Charlene Tessier, Strength in Numbers Virtual Summit  

Charlene Tessier, founder of the Strength in Numbers virtual summit joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek this week to discuss community building, and networking in the current state of the world.

Have a listen, and make sure to get your free ticket to the Strength in Numbers virtual summit with a host of amazing guest speakers, and interactive workshops. Topics range from Equity Splits and Aligning your Message, to Credibility and even Virtual Retreats!

Listen in to this week's episode to hear more.

Kahlil Ashanti, Founder of WeShowUp.io

Kahlil Ashanti, Founder of WeShowUp.io, joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek to discuss the journey of discovering and developing a product and a business that has come out of a combining a rich history of experience in performing arts and web-based payments.

"In addition to performing, it was actually our job to stand and thank every audience member who came to see us," explains Ashanti reminscing of the early days of his perfomance career in the 90s, "And people kept saying, 'I would have paid more for that.'"

Continuing how he had started, Ashanti kept shaking hands with audience members and thanking them after the show, and kept finding people echoing the same sentiment, "I would have paid more for that."

Listen in to find out more about this founder's journey of discovery and development.

John Thompson, Analytics Leader & Best Selling Author, Keynote Speaker, Data Science Thought Leader.

John Thompson, Global Head, Advanced Analytics & Artificial Intelligence at CSL Behring. Author of Building Analytics Teams: Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement, and Analytics: How to Win with Intelligence joins hosts Lauren Bates and Drew Ogryzek for episode 105 of the Vancouver Tech Podcast.

Thompson explains that he started writing his latest book, Building Analytics Teams: Harnessing analytics and artificial intelligence for business improvement, or at least thinking about it last year. He asked people how they felt about their analytics teams, the people on them, and the cohesion, and those kind of topics, at a few presentations in Chicago and other places around the United States. The incredible responses he received prompted him to stop working on a book he had started regarding AI and Ethics, and pivot to the topics addressed in Building Analytics Teams.

This book is for people who are hiring and managing high performance advanced analytics and AI teams. So, if you're a manager and you're responsible for a data science team, this book was written for you.

-Download Episode 104

Annee Ngo, Co-Founder and CEO of Startup League

Join Annee Ngo, Co-Founder and CEO of Startup League with host Drew Ogryzek to talk about Startup League, QUP, and more for the first episode of the new Fall 2019 Season of the Vancouver Tech Podcast.

Having spent the past several years in the North American startup scene, spending time in Vancouver, New York, San Francisco, Ngo shares insights garnished from leading endeavors such as ProtoHack, a code free hackathon, focused on producing a prototype, key factors in co-founding startups, and building teams for success.

"With Startup League, what we're trying to really solve here is the problem of opportunity"

"We encountered a school of thought called design thinking. Stanford has a school called The D School for Design and I was just blown away. I was like wow, this is what innovation really comes down to; these core principles and core educational values of 1: empathy, 2: syntheses, 3: ideation, and then it goes into prototyping and testing," explains Ngo, "I was trying to wrap my head around what have we been doing with ProtoHack and understanding that this model existed, we saw that this entire time, we were focused so much on the ideas. In a similar way to what education looks like today, we were focused on outcomes, ideas and solutions. And I really wanted to figure out a way that we could make students, and in this case aspiring entrepreneurs, really fall in love with the problems themselves."

Listen in to hear more!

Community Partners

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

-Download Episode 103

Angela Griffen, CTO of Glance Technologies

Angela Griffen, CTO of Glance Technologies Inc. joins host Drew Ogryzek to talk about Glance Pay, the life of a CTO, team culture, and more!

As a seasoned software developer and CTO, having started her career when building web-based software solutions was first starting out, Griffen shares knowledge and insight ranging from domain expertise, the role of a CTO as companies grow over time, the beginnings of Glance Pay, and some thoughts on future adoption of cryptocurrency payments.

Listen in to hear the whole conversation.

Follow Glance Pay on Twitter at @glancepay, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast.

Vancouver Public Library Events

Friday, January 5

Are you curious about making movies, creating a podcast, or editing photos? What about publishing your own book or ebook? You can do all of this and much more in the Inspiration Lab. Come learn about the creative possibilities!

• 2:00 PM: All About the Inspiration Lab

Tuesday, January 9th

Learn how you can tell the story of a family member, bring together family history, or just share a vacation adventure... it's up to you! Get hands-on experience digitizing, creating, and editing media to help turn your memories into movies.

• 2:00 PM Turn Memories into Movies: Part 1

Wednesday, January 10

From personal stories, to marketing videos, to social and environmental films – it all starts with an idea and a dream. Award-winning documentary filmmaker Julia Ivanova leads this four-hour workshop where participants learn how to develop a successful, achievable film or video project idea.

