We’re not quite sure what to call Ron Proulx, but “Renaissance Man” seems quite fitting.

Ron is a recent import from Toronto and contacted VIATEC to introduce himself with the most creative (and elaborate) bio they had ever seen:

“I’m from Toronto
I drove across the country in 2014 thinking I’d buy a place in Vancouver;
I decided I like Vic better.
I like the weather in Vic, because I used to live in Venice Beach, California.
I took possession of a condo on 6/1/15; every day is an adventure, with a killer view.
I own a music supervision company in film/tv.
I manage several TV composers.
I co-own a rights clearance company.
I had a digital company that got into podcasting; too early i might add lol.
I own a patch of trees in the BC Interior; the deer love me.
I have written 2 ebooks that I sell online; one has done well, the other not so much.
I’m entrepreneurial and/or a bon vivant lol.
I’m looking for the next adventure(s); passive or active.
I play poker once in a while; I raise with A9 suited.
I play piano and sing; good for the soul.
I am a big walker; see Vic for why that is good.
I had a record deal in another life; I also had purple hair, and now I have none.
I believe the arts are important; as is free speech.
I live for my iPhone and Apple products; and/or ability to be mobile/everywhere.
I was once addicted to Sudoku; I have that under control now.
I have made some short films.
I was in the middle of producing a feature length documentary for 2 years – shoot/edit/wrangle/produce/chief bottle washer… all until I pulled the plug due to my subject being “unavailable”… long story.
My axes = Canon5DMII + FCPX.
I am not looking for a job lol.”

Oh, and he won a Genie Award once…

Due to having a bit more freedom with his business, Arpix Media, (thanks to his amazing employees), Ron decided to move to Victoria, a city he feels is up and coming and more sustainable than Toronto or Vancouver.

He’s hoping to be proved right. And, who knows what opportunities will fall into his lap while he’s here.

“Being curious about any and all things is inspirational,” commented Proulx. “I love not knowing how to do something. It’s great fun to be on the learning curve, far more than once things start to get easy… that starts to get a little hamster wheel for me. I’m not big on hamster wheels.”

Proulx is also a public speaker with experience as a panelist and moderator. Topics have mostly been about music licensing, but occasionally regarding one of the ebooks he wrote (hownot2suck@businessnbeing), which is a primer for young people entering the workforce. His other ebook is called “How to license your music into movies and television”.

With his stay so far, Proulx has noticed that “people in Victoria sure like their beer!”

“I mean, people like beer everywhere, but if you really want to have a spirited conversation in Vic, I’ve found that discussing beer totally works!”

Yup, we’re definitely proud of our microbreweries. In fact, there’s now an official map with 25,000 copies placed in tourist traffic areas and at each location!

While Proulx still has a lot to discover in Victoria, he definitely has the same feeling we all have: That “an explosion is about to happen in Victoria due to its technology, distance working and mobility all smashing into a great climate and property values.”

“I thought I’d get here now, rather than later with the others.”

Cheers and welcome, Ron!

Silkstart helps member-based associations manage their web presence, events, members, job board and calendars by creating modern, affordable and custom platforms.

They’ve been very busy since forming in 2011. Shaun Jamieson, CEO of Silkstart, made the (smart) move to Victoria in the Spring of 2014 and the company consisted of just him. Silkstart now has 7 employees, another office in Toronto and they’ve quickly found their groove. Just last month they were finalists at the 2015 VIATEC Awards for Emerging Technology Company of the Year!

With their brand new shared office space at 838 Fort Street, they’re right where they need to be.

“We take inspiration from being a part of the Victoria startup community; whether it’s helping startups in VIATEC’s accelerator program, participating in Ladies Learning Code, WhiskyDev, or PyVic, or just networking at a Tectoria Social Club or Startup Meetup,” commented Jamieson.

You may have also seen Silkstart in the news in early July. They announced a seed round they raised earlier in the year for $550k that included HIGHLINE and a group of US and Canadian angel investors (Including Victoria’s Thomas Ahn of Mad Ventures, John Hopper of Torrent Investments and Boris Wertz of Version One Ventures (formerly based in Victoria and now located in Vancouver).

On the product side, they’ve modified their platform to support multi-chapter associations, something unique in the market, and they are starting to onboard their first large customers.

They’re also about to launch a Job Board, something many of their customers are excited to use right away, including VIATEC.

