Ottawa

There are 8 posts tagged Ottawa (this is page 2 of 3).

Shelter for startups in Ottawa

Mercury Grove offices

Catwalk at Mercury Grove/NetworkHippo offices

Scott Annan announced he was making available some of the space in the newly acquired NetworkHippo/Mercury Grove office space for startups. It is a raw space located in downtown Ottawa to enable startups and entrepreneurs to come together and share. It embraces the idea that great things come out of the collisions that happen in our communities.

“The idea behind opening up our space is that I think that Ottawa has some of the greatest entrepreneurs, talent, and ideas in the world. But we don’t spend enough time together collaborating on ideas, discussing technology opportunities, or discussing ways we’re changing the world. I think the more we can be surrounded by people who are facing similar challenges (trying to get launched, trying to get noticed, and trying to get paid) the more we can feed off each other’s successes and learn from each other’s experience.”

This is different than a coworking space. It’s an entrepreneur that values the collisions, differing view points and conversations that happen in larger offices. It’s Scott making sure that he and his staff have a unique experience by getting to interact with others in the Ottawa community. It speaks deeply to why we host events like DemoCamp and Founders & Funders. And you can see venture firms in Toronto and Vancouver taking advantage of the opportunities of having others drop in (BootupLabs during Grow Conference; and open door policy at Extreme Venture Partners and office hours with Year One Labs).

If you’re visiting Ottawa make sure that you stop by:

Mercury Grove Startup Shelter
Address: 738A Bank St. (map here)
Phone: 613-237-2071
Email: info@mercurygrove.com

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.

Network Hippo

Congratulations to Scott Annan and the Network Hippo team for their great demo at Demo Spring 2010. Scott Lake wrote about the performance on StartupOttawa, and I’d agree it’s worth taking the 5 minutes and 24 seconds to watch a great demo.

Funding Details

Self-funded

Competitors

No direct competitors. Secondary competitors include Gist, Plaxo, Xobni, Highrise, and Batchbook.

Product Description

Network Hippo is the smartest way to manage your network. We help individuals and businesses manage and stay connected to people across social, professional, and business networks. Network Hippo aggregates and organizes contact information intelligently from email and social networking sites and has proactive, addictive tools to engage your network. Close more deals, crowdsource your next product design, or change the world: Network Hippo and your network make it possible.

Market Opportunity

Jack Myer’s Media Business report forecasts spending in social marketing to grow from $800 million to $3.2 billion by 2012. AMR projects CRM revenue of $22 billion in 2012 (up from $14 billion in 2007) and Gartner predicts 80% of the immediate growth to come from “social application vendors.”