Red Flag Deals has a passionate bunch of users ? they love to save.
Founded back in 2000 the site has grown from a handful of page views a month to over 18 million. They recently hit 100,000 registered users and now serve over 750,000 unique visitors. Red Flag Deals can in all earnestness claim to be ?Canada?s Bargain Hunting Community.?
Congratulations to the Red Flag Deals Team on hitting this milestone. We look forward to following this Toronto company’s continued success.
Infonaut is in the bird flu business. The Toronto startup (incubated at MaRS) provides governments with a Health Informatics GIS solution for pandemic preparedness and emergency response planning. Plain English: Healthcare Map Mashup, on which one can layer predictive indicators such as emergency response times, demographic data, hospital service areas, and even poultry density reports (don?t ask).
The Canadian Government knows all too well about dealing with pandemics (remember SARS), but don?t write off Infonaut as just making a quick sale using scare tactics. The web service is employed by a diverse set of clients; health insurance companies are using it to target populations interested in supplemental insurance plans.
I saw a demo of the product and it looks like a full featured web app. While other epidemiology GIS tools are available, few if any have preloaded data sets, map relative rss news feeds, markup tools, multi format import / export, streamlined document sharing, and most impressive – automated information propagation to healthcare providers.
Prevention is the best medicine and Infonaut is on the path to success.
The rumors are true, The Toronto Venture Group is no more.
The TVG, like the Toronto Angel Group (which is probably dead too, more on this soon), is one of the many often-flirted with, rarely treaded on groups that court Canadian Startups to get on stage, or to send their business plans around. The effect on the startup was feeling more like they were being asked to take their pants off in the waiting room before going in to the Doctor’s office. More often than not, it was some sort of witch doctor behind the door anyway, and you would have kept your pants on if only you had known.
That leaves us with a slew of angel groups who are all still asking Startups to take their pants off well in advance of a typical show-all timeframe for a real relationship.
Do these groups actually work? One telling aspect is that many of them claim to model themselves after Silicon Valley groups. The problem is, there is no evidence (and conversations tell me otherwise) that these groups actually do many deals themselves. The world of Angel, Venture or other investment is about relationships. When you, as a startup, start to meet Angels and VCs, your focus should be completely on building a relationship with them, the deal can flow from that.
There are always exceptions to the rule, I know that b5media was funded out of a TVG event in Toronto pretty quickly. I don’t know of any others though.
Like I do our friends in the Den, I tend to question the value of these groups, especially the ones that charge upwards of 3000$ to the entrepreneur for participation (like First Angel Network), but it’s also important to recognize that the members of these groups can been keen, hungry and able investors. The trick is to pick them out of the pack and focus on dealing with the individual directly. Your $250,000 deal doesn’t need 4 weeks worth of legals holding it up when a simple note and issuance of shares could do the trick.
The obituary after the jump. Who wants to sing the requiem?
