Wired Wednesday moves to our nation’s capital

The requisite photo of Naira & I at Wired Wednesday Ottawa

It seems like yesterday that we held RedWire’s very first Wired Wednesday back in February. Over the months we’ve benefited from hearing local startups talking about their challenges & goals, learned from amazing guest speakers talking about their personal journeys and have met tons of ambitious new entrepreneurs. The Wired Wednesday community in Toronto has grown to include hundreds of exciting innovators and has been a thrilling network to be a part of. With word traveling about the Toronto gatherings, we found ourselves being approached by other cities inquiring about events being held in their area. With an exciting cluster of early stage start ups in life sciences, web & research we couldn’t resist heading to Ottawa to learn more about the scene there.

Some of the attendees at Wired Wednesday Ottawa

On May 27th we debuted Wired Wednesday in Ottawa with the help of local entrepreneur Karla Briones. With the a theme of new media, the event was held at Patty Boland’s to a standing-room only crowd of well over 50 people.

Three local startups participated in our innovation demo – see below for a brief overview of each:

Choicebot – Nick Desbarats of Choicebot showed us why it’s an amazing tool for consumers. Looking to buy a digital camera, know which features you want/don’t want, but don’t know which of the 500 cameras out there to choose? Choicebot allows you to rank how important a feature is to you, and then will give you the best product according to your specifications.

Gazaro – Dominic from Gazaro showed us this unique, helpful tool for consumers. Let’s keep with the digital camera example – if you’re looking to buy a specific model, you can go on Gazaro and it will tell you whether now is a good or bad time to buy it (rated on a scale of 1-10, based on former prices). They track data on product prices and compare against similar products to make sure you’re getting the best possible deal on the product you want.

DNA11 – Nazim and Adrian were at Wired Wednesday representing DNA11, a company that makes art from your DNA. Sounds crazy, right? But their art is extremely popular and they have a gallery in LA. They weren’t at Wired Wednesday to talk about DNA11 though – they were there to introduce a BRAND NEW company called CanvasPop, the easiest way to print your photos on canvas (even poor quality images or images from Facebook). It’s the next big thing so watch out for it this summer!

The guest speaker for the night was Joe Thornley of Thornley Fallis Communications. He is an entrepreneur and avid fan of social media – his agency embraces tools like Twitter, and many of his employees have blogs – most notably my friend Dave Fleet, who writes on the intersection between public relations and social media. He talked about his journey as an entrepreneur, and how he learned to embrace and use social media tools like wikis, blog & Twitter. His biggest lessons were to give back to the community, that you lose by not engaging & that social media relies on a culture of generosity.

We had such a great time meeting all the amazing entrepreneurs in Ottawa, and can’t wait to do it again – stay tuned for details on the next Wired Wednesday Ottawa. Also want to give a special thanks to Kelly Rusk, the Director of Marketing & Communities at MediaMiser - it was her birthday the day we held our event, and she came out and celebrated with us. So happy birthday, and hope you had a great time!