The team of Silkstart have been working on a brand new site for VIATEC and the Job Board feature is being customized for their needs. VIATEC’s current Job Board has high traffic and is something Members and Non-Members use daily to post jobs and apply for them. This was the perfect project for Silkstart to launch the Job Board. This large project is scheduled to wrap mid August.

“We work hard, have fun and really try to make a difference,” commented Jamieson. We all have a mutual goal of wanting to learn, develop and also to work somewhere we enjoy coming to. There’s a lot of mutual respect within the team and while we don’t always agree on everything, we know that’s a good thing and helps make us better as a company.”

When the Silkstart team needs to take a break, you’ll find them away from computer screens and playing board games.

In the last year they’ve hit four significant milestones:

• Reaching the 1,000 customers mark
• Hiring their 100th employee
• Winning Technology Company of the Year at the VIATEC Awards last month
• And being the Tectorian of the Week!

Latitude Geographics makes software to help people make better decisions about the world around them (no big deal). “Whether it’s responding to an oil spill, figuring out rain water rebates available to citizens, or tracking polar bears in the Arctic, we provide technology to get information in the hands of people,” commented Steven Myhill-Jones, CEO of Latitude Geographics.

Their team had a booth at the Esri User Conference in San Diego last week where they participated in Geocortex events and where they hosted an annual BBQ for over 400 people! Canadian politeness at its finest!

Just two days ago they unveiled Geocortex Insight, the long-anticipated successor to Geocortex Optimizer and they just opened registration for their Advanced Workflows: Foundation Course being held August 4-5.

Looks like Latitude Geographics will be continuing to make their mark on the Tectoria map this year! Let’s just hope they continue to hold BBQs and meetings on their rooftop deck overlooking the inner harbour 🙂

LlamaZOO Interactive is NOT a local zoo where you can ride Llamas. Just wanted to get that out of the way.

LlamaZOO Interactive is a local startup that just won the prestigious Startup of the Year Award at the VIATEC Awards last month.

Their product (currently code named “EasyAnatomy”), is a 3D app designed to help veterinary students learn animal anatomy and become better veterinarians. They do this by working with Universities in an effort to create the most relevant content and course material and use data from medical scans including MRI and CT to create the 3D models.

These models are then bundled with written content, course material and quizzes to allow students to explore the full animal anatomy at their leisure.

In fact, founders Charles Lavigne and Kevin Oke, are currently on the road to Oregon State University.

“The veterinary department has invited us to pitch, demo, and discuss EasyAnatomy,” commented Lavigne. “The goal is for the department head to make a purchasing decision to buy licenses for all of their first year students. We’re also treating this meeting as a customer discovery opportunity. [We’re] trying to glean insights on the pain and challenges the individual anatomy professors are experiencing.”

After Oregon they’re next pit stop is Washington State University in Pullman where they’ve been asked to present their software at the American Association of Veterinary Anatomist Conference. “It’s a great opportunity for us to get in front of and meet with the leading anatomist in North America.”

Charles Lavigne started in the games industry by studying 3D animation and design, and later Game Design at the Vancouver Film School. He has 10 years of experience designing games and player experiences for companies including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft Montreal and Microsoft and consulting for smaller studios, startups and indie developers.

Kevin Oke has 9 years of experience. Most recently he worked as a design, production and business strategy consultant with Fox, Nickelodeon, Arnold Worldwide, The Chernin Group and many small startups on over 30 projects. Prior to consulting, Kevin worked at Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and Next Level Games.

Together they have been dominating since 2014 with an idea that came from Kevin’s girlfriend practicing to be a veterinarian and identifying a lack of useful apps to help her study.

“As two recent transplants from Vancouver we’re blown away by this city and the local industry’s spirit,” commented Lavigne. “Most everyone is friendly, welcoming, and willing to help in one way or another. Plus there’s tons of good beer, food to eat, and activities to do year round, when one can find the time!”

You can find LlamaZOO’s office at Fort Tectoria or contact them by emailing hello@llamazoo.com. They’re currently seeking investors!

 

WOW! Did that actually happen? The VIATEC Team is still coming down from our adrenaline rushes and overjoyed emotions from the 2015 VIATEC Technology Awards that went down in history last Friday. It was a colourful, music-packed evening with special appearances from Shia Labeouf and Rick Astley 😉

Congratulations to all our award winners!

