RIM acquires Tungle

Congratulations to Marc and the Tungle team. Tungle announced their acquisition by RIM. Tungle had previously raised $1.5M from JLA, Desjardin, and angels and $5M from Commonweatlth. This is a great addition for the RIM team to continue to build out an application suite for the mobile office. Mark MacLeod (@startupcfoprovides additional thoughts and comments on the acquisition:

Clear Problem

Tungle just made sense. Finding a time to meet is a huge pain. This may not be the sexiest, flashiest market, but it is huge. Every business person feels the pain.

Pivots

We didn’t have this term back in the early days, but Tungle sure went through some pivots. When I joined it was a peer to peer client a la Skype. And it was S-L-O-W.  The service today bears little resemblance to that early product.

Data-driven

All startups but especially SaaS startups should be data driven. Tungle was no exception to this. We even built our own custom system (known as Knudderforce) and tracked daily, weekly and monthly stats. Those stats triggered many actions, automated outreaches, etc.

Luck

All good outcomes have an element of luck. I am sure there are many examples in Tungle’s case, but the one that stands out for me is closing our Series A funding in September 2008 just as Lehman Brothers crashed and the markets started tanking. If we had been only a few weeks later we might have had a much tougher time closing the round.

Focus, focus, focus

I’ve seen many teams get distracted as they grow. The CEO is off attending conferences, the company moves from market to market, etc. Tungle was laser focused on solving its’ users’ scheduling needs. At one point we were doing usability sessions every day. We reached out to every new user. We just stayed focused.

Platform

When we first were getting started, investors wondered if this was a feature vs. a product. Fast forward a few years and it is on its way to being a full fledged scheduling platform with APIs for other companies to use.

Strategic engagement

An ideal startup for me is one that can develop conversations with potential strategic partners as a natural part of its goto market strategy. This presumes you are building something that is important to the big players and assumes that you have a CEO capable of establishing and building those relationships. This was definitely the case with Tungle and this announcement is just a logical outcome of this reality.

The icing on the cake for me is that this is an all-Canadian deal. The Tungle team will be staying in Canada and continuing to make things happen.

Shared calendaring continues to be a difficult problem as you move to the edge of an organization. Just think about how difficult it is to see availability and schedules of people who are not on your GApps domain or your Exchange Server. Tungle gives RIM a leg up in having tooling like BBM and email and now calendaring that blurs the edge of the organization.

Cisco looking for Canadian innovation

We understand that the good people at Cisco are poking around up North for some start-ups to play a role in the company’s expanded focus  into the datacenter, virtualization and smart grid markets.

These are key new markets for Cisco and clearly they want to know what the most innovative start-ups are up to (isn’t the hunt for innovation why all leading companies come poking around here?)

Cisco’s got a few criteria (big companies love their processes!) but it should be pretty easy. To summarize: :

1)      Companies must be active in the datacenter, virtualization or smart grid markets

2)      Must have existing VC investment

3)      Ready/able to take their business to the next level

4)      VC-pitch PowerPoint will be accepted only. (they can’t review websites, datasheets or whitepapers)

The people doing the poking are Cisco’s Corporate Development team, who are responsible for investment, acquisition, strategy and partnerships for the company. So if any of these options sound appealing to you, forward your slides to Tab Borden of the Canadian Consulate < [email protected]>

dna13 acquired by CNW Group

dna13 acquired by CNW

This was a crazy weekend for Canadian startup acquisitions.

First there was Bumptop announced their acquisition by Google. There is StandOutJobs.com being acquired by an unnamed company. Now Ottawa-based dna13 has been acquired by CNW Group. Read the Social Media Release for more details

“This acquisition reinvents the newswire and we’re terribly excited about it. It’s of benefit to our clients because we’re taking dna13’s technology platform, which is best-in-class, and marrying it with CNW’s suite of offerings. For the first time we’ll be providing an end-to-end solution that will really allow communicators to manage every facet of the communications process. Everything from creating content; targeting your message; distributing your news and information; understanding how that information is being received by your audience to further refining your message and developing metrics. That will all be available to CNW clients in one, single platform.”
Carolyn McGill-Davidson, President and CEO, CNW Group

This makes a lot of sense since CNW Group is a reseller of the dna13 platform under the MediaVantage brand. No details about the purchase price have been disclosed. 

Looking at the cached Board of Directors page we find:

We can hope that this was another 10 banger for a Canadian startup.