Devshop.com, which was one of the first profiles we ever did, recently launched a new version of their project management application for development teams.

The most unique aspect of Devshop is its focus on using historical data to estimate future performance. By monitoring past timelines, milestones and other aspect of a project, Devshop will estimate the risk associated with current time estimates.

Devshop also focuses on tying project requirements to the development schedule, so things don’t get out of sync.

Craig has methodically gone from a private beta through launch, a 1.0 and now Devshop 2.0 looks like a powerful tool for development teams of any size. I also took a look at the team that has come together in the last year and I was even more impressed. It’s not hard to tell that Craig is aiming to build a company that will scale when the opportunity comes.

AndyCamper.com launched this week. The Ottawa based startup is a sort of “activities portal” targeted at kids. 

The site categorizes activities in the same way that kids tend to, using broad titles like “bugs”. When you click through there are all sorts of videos, ideas and games about what you can do to learn about bugs.

I would have been all over things like How to Create and Berlese Funnel and to be honest, it is still tempting!

The amount of content available on this site is incredible. It sort of makes me wonder if the days of “Mom, we’re bored!” will soon be a thing of the past. “Just go to AndyCamper.com kids”

The guys at MercuryGrove, who last year came out with a product called Web Groups are now reinventing themselves as a multiple product company. In the next few months they will be re-developing Web Groups and introducing a new set of products, including a CRM, an E-Mail Campaign Manager, and finally something called a “Customer Page“, that provides an easier way of working with customers.

I have had the chance to get to know Scott Annan over the last few years, and he has been one of the guys behind StartupOttawa, so it is cool to see him show some of the inner workings of MercuryGrove.

There is no doubt that this is partially just a PR stunt, but that is fine with me, because Scott has all the street cred he needs and I know that he does the right thing for the Ottawa community every chance he gets.

I’ll be watching along, and we will post some updates here. Follow along on the blog.

The Code Factory is having its grand opening tonight in Ottawa. The Code Factory is a shared office space for startups and freelancers.

Here in Toronto we had The Indoor Playground for a few years, but due to some problems with their landlord, they had to close up shop. Co-working spaces tend to be indicators of healthy entrepreneurial communities and it is nice to see Ottawa get such a great looking option.

The grand opening takes place tonight, at 5:30pm at Suite 200 – 246 Queen Street (between Bank and Kent).

David Crow recently covered co-working in Canada on our sister site CommunityNorth.ca where is also included a list of other known co-working spaces in Canada.

As promised… we have a couple spring acquisitions:

Meriton Networks, an optical networking infrastructure company based in Ottawa, has been acquired by Xtera Communications. Meriton had taken venture financing from: Desjardins Venture Capital Group, Newbury Ventures, Nomura International, Primaxis Technology Ventures, RBC Capital Partners, VantagePoint Venture Partners, VenGrowth Capital Partners, Skypoint Capital. The acquisition price has not been disclosed.

Sirific Wireless, a fabless semiconductor company specializing in CMOS RF transceivers based in Waterloo, has been acquired by Icera. Sirific had taken venture financing from: Agilent Technologies, BDC, Celtic House, GrowthWorks, Hunt Ventures, Intel Capital, Solowave Investments, TD Capital, and Tech Capital. The acquisition price has not been disclosed.

Hat tip to Mark McQueen of Wellington Financial, who described the exits as follows:

Although details weren?t announced, these don?t feel like successful exits. Probably somewhere in that middle of pack for that vintage. Neither company had announced the kind of revenue generating customer traction (think Dragonwave and Clearwire) that drives a home run. And they both raised tens of millions over 8 or so years. Yes there was value built (which the strategics can afford to fund and harvest) but after that long these are deals where the clock ran out.

Sounds like a little portfolio spring cleaning to me.

I thought it was worth mentioning that Joseph Thornley, who blogs at ProPr and is based in Ottawa, has decided to eat some of his own Social Media dogfood and has released two wordpress plugins today along with 76Design.

FriendsRoll reminds me a lot of, well, a traditional blogroll. The big difference however is that it has a form which friends can fill out and request to be added to your FriendsRoll. It is a cool and simple way to keep blogrolls a little more fresh over time. Right now they usually get stale with old blogs that aren’t maintained, or people who are not blogging about different, less relevant, subjects.

The other widget, TopLinks, automatically keeps track of what sites you are linking to in your blog posts and it lists them in the widget, ordered by popularity.

Both of these widgets help create mini little networks between blogs, but require little ongoing maintenance. I will be installing them on my personal blog as soon as I update my template.

Celtic House Venture Partners, EdgeStone Capital Partners and Tech Capital Partners announced today a Series A investment of $4,600,000 in Overlay.TV.

The company, based in Ottawa, is building out an internet video-advertising platform that allows viewers to interact with online video, and enables content owners and distributors to monetize videos. Videos stream from their original location (e.g. youtube) and viewers are able to opt-in to receive overlays with contextual information and links (e.g. affiliate shops).

Stay tuned for a full review following the official launch February 14, 2008.

Workspace is an Ottawa-based startup co-founded by Obaid Ahmed and Marc Windle.

Workspace provides an online collaboration environment for web development projects, allowing for management of many remote servers through a single interface, a built-in editor (no local machine IDE required) and support for six programming languages. A potential boon to freelancers and consultants, Workspace has 2,000 beta testers from around the world providing feedback on bugs and feature requests since beta testing began at the end of March. Pricing has not yet been determined, but will likely follow the freemium model familiar in Web 2.0 applications.

Beta users were identified early on (prior to development) by starting with a blog and using Digg to get some attention to the idea from likely customer/users and signing people up with a simple online form. Workspace is currently working closely with their beta users and will be looking for seed funding this summer to expand the team to add more features and to support scale at launch.

Devshop.com is a hosted project management application for software projects. I took Devshop for a test drive a few months ago at the beginning of their beta and found it to be straightforward, but took a pass on it because it felt like it was focused on larger projects. It seems that Devshop is a legitimate competitor to most major project management software, and at 24$US per seat per month, it is priced well, although that could definitly add up for larger teams.

There would be a good reason to pay for Devshop however, and that is their approach. Devshop focuses first on requirements and also focuses on time estimation and actively measuring progress against the project schedule. Devshop also brings the entire development team in to the same enviroment, so you don’t have to worry about updating MS Project files or emailing spreadsheets between team members.

Their “squash the risk” approach, which addresses the most real need of project managers, is what will help make Devshop successful. I think that being focused on Software Development, and only Software Development means that Devshop can keep innovating features that affect their niche audience directly, rather than a lot of the bloat that you get from more general purpose project management vendors.

Devshop is based in Ottawa, Ontario, and they have 5 employees. They were founded in September 2005 and their software went in to public beta just over a year later. To date, Devshop has been funded to the tune of $200, 000 and they are currently looking for angels to top off a second round of funding.

Considering what they have done with the small investment they have taken so far, and the fact that 2000 customers totaling over 7000 users are using Devshop already, while it is still in beta, is a pretty good sign of things to come.

Depending on their plans, I would also think that Devshop will have some pretty attractive exit opportunities. Everyone from Borland to Sun and Microsoft will need a tool like this in their back pocket and will be willing to pay to scoop up the market leader.

Contact Craig Fitzpatrick