for my soon to be released OPENapp called BucketShop. Following Scott came Arvind Rajan who is VP of LinkedIn’s International team. Arvind was very different from Scott by way of how he conducted himself and answered questions posed to him. There was less joking around and a very clear but dry message about what LinkedIn is up to in the near future.

After a lunch break (which again was very good), it was back to the sessions. I had trouble deciding what session to attend right after lunch because none of them were all that compelling to me or conducive to the people I was trying to meet. In the end I settled on “Building a B2B community” which turned out to be a strange mish mash of workshop and group discussion around what professional B2B is verses B2C. Overall I did not get to much out of it but my take away was that its important to be professional in all outreach initiatives involving your employer – especially so when you are leaving.

I then hit up the workshop on “Getting Your Start-Up Ready for Investment” which I thought would contain a lot of entrepreneurs who would be ripe for wanting to build on OPENapps.com. It was a good workshop on how to actually think and act upon getting investment for your startup in Canada. The takeaway for me was that there is very little available and it will take a long time to get even if you are not rejected out right.

To close out the Mesh sessions I went to the panel on “The State of Canada’s Seed and Start-up Investment Landscape” which was my favourite Mesh session. There was discussion on the $25M exit of BumpTop and what a large Canadian success exit would look like when in the billions of dollars range. The end of the session brought a standing ovation for the event and organizers (who really did an outstanding job) and we proceeded to the patio BBQ with live band and lots of food and drink.

Overall I loved Mesh and highly recommend attending if you are able to next year. The organizers are well organized and have added a valuable forum to our Toronto Startup community at large.