Waterloo's 'Dormcubator' fosters digital entrepreneurs

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Early in the film The Social Network, the actors playing Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin pull an all-nighter in their Harvard dorm room to create Facemash, a website that ranks and compares female students. Amid the glow of multiple computer screens and clinking beer bottles, the pair, along with a couple of other dorm mates, conceive of and build the site in a single night. The website is such a hit, it crashes Harvard's servers.

Now, ethics (and good taste) aside, one wonders how much of an impact environment had on such a collaborative effort. Would Facemash, a precursor to Facebook, have come about had Mr. Zuckerberg and friends lived in separate apartments off campus? Or did their close proximity play a part in the eventual outcome?

That, in a nutshell, is the inspiration behind the University of Waterloo's VeloCity program.

Launched in the fall of 2008, the program accepts as many as 70 of Waterloo's budding developers and entrepreneurs and houses them together in their own dormitory. VeloCity's "dormcubator" was envisioned to foster a culture of collaboration and to provide resources and mentorship to help students turn their bursts of genius into something tangible.

"The requirement is you're supposed to live, engage and be part of the environment, participate in [events]we put together for you and produce something by the end of the term," says Jesse Rodgers, VeloCity's director. "It can be a feature app or a prototype of a bigger idea."

And it's working. Some VeloCity students have gone on to form startups. To date, the most successful is Kik Interactive Inc., created by Ted Livingston, who came up with the idea for Kik Messenger during his term at VeloCity.

Kik Messenger is a mobile application that lets users send instant messages to one another on several different types of mobile devices, from iPhones to Androids. In the two weeks after it launched in October 2010, more than one million mobile users signed up for it. (The app used to work on BlackBerrys, too, but Research in Motion booted KIK Messenger from its App World store in December, 2010, and launched a patent infringement lawsuit, claiming it infringes on RIM's own BlackBerry Messenger.) Mr. Livingston credits the program with providing the support and mentorship he and his colleagues needed to get their startup running.

"Finding people that want to start a company is hard, and finding people that want to start a company with you is even harder," he said. "Kik wouldn't have happened without [VeloCity]"

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