{"id":6190,"date":"2008-12-05T08:12:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-05T04:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=6190"},"modified":"2009-02-06T11:02:26","modified_gmt":"2009-02-06T07:02:26","slug":"tech-christmas-in-calgary","status":"publish","type":"magazine","link":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/magazine\/tech-christmas-in-calgary","title":{"rendered":"Tech Christmas in Calgary"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night I attended the Christmas Bash hosted by CCAT <\/a>(Calgary Council for Advanced Technology), WiTeC<\/a> (Alberta’s Wireless & Telecom Association), Digital Alberta<\/a> (Alberta’s Digital Media Association) and TheCIS <\/a>(The Centre for Innovation Studies).  It was a packed room at the Chicago Chophouse in downtown Calgary with well over 60 people in attendance.<\/p>\n

There were quite a few interesting Entrepreneurs in the room, including the guest speaker, Paul Vickers.  Many people know Paul as the night club\/restaurant Kingpin who is owner to such infamous names as Coyotes, Tantra, Ceili’s, and most notably Cowboys.  (all of which are owned under the Pennylane Entertainment Group<\/a>)  He wasn’t there to talk about the entertainment business…instead he spoke about his new venture, US Flood Control<\/a>, and how he saw the future of entrepreneurship in these turbulent economic times.  (Rule #1 – Perseverance.  Rule #2 – Don’t get food poisoning in Dubai.)  US Flood Control proves that innovation can happen anywhere if you look hard enough.  It’s one of those businesses you hear about and think:  I can’t believe we haven’t done it this way for 50 years!  What do you have too much of when a flood is coming?  Water.  What do you not have time to do when a flood is coming?  Shovel sand into sandbags.  Why not make a dam that inflates with water?  Genius.<\/p>\n

It was interesting to hear an entrepreneur’s perspective from outside of the “tech sandbox” as I sometimes get the feeling we think the path is more difficult because we are working with technology.  Regardless of the industry you can’t just have a good idea, you need a great idea.  Starting a company is difficult no matter what…managing sales, hr, product, and that little thing called capital.  Don’t be afraid to take risks…the payoffs can be huge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last night I attended the Christmas Bash hosted by CCAT (Calgary Council for Advanced Technology), WiTeC (Alberta’s Wireless & Telecom Association), Digital Alberta (Alberta’s Digital Media Association) and TheCIS (The Centre for Innovation Studies).  It was a packed room at the Chicago Chophouse in downtown Calgary with well over 60 people in attendance. There were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51611,"featured_media":6192,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"magazine-region":[],"magazine-series":[],"magazine-topic":[],"class_list":["post-6190","magazine","type-magazine","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/6190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/magazine"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine\/6190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/6192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6190"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-region?post=6190"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-series?post=6190"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainstation.io\/wp\/api\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=6190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}