Who You Calling A Jesse?

The Canada 3.0 conference wrapped up the second day with speeches from the CEO of RIM, the Chair of the CRTC, and others all with a strong patriotic message as well as a surprising amount of useful vision and position stuff specifically from the the Chair of the CRTC. Day 2 did, sadly enough, start off with some rather dry and boring stuff that made for a fun game of buzz word bingo.

Between the speeches I attended the talk that included Waterloo’s own Jacqui Murphy from TechCapital. She took full advantage of having a mic and an audience to make it clear that startups shouldn’t be about seeking funding or exits with big companies buying you. You should dream big and focus on revenue generation. Some great messages to bring back to VeloCity I think.

The round table discussions in the afternoon felt like they lacked energy and urgency. The big rooms and groups just didn’t work well for that but I did meet some really interesting folks around my table. If nothing else, that was a huge bonus.

Overall, the strength of the Canada 3.0 conference was in the diversity of the folks that attended. There were some very obvious complaints about the lack of students attending but we really need to stop idealizing students, if they are interested they will come—if they aren’t there they really don’t care…. yet. There were enough student volunteers to suggest to me that the ones that are interested knew about it and made the effort to attend.

What I think was really missing was the younger entrepreneurs and leaders on the panels. Not the under-25s that the over 50’s marvel at, but the 25-40 yr old professional crowd that have the skills, experience, and know how to really push Canada’s ‘digital economy.’ I would have also liked to see more of an unconference stream. Being a Barcamp/Startup organizer I am already a fan of the format but we needed more conversation over round table sticky notes. I will even volunteer to organize that for next time ;)

I should also point out the technology situation. Stratford doesn’t have 3G, the wireless was overwhelmed by all the mobile devices and laptops begging for data (but we got the tweets out!), innovative things weren’t set up like streaming panels to the media room at the very least. Sure Igloo put together a good site but that was impressive a couple years ago, if this is ‘3.0’ then it should push the boundaries.

Honestly, it was an amazing conference. This should be the start of something… keep the buzz going, follow up with the business cards you collected, and start thinking big!