Akoha is premiering today during the gaming session at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco. The session starts at 10:30 Pacific time.

Prediction market provider Hubdub has been running a market on which of the 52 selected companies will win the coveted Best in Show award and our Akoha fans have kept us in the lead for most of the last two days. Currently we are neck and neck with OtherInbox who presented a cool new email spam protection service. Congratulations to them on their presentation.

It will be interesting to see how the predictions evolve once we unveil Akoha later this morning.

Fans can bet up too $1,000 of fake money and register their accounts to see if they can predict who will be the TC50 Best in Show Selection.

We’ve included the live results here for our fans to track the results as the day proceeds.

There have been some great companies launching during the last two days, the competition is impressive and we are very grateful for all the support of our fans have shown us in predicting our success.

If you haven’t voted yet, take a moment to sign up and make a prediction. It’s free and easy to do.

TechCrunch50: Which company will win Best in Show?

Last year’s TechCrunch40 Best in Show winner Mint had great things to say about what winning the TechCrunch40 last year did for them.

Akoha is really happy to announce that we are one of the finalists selected to present on stage at TechCrunch 50.

My partner, Alex Eberts, and I started working on the concept of Akoha two years ago and we’re very excited to be able to share the project with the world very soon.

Our team has been hard at work over the past year developing Akoha. While the official game will not launch until 2009, we’re opening up a beta site for a community of playtesters to help us beat the beta out of it.

After many months of hard work, lots of fun with our team, life threatening attacks by creepy software bugs, and more twists & turns than a contortionists’ conference, we recently invited a few local Montreal friends to help us work out some kinks under a private test of the system. They were kind enough to sign our frienNDA and have been helping us keep our project under wraps.

Our friend, musician David Usher, was also kind enough to come play a few songs.

Hold on World, we look forward to sharing Akoha with you soon.

In the meantime, here is a little video with some images of our team preparing Akoha and of our Montréal private screening.

P.S. Robert, if you are seeing this we hope you’ll wait ’till our real website, which can only launch on Wednesday, and our presentation to decide if we suck.

Akoha was recently selected as one of Canada’s 20 Hottest Innovative Companies and invited to present at the Canadian Innovation Exchange which just wrapped up in Toronto.

The Canadian Innovation Exchange is a two-day event that included a series of discussions about the Canadian Venture community, advice for entrepreneurs and investors and wrapped up with 8 minute presentations by the 20 selected companies.

The list of companies chosen among the top 20 includes many great companies from across Canada.  Akoha is proud to be among the selected companies.  We had the opportunity to present to an audience that included other startup founders, venture capitalists and investors from across North America and members of the Canadian media.

Congratulations to all the presenting companies.  If we are to be judged by the company we keep, then being onstage with these great Canadian startups was indeed an honour.

Accipiter Radar Technologies Inc. (http://www.sicomsystems.com/home.html), Fonthill, ON
Acquisio (http://www.acquisio.com/), Saint Lambert, PQ
Bitcasters (http://www.bitcasters.com), Toronto, ON
Blueprint Software Systems (http://www.blueprintsys.com/), Toronto, ON
Brainpark, Inc (http://brainpark.com/), Toronto, ON
CellWand Communications (http://www.cellwand.com/), Toronto, ON
Coveo (http://www.coveo.com), Quebec City, PQ
Digital Payment Technologies Corp. (http://www.digitalpaytech.com/), Burnaby, BC
dthree Inc. (http://www.dthree.com/), Mississauga, ON
HomeZilla (http://homezilla.ca/blog/), Toronto, ON
Kaben Wireless Silicon Inc. (http://www.kabenwireless.com/), Ottawa, ON
Mobidia, Inc. (http://www.mobidia.com/), Vancouver, BC
Octopz (http://www.octopz.com/), Toronto, ON
Planeteye Inc. (http://www.planeteye.com), Toronto, ON
Redwood Technologies (http://www.redwoodtechnologies.com/), Calgary, AB
Spatial View Inc. (http://www.spatialview.com/), Toronto, ON
Standout Jobs, Inc. (http://standoutjobs.com/), Montreal, PQ
Streametrics Corporation Inc.(http://www.streametrics.tv/en/), Montreal, PQ
TimePlay Entertainment. (http://timeplay.com/), Toronto, ON

- Company developing a new type of multiplayer online/offline social game -

Montreal, Canada, April 28, 2008 – Akoha, the developer of a new social game, announced today that it has received $1.9 million in financing from angel investors. The financing was delivered in two tranches, the first in early 2007 and the second in early 2008.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Graham the co-founder of Y Combinator gave a fascinating presentation at Y Combinator startup school this weekend about the similarities between great Internet companies and non-profits in this presentation about Being Good.

Paul also posted an essay version of this speech on his website.

This speech reminds me of many of the conversations that Alex and I had when co-founding Akoha. 

We were brainstorming about social entrepreneurship, our experiences in trying to make the world a better place at Zero-Knowledge Systems and our believe that there was an opportunity to make improving the world fun.  We discussed the best approach to implement some of our ideas and decided that a company with a strong social goal made the most amount of sense.

This lead to one of the principle questions that Akoha has been designed to answer.  "What if playing a game could make the world a better place?"

We look forward to sharing Akoha with the world later this year and sharing how we think we can help everyone Be Good together.

Thanks to Heri @ Montreal Tech Watch for the link.