Mercury Rising: Watch a Startup reinvent itself

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 – Ottawa Co-Working Space

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.

Spring Acquisitions: Meriton Networks & Sirific Wireless

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.