StartupNorth

Year: 2008

  • Will you bet on VenCorps?

    The VenCorps machine has been ramping up lately and it got a further injection of excitement with some posts in the last week.

    The premise of VenCorps is this: You record a video of your “pitch” and upload it. The “crowd”, that is the Vencorps community, then votes and chooses some winners. Those winners then go on to be vetted in a traditional investment process involving angels and other sources of funding. Chosen startups then get some amount of funding.

    VenCorps isn’t the only new Canadian video-pitches-for-financing site to launch, fundfinder.com, which also connects your pitch to a “crowd” of would-be investors. The difference being that VenCorps uses the Cambrian House software to help manage the selection/voting process. The end result however (videos of startups pitching) looks quite similar.

    We first covered Vencorps in January and at that time we were told that they would be making more announcements at the end of the month, but it seems to have taken almost 5 more months to see any sort of public activity. This is no doubt the result of some of the problems Cambrian House has been having.

    I decided to poke around and, as you might have guessed, I managed to find some differing opinions. Overwhelmingly, from community members to current and former employees, the sense is that this is truly a last stand for Cambrian House, and had Sean Wise not come along with money from Spencer Trask, that things would look a lot different right now.

    One of the overwhelming reactions I did get was that Cambrian House CEO Michael Sikorsky is a brilliant guy who took this thing as far as anyone could have. I think we need to applaud Michael and the entire team for doing something worth doing here in Canada. I have no doubt Michael will be back with something great again.

    So the question I have is: Will you bet on VenCorps? Will the best startups in the Canada, and the world, flock to VenCorps to pitch themselves? Will there be enough investors and money to make it attractive?

    I think it is possible for this to work. It takes guts to attempt something like this.

    However, the model has failed a few times already, Cambrian House has proven that it has serious flaws, so VenCorps is going to have to do more than just re-apply that model with a more direct financing spin on it. In a video that Cambrian House recently posted (included below), they say that VenCorps will focus more on teams than on ideas, and that the lack of focus on teams was one of the downfalls of Cambrian House.

    The thought that lingers in the back of my mind is whether or not VenCorps should have attached themselves to Cambrian House or not? My gut reaction was a big No, but you have to weigh that against the fact that the Cambrian House crew have probably learned a few things about community building in the last couple of years.

    Will you pitch on VenCorps?

  • Weekend Reading – May 18, 2008

    Been a bit quiet round these parts… Jevon is on the road and my computer caught the dreaded Vista. Next week will be exciting though as Chris and I will be covering MESHU and MESH.

    Serial entrepreneur Jeff Fedor riffs on Startup Regrets.

    The TSX hit a record high, closing in on 15,000.

    Venture lawyer Suzie Dingwall Williams auditioned for Dragon’s Den.

  • TSX Venture Exchange Entrepreneurial Bootcamp

     tsx-bootcampModerated by Sean Wise, Wise Mentor Capital

    Decide if Public Venture Capital (PVC) is right for you. TSX Venture Exchange’s Entrepreneurial Bootcamp is tailored for CEOs and CFOs of aggressive growth companies considering raising capital from the PVC marketplace over the next few years. This workshop will explore the use of PVC as a growth tool for emerging companies.

    Topics include:

    • How to decide if going public is right for your company
    • The Capital Pool Company® (CPC) Program
    • Picking the best and most cost-effective advisors
    • How to pitch for public capital
    • Why PVC may work when private VCs are not interested or an attractive option

    Register, Cost: $65.00

    What: TSX Venture Exchange Entrepreneurial Bootcamp
    Cost: $65.00 Moderated by Sean Wise, Wise Mentor Capital For more information please contact: Debbie Bamforth, TSX Venture Exchange, at (416) 947-4411 or [email protected]
    When: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 1:00 PM to 5:30 PM
    Where: MaRS Centre

    101 College Street, Auditorium B
    Toronto, ON   Canada

  • 2008 ACE Exposition

    acecanadaAdvancing Canadian Entrepreneurship (ACE) held their showcase of entrepreneurs at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.  ACE is a charitable organization that delivers programming to higher education students to inspire them to make meaningful contribution to words their community by building real world businesses and entrepreneurial ventures.

    ACE submissions are from major Canadian schools including BCIT, University of Calgary, Ryerson University, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo amongst others. The Student Entrepreneur Competition requires that students be a founder (or 50% owner of a business) and are selected based on financials and subjective judging criteria. The goal is to submit an operating venture that is ready for growth.

    ACE announces 2008 National Student Entrepreneur Competition Champion – Joseph Moncada, Sweet Tooth Candy Emporium

    Since 2006 Joseph, a Business student, has owned and operated Sweet Tooth Candy Emporium, a network of stores and kiosks offering rare, unique, retro, and imported sweets from around the world. What started as a summer project through the Ontario Government “Summer Company” program has grown exponentially into a successful franchise.

    Now in operation for only two years, Sweet Tooth Candy Emporium employs over 25 people and has grown into three stores based in prominent locations around the Greater Toronto Area and Wasaga Beach.

    The focus of the ACE programs is on economic impact on local communities. The submissions are diverse ranging from software to franchises. The 2008 regional winners included software companies, an online retailer, a French language publishing company and a walking stick manufacturer.

