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It’s has been a long time since Canadians have seen the creation of a new 200MM+ venture capital fund. It was back in June 2010 that OMERS announced the creation of the INKEF fund. OMERS and ABP have since gone their separate ways with ABP running INKEF Capital focusing on high tech startups in the Netherlands. And OMERS creating OMERS Ventures focused on “investments in the Technology, Media, Telecommunications, Clean Technology and Life Sciences sectors in Canada and the US”.

A little more than a week ago, OMERS announced that they had hired Howard Gwin (LinkedIn, @howardgwin). Who I’ve been quoted as saying “he really is the best VC in Canada”, mind you Howard was buying the drinks at the time…

And it looks like they have added fellow Edgestone alumni Derek Smyth (LinkedIn, @derekjsmyth). I’ve heard the announcement is due later today, but OMERS Ventures announced Derek Smyth as part of the team today, Derek’s profile is already part fo the team at OMERS Ventures. Derek is another rockstar going to OMERS. Prior to joining OMERS Ventures, Derek co-managed two VC funds at Edgestone Capital Partners. He also has operational experience that includes his former roles as President and CEO of solutions provider Bridgewater Systems, and as COO of California-based Ironside Technologies Inc.

Derek and Howard were instrumental at Bridgescale in running the Digital Puck and Mentor Monday events that helped connect Canadian entrepreneurs. I’m hoping that these guys continue to invest in connecting, engaging and supporting all entrepreneurs (along with their portfolio). The ongoing support of the C100 and AccelerateTO already show that OMERS has a larger operational budget that allows them to support and sponsor community activities.

The future looks bright for OMERS Ventures.

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Mark Evans’ post about Do Canadian Startups Get Enough Attention? annoys me. It is not Mark, it is not Canadian startups, it is the assumption that Canadian media outlets should write about Canadian startups.

“But the fact is there are a lot of great startup stories that go unreported or receive a smidgen of the coverage they deserve. It is a situation that frustrates entrepreneurs, investors and people within the startup community who believe the spotlight should be burning a lot hotter.”

Let’s start by answering Mark’s implication that “startups stories go unreported or receive a smidgen of the coverage they deserve“. Bullshit! They don’t deserve coverage. They have to earn coverage. They are noise. And as an entrepreneur you need to learn how to rise above the noise and tell stories that the media want to share with their readers.We have many examples of Canadian startup success and failure stories that have managed to figure out how to tell media friendly stories. Sarah Prevette at Sprouter managed to become a media darling:

• Sprouter sprouts again
• Sarah Prevette in 2o Young Women in Power
• Sarah Prevette in Inc. Magazine’s 30 under 30 America’s Coolest Young Entrepreneurs
• ITBusiness.ca

Why was Sarah Prevette so much more successful in getting press coverage for her startup than other entrepreneurs? Is she smarter? Does she have more hustle? Is her startup more successful? I challenge Mark’s assertion that Canadian startups deserve coverage. I think the first step is doing something worthy of coverage. And as entrepreneurs we need to understand the stories that media want to tell, and begin to hustle to take away time and space from the big players. Tim Ferriss told his story about getting on national television, From First TV to Dr. Oz: How to Get Local Media…Then National Media. You have to work at crafting a story, building relationships and being newsworthy. So rather than assume that all good startups deserve coverage, how about we as entrepreneurs go out an earn it. Aim higher. Make something newsworthy.

Resources for Getting Media and PR Coverage

• StartupOttawa.com – Getting Media Coverage for Your Startup

• Is your news newsworthy?
• Making your pitch
• Writing a news release

• Jason Calacanis on How to Get PR for your Startup

I met the attachments.me team a while back while they were still up here in Toronto, sharing office space with David Crow (@davidcrow). Unfortunately for all of us, two of Canada’s better tech guys (@jesse_miller,@ryancoe) are now down in the Valley doing their thing.

Attachments are a weird forgotten domain in the tech world. One of the worst user experiences in your life is “hey can you find that document that is attached to that email”. Even in gmail its painful – you try to remember the date, the name, the subject, etc. And attachments.me help solved that problem in a big way by making the attachments themselves searchable. Admittedly I liked attachments.me as a product, but I found it a bit novel. I needed it every once in a while, but not every day, so I sort of forgot about it and went back to my painful way of finding attachments. So I wasn’t super sure where they’d go with the product – would they just integrate with more stuff than gmail? Would they add more context to attachments they sort, etc?

Well, I never really foresaw where they were going next. I just finished using their groups feature, and I think its an awesome replacement for sharepoint and/or google docs! We all have experienced the archaic pain of file servers and sharepoint. Everything is painful about this world. Organizing documents, getting people to put documents into the system and finding them. Its all bad, bad, bad. Its even more unsolved in the family/small office space where user’s don’t have really have any solution (google docs is the closest, but then you have to use google docs and lots of folks still like MS Office). Well, attachments.me has solved this problem with a very easy to use grouping & sharing feature (see the video below for an example).