The VIATEC Awards started 14 years ago and it definitely wasn’t the production you see today. It started as an e-Commerce event with 110 attendees. In 2002 it officially became the VIATEC Technology Awards and 220 attended it at the Grand Pacific Hotel. In 2003 it moved to the Crystal Ballroom at the Fairmont Empress with 330 guests. In 2004 we made the move to Carson Hall with 450 guests. 2005 onward, we stayed at Carson Hall climbing into the 500’s, hitting an attendance of 600 in 2011 and reaching 700 last year.

Last week’s event brought out 750+ Tectorians, 1000 balloons (with 50 additional mini orcas squeezed in the nets), 50 BIG Orcas, 11 funky mirrors, 9 projection screens, 8 bubble machines, 7 interactive cube lights, 7 tower lights, 3 interactive mirror boards, 1 AWESOME Band with 1 Jesse Roper, 1 Spoken Word Poet (Jeremy Loveday) and 1 breathtaking, projected sculpture.

Thank you VERY much for being a part of the madness and celebrating with Tectoria. We look forward to squeezing in a few more tables next year!

• Image gallery
• Video recap
• Finalist videos

Click here for a special message from Dan Gunn!

A special thanks to the following…

• FCV Interactive
• Shaw Business
• Thompson Cooper LLP
• Hemlock Printers
• Vecima Networks (And the Vecima Virtuosos band!)
• Corporate Traveller
• Farris Vaughan, Wills & Murphy LLP
• KPMG
• Reed Pope
• UVic
• Capital Magazine
• The Zone @91.3
• Grant Thornton
• AbeBooks
• BMO
• Corporate Recruiters
• Cox Taylor
• RBC
• Alacrity
• Freeman Audio Visual
• Our hard-working volunteers
• EMP Interactions
• Innovate Imageworks
• UberDave.com
• Vic42
• Annika Lavigne
• Jeremy Loveday
• Jesse Roper
• Greg Miller Photography
• Limbic Media
• The Social Media Team led by @SocialMediaSean
• Pacific School of Innovation & Inquiry
• Upstairs Cabaret
• The Duke Saloon
• Decorate Victoria (Huff ‘N Puff)
• Atomique Productions
• Four Seasons Musical Theatre
• Monk Office Interiors
• Island Print Group
• Victoria Conference Centre
• Fairmont Empress

In 2013, Brendan Iribe introduced Oculus Rift to the world via kickstarter, made virtual reality a reality and in 2014 it was purchased by Facebook for $2 billion.

This past week Microsoft announced that the Xbox One will support Xbox 360 game streaming to Windows 10… and the Oculus Rift.

But what does this all have to do with Dave Neufeld?

Dave, along with local developer Carson Book and the support of VIATEC, hosted their first Virtual Reality (VR) Meetup at Fort Tectoria on March 2nd. VR meetups are popular in Vancouver and Dave saw a gap here in Victoria.

“Since that meetup, the conversations and projects have begun to blossom. We are completing UI/UX experiments and hacking together hardware to build interesting experiments,” commented Dave. “I had a chance to try the Oculus at a friend’s house a few months back and I was blown away. I immediately purchased my own (and a laptop with enough graphics power to drive it) and started experimenting.”

 

Dave was inspired to build a Virtual Racing Car platform to help demonstrate what it’s like to use the Oculus Rift with Car Racing Software. It’s off to a great start and it will be available for demos next month. Or, as soon as Dave is done playing with it.

Dave is a software engineer (B.Sc. Comp. Sci. From the University Of Calgary), who has been fortunate enough to have worked with a lot of innovative companies.  When he’s not working as a Software Development Manager or Quality Assurance Lead, he’s building projects like this in his home workshop.

“Victoria is a fantastic city (I spent most of my life in Calgary, just for context). The weather is amazing and the local tech community is great. Having a chance to use the Fort Tectoria space during my last parental leave has been a real blessing.”

The next VR Meetup is in the works and details will be announced in the fall. The hope is to meet every 8 weeks and build the VR community.

“Life is short. If you have an idea that you want to try, or a technology you want to play with, give it a go. And, if you have the chance, give back to others by sharing your knowledge and skills. Oh, and have fun.”

If you are interested in joining the local Oculus Rift/ VR community, contact  oculus@daveneufeld.com