• 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Reel Stories: Developing an Idea for Film

For more events, visit vpl.ca/events and to find out more about the Inspiration Lab visit vpl.ca/inspirationlab

Community Partners

Innovation Labs is hosting a DevOps for Any Language, Any Platform event, Tuesday January 9th, 2018 from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

We are very excited to start the new year with a seminar dedicated to innovation in IT! We are bringing one of Microsoft's key cloud advocates, Donovan Brown to demonstrate how to set up your very own DevOps in your organization from scratch.

Adaptech Solutions Drive business value. Stay ahead of competitors. Build great products. January 18th, and 19th, 2018 - Adaptech Solutions is holding workshops on Delivering Effective Microservices and Hands-On Microservices Implementation: Deep-Dive.

deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges.

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

-Download Episode 102

Mike Volker of New Ventures BC

Mike Volker of New Ventures BC joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss New Ventures BC, its venture acceleration program, and the BCIC-New Ventures Competition.

"The ideal participant would be an individual participant or group of indivuduals that think they have something that has huge potential in the marketplace. And, they need some guidance, they need some help figuring out how to take their idea and commercialize it," Volker explains. "The capital is a very important part of it, because a lot of the mentors in the New Ventures BC program are investors; business angels, who invest in startup companies."

"In addition to learning about business, and potentially winning the prize money, which can be quite substantial - first prize is more than $100,000, and that's cash, no-strings attached. And that of itself is attractive. But even more attractive is that not just the winner, but the runners up and the other companies that compete in the competition now have access to these investors who can get them launched."

With mentors such as Peter Jennings co-founder of VisiCorp, the company that launched the first killer app, a $100,000 no-strings first-place prize, and a very modest entrance fee, the only reason someone wouldn't want to take advantange of the programs and competition is probably because they just don't know about it.

Listen in to hear the full conversation and learn more about New Ventures BC.

Follow New Ventures BC on Twitter at @NVBC, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast.

Vancouver Public Library Events

Thursday, November 30th

• 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Self Publish 100: Introduction to EBooks.

Wednesday, December 6th

• 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM Intro to Video Editing with Premiere Pro

Saturday, December 2nd

• 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM Let's Talk About Personal Branding

Thursday, December 7th

• 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM: Self Publishing 101: Create Your Own Ebook

Community Partners

deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges.

ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th at the Sheraton Wall Center.

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Jeffery Walsh, EtherParty Developer

VanBex, a team of blockchain consultants and experts does client work, helping with development, marketing for businesses that want to integrate blockchain, smart contracts, crowdfunding and also has their own projects.

EtherParty is a VanBex project that helps by making smart contracts easier to use. Smart contracts exist on the Ethereum blockchain. EtherParty is like the Wix or Squarespace of smart contracts; an app you can use to click through and make your own.

Jeffery Walsh, fullstack developer of EtherParty joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss VanBex, EtherParty, blockchain development for both cryptocurrency and other uses.

With regards to what blockchain is, "I just think of it as computers agreeing on something," says Walsh. "There's a bunch of computers, and they're all running the same code. They agree on something, and that can be entered into a public ledger, because everybody agreed."

Listen in to dive deeper into how blockchains and cryptocurrencies like BitCoin and Ethereum work.

Follow EtherParty on Twitter at @etherparty_io, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast.

Community Partners

deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges.

ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th at the Sheraton Wall Center.

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Joni Brennan, President of DIACC

Joni Brennan, president of the Digital Identification and Authentication Council of Canada joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss digital identity, and some of the challenges, dangers, and benefits associated with it.

Brennan is working on trying to solve some of the problems with digital identity, such as storage of personal information across multiple sites, including photocopies of driver's licenses, having too many user ids and passwords, and many breaches of data, in ways that allow us to unlock opportunities for Canadians, and globally. What we do here in Canada, the DIACC hopes to bring out across the digital economy and to the world.

An identity could be defined as a passport, or a permanent residency card. Brennan says she likes to think of an identity as being a construct of a village. When answering the question of who I am, a large part of the answer is based upon making a claim that we are something, and having that claim reinforced by a third party, often dependent on the context. In the digital world, there are still many challenges in moving from one context to the next.

Within the digital identity landscape, the focus for people working on these issues, has shifted to what is called verified claims. Claims can be age, address, type of entity. Verifying these specific claims can be more interesting than verifying all of the potential attributes that could possibly go into making an identity. For example, we might simply need to know, whether a person is of age to purchase liquor.

