We’re really excited to announce our upcoming event on February 5th, just one week before the Opening Ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics officially begins.

As part of our Momentum Connect series, this event will feature a speaker and Q&A session, as well as ample networking time to help aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs connect with the people, resources and answers they need to succeed - all in an inviting, fun and casual environment.

Our speaker for the evening will be Mark Williams, Co-Founder of Elastic Path Software, a local technology company that has experienced substantial growth and success, creating an e-commerce platform used by everyone from Sony Ericsson to the Vancouver Olympic Committee.

Mark will share some great war stories on co-founding a start-up company and what young entrepreneurs can do to emulate building a successful technology business in Vancouver.

Click here to register now.

Jason Bailey, CEO and Co-Founder of KITN Media and SuperRewards speaking at VEF Momentum’s Bootstrapping to Success event on November 10, 2009 at Nuba Restaurant in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Using his own finances, Jason co-founded SuperRewards with two fellow entrepreneurs with the premise of monetizing virtual currencies. Almost immediately the service took off generating millions in revenues. It was acquired by AdKnowledge shortly thereafter for amount rumored in the tens of millions.

Jason shares his lessons and experiences on bootstrapping a start-up company with a killer business model and what young entrepreneurs can do to replicate SuperRewards meteoric rise to the top.

He also addresses the controversy surrounding his business that has been recently surfaced by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.

VEF Momentum was founded under the Vancouver Enterprise Forum with the purpose of connecting, inspiring and mentoring aspiring and emerging technology entrepreneurs

We’re really excited to announce that after a short summer break, the VEF Momentum team is kicking off its 2009-2010 series of speaker and networking sessions with “VEF Momentum Connect: Bootstrapping to Success”.

As part of our “Momentum Connect” series, this event will feature a speaker and Q&A session, as well as ample networking time to help aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs connect with the people, resources and answers they need to success - all in an inviting, fun and casual environment.

Our speaker for the evening will be Jason Bailey founder and CEO of KITN Media and SuperRewards. Using his own finances, Jason co-founded SuperRewards with two fellow entrepreneurs with the premise of monetizing virtual currencies. Almost immediately the service took off generating millions in revenues. It was acquired by AdKnowledge shortly thereafter for amount rumored in the tens of millions.

Jason will share his lessons and experiences on bootstrapping a start-up company with a killer business model and what young entrepreneurs can do to replicate SuperRewards meteoric rise to the top.

Click here to register now.

As you may have heard, in just two weeks the BC Innovation Council will be holding its largest and most anticipated event of the year, Connect ‘09 (October 19, 2009 at the Sheraton Wall Centre). The event will feature speakers including local entrepreneurial icon Leonard Brody of NowPublic, the BCIC Annual Awards ceremony as well as informative expert panels, workshops and excellent networking opportunities.

A group of dedicated people at BCIC have been spending the better part of the summer putting together this world class event, so it is really exciting to see it come together in a few short weeks. As a past Chairperson of the Enterprize Conference and Competition, I can definitely appreciate the time, effort and care that goes into making one of these events a success. I have seen personally the transformative effect a large, multifaceted conference can have on an eager and enthusiastic entrepreneur. For that reason, I wanted to share my thoughts on why all serious up and coming technology entrepreneurs should be registered (and ready) for this event:

At tonight’s event at Nuba, Jon Bixby will be speaking about focusing on the big picture, lessons in leadership and achieving measurable results. It seems only appropriate then, that he’ll be recommending you to make a goal, and make it public.

We’ve got three ideas you can use to make your goal public:

• Post your goal as a comment on this blog post
• Post your goal on the VEF or VEF Momentum LinkedIn Group pages. A discussion thread has been made for this topic so you can post your goal under the thread “Make Your Goal Public”.
• Or for maximum impact, use Twitter! Keeping your goal succinct is probably a good idea anyway. Use the hashtag #MyGoal on Twitter.

We’ll accumulate the best and most interesting goals in put them together in a seperate post.

We’re excited to say that tomorrow’s event at Nuba is sold-out! There will be 140 entrepreneurs, professionals, business leaders and students out so we anticipate an exciting mix of people that will make this event an excellent networking and learning opportunity. Here are some reminders on the event tomorrow and a quick note about our Twitter Challenge that we think you’ll find interesting:

Event Details

The event starts tomorrow (Thursday) at 6:00PM at Nuba Restaurant. Our speaker for the evening, Jon Bixby CEO and Co-Founder of Strangeloop Networks, will be speaking early on in the evening and Nuba will be serving up some excellent appetizers around that time so we encourage you to arrive early. It is important to note that we do not have additional capacity for guests who have not registered online and can not accept payments at the door to register them.

Nuba Restaurant is located at 207 West Hastings Street on the corner of Cambie Street and West Hastings (Link to Nuba Restaurant on Google Maps). We encourage you to enter on the Hastings side of the street to pick up your name tag.

Twitter Challenge

As a number of our guests will be Twittering at the event, we thought we would step things up a little and make it interesting with a gift card to the Apple Store. We will be using the hashtag #MomentumLeadership for the evening. We encourage everyone to take photos during the event of the venue, the speaker, of connections you make and friends you meet, whatever you like. Using the hashtag #MomentumLeadership (and make sure you call out @VEFMomentum in some of your tweets!) we want you to upload those pictures to Twitter using your favourite Twitter photo app (TwitPic, yFrog, etc.).

The next morning we’ll tally up who has the most photo tweets of the event on Twitter (using the #MomentumLeadership hashtag to track them down) and awarding the top 3 Twitterers with free tickets to the next event, with a $25 gift card to the Apple Store going to the first-place finisher. This will be announced on our Twitter stream the next day so please follow us on Twitter (@VEFMomentum) to find out if you won!

We look forward to seeing you at the event!