I actually just finished setting this up to create a group for sharing all the resumes I receive with my colleagues. It was a brilliant solution to the pain of constantly finding and forwarding resumes.

Here’s the attachments.me announcement:

We’ve just released a new feature that we think you’re really going to enjoy. In our continued quest to make email better, we’ve now taken a look at collaboration, and completely reinvented it.

So much collaboration happens in email, and often it’s all around attachments. Your family shares pictures of a trip. Your real estate agent and lawyer send around documents so you can buy that house. Your friends share the latest ridiculous funny dog videos.

Our new Groups feature looks to improve all of that collaboration.

Take a look at our introduction video here:

Then login and give it a shot!

As always, we’d love to hear what you think. Feel free to reply to this email and let us know what you love, what you hate, and what you’d like to see next.

A lot of people talked shit about the recent valuation of Kik. It all seemed a bit insane and I admit the numbers I heard seemed wild. That was until word dropped that Union Square Ventures has joined the deal alongside RRE.

Today Techcrunch is reporting that Ted Livingston is using a chunk of the money that he took off the table in the recent financing in order to further back UWs Velocity dorm/program.

Say what you want to but Ted Livingston gets it and the moment he had the chance to do it: he gave back. That is all too rare a thing. He obviously did well in the transaction that generated the extra $1million, but not THAT well. He is obviously just an incredibly generous person. I am totally inspired.

If we can continue to back and inspire entrepreneurs as passionate as Ted then we just might get somewhere.

We first covered Indochino when they launched back in 2007. To say I was excited would be an understatement and anyone who knows me knows I have been advertising their stuff to anyone who will listen since then. The news has finally landed that they have closed a $4million round led by Madrona Ventures.

Indochino is also one of the original Boris Wertz Deals™ and was further backed by Wertz’ Burda Digital relationship.

More than anything we have seen Kyle and the team remain true to their vision over the years and while I am sure they have hit their share of bumps along the way, they have never wavered in their dedication to their concept.

Chango has announced today that they have closed a $4.5 million B round that includes their existing investors as well as lead participation from Rho Ventures (Canada) and iNovia. Roger Chabra lead the deal for Rho and this represents his first placement since joining Rho Ventures last year.

Christopher Dingle has also joined Chango from his role as EIR at iNovia (although he seems to have joined in October, so I am just catching up it seems). Notably absent from this round as well as the Series A is MantellaVP, who seem to be participating in the form of sweat equity but not in the form of capital placements as Duncan Hill is actively operating on the management team. Perhaps I am unclear as to Mantella’s model, I thought they were operating as a traditional fund but perhaps their model is changing. That could make sense as both Duncan Hill and Robin Axon have a lot to contribute in terms of operating capability.

Chango is an AdWords style platform for display (banner) advertising which is focused on low-latency ad targeting and serving across networks. As inventory has become realtime they are able to distribute highly targeted ads across that inventory. This sort of targeting was not possible in past models and Chango seems to be utilizing capital to stay ahead of the curve as more players enter the space. Chango also has the unique ability to automatically generate the banner ads being served.

The most important aspect of this deal is that Canadian capital is being put to work to power a high-potential company that otherwise likely would have closed a US focused deal. This type of growth capital was much less active just up until recently and it represents the critical role that iNovia, Rho and others are going to play in the Canadian landscape in the coming 5 years. The health of these funds is critical to our ability to create value based in Canada that can attach US and international markets with a comparable amount of resources. Albert Lai famously made a splash about the lack of growth capital in Canada in 2008 and it is my hope that the situation is now changing.

UPDATE: We are hearing that the acquisition price tag is closer to $30m and possibly even higher. 

Another great exit for the Toronto startup community and some great news in advance of CIX in a few weeks. Toronto based Cognovision has reportedly been acquired by intel. According to DailyDOOH, which covers the digital out of home market, the pricetag was $17m.

Cognovision was the winner of the CIX pitch competition last year.

I have to admit that when I first heard the Cognovision pitch, it felt holodeck cool. It also seemed “too good to be true” — Turns out I was wrong and the company shot to ~$1m in revenue pretty quickly. Using a camera on top of a digital display, Cognovision could give you some rough estimates that covered:

• Actual Impressions – The number of people who look at your displays
• Length of Impressions – How long people look for
• Potential Audience Size – The number of people who walk by
• Dwell Time – How long people stay near your displays
• Anonymous Demographics – Demographics of your audience (gender and age bracket)

Congrats to Shahzad, Haroon an the entire team.

Some great news for Ontario, and the national startup community, today. We are hearing from multiple sources that John Ruffolo will be joining OMERS as Senior Vice President of Knowledge Investing. He will start in the position on January 3rd 2011.

This position, which is focused on managing direct Venture Capital investments, has been the subject of speculation since OMERS announced that they planned to take a similar direct investment model with Venture Capital as they have with Private Equity deals, which has been a successful model for them so far. Pension and other labour sponsored funds like OMERS have historically taken Limited Partner positions in third-party funds (the VC funds you know and love already) and this hands-on approach is unique in Canada.

