mattroberts.com

So before I goto the OWC Event a week from now I’ll be attending a Townhall on High Tech in Kanata North That our local Councillor Marianne Wilkinson is holding

As the Invitation states.

This town hall style meeting will be a great networking opportunity and will feature presentations by Rob Collins of the Mayor’s Task Force on eGovernment, staff of the Ottawa Public Library’s “Taking Care of Business” programme as well as the City’s Economic Development branch.

Additional staff and representatives will be on hand to field questions and participate in the discussion, including staff from Parks & Recreation and OC Transpo as well as the Kanata Chamber of Commerce and OCRI.

As someone who grew up in Kanata and has worked here for almost all of my career I’m very interested in engaging and helping our elected representatives understand the different needs and concerns we in the Kanata Tech community have. I’d encourage anyone in the area who wishes to have a dialog with our municipal government to attend.

Here are the necessary details:

Date: April 10th, 2008
Time: 3:00PM-5:00PM
Place: Brookstreet Hotel

To RSVP: Please Visit Mrs Wilinson’s Website

It is getting to be that I have an event to goto here in Ottawa every weeknight!

The Ottawa Wireless Cluster is hosting Nick Quain President and co-founder of CellWand. CellWand is best known for their #TAXI service on mobile phones, but they have also developed other services that include #pizza which is due to launch this year.

Should be interesting to hear his experiences about partnering with the Carrier.

Here are the obligatory Details:

Date:    Thursday, April 10, 2008
Location:    bitHeads Office
1309 Carling Avenue, Ottawa
(East Side of Westgate Mall, beside the Blockbuster Video Store)
Time:    6:00 pm to 9:00 pm

I love watching SiGe as they grow. As longtime readers know I have a background with the company.

Today, SiGe announced that it had Sales of $69 Million US. Earlier this year they raised $20 Million from their previous investors and Samsung (one of their largest customers.) They also hired a new CEO. At this point the company is now 12 years old and has had over $140 Million in Venture Capital Investment. Who ever said High Tech was easy?

So I”m about to start renting a new apartment down in Westboro (a nice little neighbourhood in Ottawa).

Beyond the excitement of a change in venue and a nice area to hangout in… I have a dilemma, I don’t really watch TV anymore, except for hockey and the occasional whatever’s on. But i do enjoy HD - So my question is on OTA (Over The Air), I know high definition is available for free in Ottawa from CBC, but I’m also hoping to complete a hat-trick of CTV and Global in HD at the same time. Does anyone know if they’re broadcasting here yet?

Also does anyone know of any good antennasIi should be looking at? I’m not expecting to pickup the US stations or PBS but that would a great bonus. 

Over at JohnnyVoIP we’re looking for people to help us develop one of our new services, JohnnyCaller.

 JohnnyCaller is a new service provided by JohnnyVoIP that allows any website and phone to connect with ease! We enable a link on YOUR website that allows your users to call you directly, without leaving your website. Make it easy for your users to contact you at the same time keeping your phone number private.

If your interested in helping us out you can check out our site for more details.

One of things I do before an Ottawa DemoCamp is checkout the sites and products of the presenting companies. While I could do this at the camp I always find it better to watch the presenter and get a feel for what they find cool about their site. I generally don’t comment on the blog here beforehand. (well boo to rules)

On the list of companies I was looking forward to seeing (beyond Aydins new website) is LoyaltyMatch.com

LoyaltyMatch is  essentially a loyalty points swapping site. Think a mix of ebay and points.com which is pretty cool idea.

Matt Walcorf from Kitchener Record, has a better way of explaining the transaction process and idea:

It works this way: Say Dick wants an iPod Shuffle for $50. An alert appears on the user pages of anyone who has enough points or miles in a rewards plan to buy the iPod.

One of those people, Jane, agrees to cash in 15,000 Aeroplan miles in exchange for Dick’s $50. Jane then either asks Aeroplan to send an iPod to Dick’s house or has the device shipped to her and sends it to Dick herself.

Everyone wins: Dick gets an iPod, Jane gets cash, LoyaltyMatch gets a $1.99 fee from each party and Air Canada gets to remove the cash value of the points from the liabilities on its balance sheet, Ball explains.

Aeroplan is not involved in the process. The system depends on users to be honest about how many points they have and to fulfil their obligations to each other.

Mike Ball their CTO just pinged me to let me know that they’re in the running to win a slot to pitch at the AlwaysOn (Vator.tv) Venture Summit - East 2008 Competition in Boston on April 8th. Mikes  looking for some help getting the from their current second place standing to first (and thus to Boston). So Click on this link and spend two minutes signing up to help a Canadian web 2.0 startup go get some attention from our American cousins down south