If we focus on answering the question of whether a given entity has access, we can also have data minimization, which Brennan describes as being not only a privacy measure, but also a security measure. It then becomes a question of, what is the smallest amount of information that can be provided, then verified to obtain access.

Listen in to hear the whole discussion, including how technology like blockchain can help solve some of the problems of claim verification and access to information.

Follow Joni Brennan on Twitter at @jonibrennan, the Digital ID & Auth Council of Canada at mydiacc, and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast.

Community Partners

Digital ID Design Challenge The Digital ID Design Challenge (DIDC) is a competition that asks teams of students and professionals to address critical issues with digital identity inspired solutions.

deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges.

ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th at the Sheraton Wall Center.

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Ahmad Nassri of Telus Digital

Special guest Ahmad Nassri, Principal Architect at Telus Digital joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss community building, TechMasters, and business and team organization.

Nassri likes to describe Telus Digital, an approximately 300 person team, with a large presence in Vancouver as well as Toronto, as being the software arm, or the part that enables all the digital experiences that Telus customers, whether business or consumers are interacting with.

As the organizer of TechMasters, Nassri is very active helping to bring the technology community closer together.

Listen in to find out how this team is able to have developers deploy code to production 300 times a day, with no dedicated ops people, and more!

Follow Ahmad Nassri on Twitter at @AhmadNassri and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast.

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guest Nicky Kunstman, Internal Recruiter at InVision

Special guest Nicky Kunstman joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss InVision, and the process of recruiting.

People who are passionate about issues of scale, usability, cloud-computing, and seeing the difference they are able to make in the lives of people on the design and UX side of things, while helping them make better products may find working with InVision appealing.

Listen in to dive into questions around the interviewing process, how InVision maintains a 100% fully remote team, and much more!

Follow Nicky Kunstman on Twitter at @LizaCole5280 and the Vancouver Tech Podcast at @vantechpodcast and frankly, why not go and work at InVision?

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Special Guests MaRi Eagar and Manie Eagar

Special guests Manie and MaRi Eagar of Digital Futures, who conducted the first study in Canada that set out to discover competitive drivers to build and further develop the ecosystem that supports Vancouver, BC, and Canada, as a global Blockchain and FinTech hub. And who have more associations and accomplishments than can easily be listed in an introduction join host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrencies and ICOs, and their implications to Canadians and the world.

Blockchain Association of Canada Chairman, Manie Eagar, a contrinuting author of The Fintech Book explains that the BAC is a Canada-wide membership or community representation at a provincial and federal level, giving everybody a voice and participation opportunity in the debate on what blockchain is, how it can be applied, on the one-side through engaging with regulators and bankers on how this technology can make a difference. And on the other side, how it could disrupt the way we do business; literally our business models at the very core, if decentralist principles are applied.

MaRi Eagar says that a lot of solutions, and whitepapers for blockchain based solutions are trying to crack the code of how to create decision making in a different way through coding thinking into an algorithm. Some of the questions aiming to be solved bring up old philosophical debates, such as who should be able to vote, and how much weight an individual's vote should have.

Being very interested in how we might be able to achieve deep democracy, MaRi Eager explains that on the whole, we still seem to think that if everyone votes, then everyone will be happy. At the moment, if we have a minority then someone loses. How to deal with a minority vote and really how to be inclusive could be questions answered by blockchain technology.

Listen in to follow along with the in-depth discussion! Follow MaRi Eagar on Twitter at @marieagar, Manie Eagar at @manieeagar and the Eventspodcsat at @eventspodcast.

Links

• Digital Futures
• Blockchain Association of Canada
• BC Blockchain Forum
• MaRiEagar.com
• ManieEagar.com

Community Partners

Decentralized Database Hackathon - Come together with like minded folks to create cool new ways to use decentralized database technology, and win Crypto! Presented by Bluzelle

deCode Hackathon: deCODE invites selected hackers to work alongside company engineers from high-growth tech companies to work on challenging and interesting technical challenges.

ConFoo is a conference for developers that will take place on December 4th-6th
at the Sheraton Wall Center.

Events Podcast Presents: Vancouver Tech Events Oct 2 - 4, 2017

• MON: OCT 2

  • Tech Starters Code Night!
    (Tech Starters | at Lighthouse Labs | 6:00 pm)

• TUE: OCT 3

  • TechVancouver Meetup (October 2017)
    (Tech Vancouver | at BrainStation | 6:00 pm)

• WED: OCT 4

  • Design Principles with C# & TypeScript examples
    (.NET User Group of BC | BCIT Downtown Campus | 5:45 pm)
  • Creating Strong QA & Development Partnerships: Lessons learned in the real world
    (yvrTesting | at ACL | 5:30 pm)

Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

Listen to the show here, email us, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.