John Ruffolo was previously a Managing Partner at Deloitte’s Toronto office and he conducted the survey of Canadian VC GPs that we wrote about earlier.

John’s reputation is positive and his knowledge of both the past and current startup and Venture Capital environment in Canada is unique. It is great to see things moving ahead in the development of a new capital source for startups in Canada.

This a.m. in Toronto, the folks at everyone’s favourite big red carrier, invited a collection of local developers and partners to give a sneak preview of their new carrier services API called Catalyst.

At first swoopy-rosy-red blush, Rogers’ Catalyst looks almost oddly familiar to that old software branding of a certain other Markham-based technology heavyweight. Functionality wise however, Catalyst has a lot more in common with the similar multi-carrier initiative called OneAPI (also supported by Rogers btw). The difference with Catalyst is that it signals a split with OneAPI to give dev’s access to supposedly deeper/better but also proprietary integration with Rogers network. for now, these are services like messaging, location and billing. For developers, richer but proprietary api is either good or bad news, depending on your appetite for carrier-specific app development. Rogers and Fido may be Canada’s biggest mobile operator. However, tying your app to their network is obviously no way to reach every Canadian, let alone the world market.

Those caveats aside, there is good stuff in this API. First up, everything is build on web and “SOAP and restful standards” promising to abstract away historically crufty telco interfaces, dedicated lines and slow/expensive integration certification.

Functionality wise in this release we get:

• Messaging: Web-based SMS origination, SMS delivery confirmation, and “instant” shortcode provisioning
• Location: Server calls at various levels of accuracy vs speed that allows your cloud to geo-locate and track any handset on the network. A scary thought, but the service also comes with built-in opt-in and privacy controls.
• Billing: the ability to bill up to $100/month to Rogers bills for apps or content. The revenue split is 30% Rogers, 70% developer, no need for CWTA shortcode to start using billing
• More stuff, apparently coming soon

So what does it mean for entrepreneurs and tinkerers? Sure you won’t yet take over the whole world with Rogers-only API integration. However I see a few great use cases: as fast/cheap proof of concept sandbox before you invest in scaling your app with many carrier integrations, for enterprise app development, for academic or mobile research projects. Now if only Rogers would also provide subsidized (or at least more flexible) hardware, sim cards and data plans with their developer programs they’d have a real winner. Where are our api’s for Canada’s aspiring hardware hackers I’d like to know? Where are our api’s for helping us do real commerce over mobile not just virtual goods? I may just be biased, maybe we’ll get there in time.

The big picture here is we are seeing carriers trying to claw their way back into digital content value chain. It remains to be seen how well a single carrier can compete on alerts, location and content billing which, let’s face it, all smartphone platforms nowadays support some pretty decent version of natively. But notionally that’s fine. More choice and competition is good for developers. I’d like to see more big companies opening their kimono’s and offering up interesting APIs. Once they’re in the wild, have at the Rogers Catalyst APIs and let me know what you think.

Rogers Catalyst Beta is not publicly available just yet, but should be launching in beta form within a week or so at rogerscatalyst.com

Photo by anitakhart

The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario announced a new Investing in Business Innovation program. The program offers matching for early-stage venture funding. This is a $190MM running from 2010-2014.

There are provisions for startups and angel networks. Since we’re StartupNorth, let’s try to deal with the startup side first.

• Startups who receive a termsheet from a qualified angel investor (as defined by the Ontario Securities Commission) or venture capital firm (registered with the Canadian Venture Capital association) are eligible to apply for up $1MM in loan from the federal government.
• Restrictions:
  • Start-up businesses will be eligible for repayable contributions up to $1 million for no more than one third (33? percent) of total eligible and supported project costs.
  • An angel and/or venture capital investor(s) must be committed to provide at least two thirds (66? percent) of the cash contribution toward eligible and supported project costs.
  • In-kind contributions related to mentoring, networking, and other business skills cannot be considered as part of the angel or venture capital investor’s cash contribution.
  • A maximum of one project per eligible start-up SME can be funded under the initiative.
  • Direct eligible costs for start-up businesses may include:
    • Labour, capital and operating expenditures;
    • Materials and supplies;
    • Consulting and/or professional fees (limited to market rate); and,
    • Minor and non-capital acquisitions (e.g., software).
  • All project activities must be completed by March 31, 2014;

Basically there is federal government matching loans up to $1MM for startups that are raising angel or venture funding in Southern Ontario. This is a fantastic start.

It’s great for startups in Southern Ontario, it’s curious that the program is only available in Southern Ontario. Why not all of Canada? How are the repayment terms set? Is this a zero percent interest loan from the Federal Government? Does the term sheet have to be equity investment? Is convertible debt eligible? How do startups “demonstrate they are using business mentoring, counseling, or related services”?