Last Year’s Winning Team with their Mentor (and our CMO) John Stix

Ever wondered what it takes to be an entrepreneur? The professional and personal challenges, the high and lows, the failures and the success?

Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding start-ups and launching successful ventures. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, people around the globe are coming together for weekend long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies.

How a Startup Weekend Works: anyone is welcome to pitch their start-up idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation.

The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback.

Last year the winner of the first Startup Weekend Kitchener Waterloo was HomeFed who pitched a platform to connect travelers with home-cooked and authentic foods wherever they are, by matching them with enthusiastic local hosts who will cook for them.

Our Co-Founder and CMO John Stix worked all weekend long as a mentor to these young entrepreneurs, and helped with the business development and marketing plans for  the third and first place winning teams.

This weekend he’s at it again at the Communitech Hub.

Who will be Canada’s next hotshot entrepreneur?  If you want to see what it takes, you can follow online LIVE online here, and on Sunday night, watch the awards presentation.

(A good bet is, the teams that have the best shot will be sitting with John.)

Dawn, raising funds for her upcoming 5K Run for the Cure, rocking her Pink Pumps

CEO Jody Schnarr and CMO John Stix share an office at the front of Fibernetics headquarters because they’ve collaborated in everything, even office space, since they started the company ten years ago, and it’s no time to break up that winning formula.

Standing guard in front of their door is their Executive Assistant Dawn Gamble, who runs their working lives, (and, to be honest, a lot of their personal lives as well).

She is the indispensable Dawn, what every successful company wants and needs.

Capable to the max, beyond her duties to the two bosses, she takes on any internal role required, as different as strategic marketing planning to changing the light bulbs in the ladies bathroom ceiling (in heels). As part of The Fun Bunch, she’s been at the heart of every fundraising venture the company has held this year. Ever capable and creative, she functions as the event and social co-coordinator for the corporation, organizing off-sites like company town halls, trade shows, even golf tournaments.

From her work space at the front of main floor office space, her desk functions as the epicentre of the company, around which everything seems to revolve. If anyone wants or needs something, seemingly the first recommendation from everyone in the company is, “ask Dawn.” Usually she’ll have the answer, and if not, she’ll know who does. As a trade off however, first you get to hear about what her son Austin or her husband Steve are up to, or her latest workout regime, or her latest healthy recipe.

Seemingly always with a side project, this week she’s been baking every night making these awesome yet healthy treats that she’s selling for $2/piece to raise money for her upcoming 5K CIBC Run for the Cure.

This is a personal for her because she is recent breast cancer survivor. Battling the disease through 2011 and most of 2012, today she has a clean bill of health.

Very few at work had any idea she even was fighting cancer because they couldn’t tell from her constantly upbeat personality.

The few who did find out did so during her chemotherapy only after asking her if she was “doing something different with her hair.”

That’s why Tuesday was such a surprise for many in the company because a camera crew from The Marilyn Denis Show descended on Fibernetics to whisk her away for a three day makeover in Toronto, and then a live shoot of the show on Friday celebrating her, and and her best friend’s, victory over breast cancer.

Dawn and Sandy Peacock Fullerton wrote into the show thinking that their story of how they became best friends while battling the disease together, was worth sharing and Marilyn agreed.

The camera crew ambushed her in the cafeteria, with the entire staff in tow, where she was so shocked she was, perhaps for the first time in her life, speechless.

From all of us here at Fibernetics, Worldline and NEWT, have a great time Dawn, and we can’t wait to tune in Friday to see your national television debut.

Karl Bode at DSLREports.com came across something rather funny, about something that was more than funny.

I don’t know if you saw it, but in the spring a YouTube video went viral talking about how cable companies rip off their customers simply because they can. We here at Worldline thought it hilarious, but we didn’t want to play it up at the time – and not just because of the NSFW language.

But now?

Now, for whatever reason, the video has been censored in Canada:

Karl notes, in the video called the “first honest cable commercial”, “a fake cable industry representative (Nick Smith) promises poor service, underwhelming broadband speeds, and a “plethora of hidden fees,” before educating viewers on the finer points of what being an oligopoly really means.”

The film by Extremely Decent Films struck a nerve, and quickly netted millions of Internet views.

While the film is pretty clearly aimed at American cable companies (see the 0:24 mark), users in our forums and over at Reddit recently noted that the film has been banned in Canada.

Users trying to view the original video in Canada are greeted with a warning telling them that YouTube has pulled the video due to a defamation complaint from an unknown source. Re-uploads of the original video have yet to be similarly censored yet.

It’s unclear who in Canada would file a defamation complaint (or why YouTube would listen) given this is a United States parody criticizing United States cable companies, none of which are specifically named. Still, Canadian defamation laws can be rather loose, and the video obviously hit too close to home for somebody.

Karl re-posted the video below – PLEASE NOTE: there is some very NSFW language in there so consider yourself warned:

We’ll see how long it lasts.