    • Ryne Flood, 6am Software – Online Parent-Teacher Interview Scheduler
    • Grahm Watts, Nature Trails – A company that manufactures walking sticks, twig pencils, bird hourses, etc.
    • Brad LeBlanc, Engaging Entertainment – Event mangement, event production and strategic marketing
    • André Wilson, Editions Court-Circuit – A French language publishing company
    • Jill Lennox, Stuffitbag – Custom designed laptop bags with online retailing
    • Brett Patrontasch, Scholars At Your Service Inc. – a student organization offering residential and commercial painting, window washing, and on site automotive detailing to their customers

    While most of these ventures probably aren’t venture fundable, the opportunity for students to see entrepreneurship as a career path is needed in Canadian post secondary educational institutions. ACE offers a great structured set of programs for students to get involved and inspired by entrepreneurs in their communities.

  • StartupIndex: Canadian Startup Map

    We just launched a neat new mapping feature on StartupIndex.

    As more data gets entered by the community, a lot of the entries contain address information. We weren’t really using this in any special ways until Ali really started thinking about a map.

    The map is dynamic and thanks to some slick programming, it will auto-cluster elements in order to make things more intuitive as you zoom in and out.

    Is it useful? We don’t know yet. We will constantly be trying things on StartupIndex and we will be testing them to see if they are valuable or not. So please, let us know what you think.

  • New $150 million Blackberry Fund, based in Canada

    VentureBeat decided to jump the gun this weekend and post some news that has been floating around lately about a new Blackberry fund. They deleted the post from their blog, but it was still available in Google Reader and in other places and TechCrunch got to it late on Saturday.

    The new fund is being managed by RBC Ventures, who just last week closed an investment in Toronto-Based Blackberry application Viigo, and JLA Ventures. RIM, maker of the Blackberry, is a limited partner in this fund, but is not involved in the day-to-day investment decisions.

    The rumor mill has been churning away on this one for months here in Toronto. Originally the numbers we were hearing were $100 million, but as the weeks went by, people started to hint that things had heated up and there were partners involved up to $150 million. That number, $150M, turned out to be true.

    Companies funded by the Blackberry Partners Fund do not have to be producing Blackberry applications yet. The press release says that the fund is “Agnostic to both stage and balance sheet, the BlackBerry Partners Fund will not restrict the development of mobile applications and services to any single mobile platform or any specific industry segment.”, which is all true, but only companies who have a Blackberry Application in their roadmap will be funded.

    The fund will be will be announced at WES in Orlando tomorrow morning.

    It is interesting to note that RBC Ventures recently funded another Balsillie company, Igloo Software with $4M. Jim Balsillie, the CEO of RIM, is on the Board of Directors of Igloo Software, who closed their financing last week.

    In talking to Rick Segal, one of the partners at JLA Ventures, about this new fund he put it very plainly: The test will be in 6 months when we look at how many deals have actually gotten done.

    Will this be another Java Fund? I certainly hope not, espcially for Canadian companies who have a chance to connect with some known VCs and tap in to a strong fund with great connections to the maker of the most popular Web, Email and Voice device out there.

  • $4,000,000 for IGLOO

    IGLOO Software, an enterprise social software company based in Waterloo, has raised $4M from RBC Venture Partners. Kevin Talbot, Managing Director of RBC Venture Partners, has joined IGLOO’s board, which is chaired by Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research In Motion.

    The Kitchener, On based company has spring out of development of IGLOO.org.

    “Founded in 2003, IGLOO’s social networking platform helps hundreds of organizations globally reduce email burden, remove distances across branch
    offices and inspire teams with new productivity and collaboration tools. The platform was initially developed to support an online international network of researchers, practitioners and educators working on global issues.”

    Igloo Software on StartupIndex

  • viigo.com – A new round of funding and a cool new app

    Viigo has announced a new round of funding today. They had previously raised a total of $6.4M and this round, at $1.5M now puts them at a total of $7.9M in angel and VC investment.

    The $1.5M, which will go towards developing their latest project, codenamed Tango and which will be launched at WES next week, comes from RBC Venture Partners.

    I hear a lot of great reviews of Viigo from Blackberry users.

    Viigo on StartupIndex.

  • Idée, who we have covered a few times, is slowly going public with their skunkworks project, called TinEye.

    TinEye is a major undertaking, and it is going to bring Idée out of the shadows of the Enterprise product space and right in to your livingroom with a tool that is the equivalent of a Google for images. In fact, I bet Google wishes they had an image search as great as TinEye. I have had a chance to play with it over the last few months and it is hard to describe just how awesome this image search is.

    TineEye, which allows anyone to search the internet for images the are similar to an original image, is a consumer-focused site that offers many of the core image matching capabilities of Idée’s enterprise product PixID, but does not offer the enterprise-level monitoring capabilities.

    In talking about TinEye, Idee has been very explicit in saying “TinEye literally does for images what Google does for text.” That can be hard to believe right until you actually use the tool. The speed and accuracy of TinEye can only be described at uncanny. It is totally refreshing to play with a tool and a technology that is exciting and inspiring to use. In the last few weeks I have played with some competing tools, and none can match TinEye. Idée’s CEO Leila Boujnane, who spoke at the latest StartupCamp here in Toronto, has said that they will begin looking for about $10-million to $12-million in capital funding for a small stake in the company.

    To celebrate the upcoming launch of TinEye, and to spread the word on how great this tool is, we are giving away 20 beta invitations to TinEye.com. To get one, all you have to do is leave a comment below and make sure you fill in your email address. I will send invitations to the first 20 people to leave a comment.

    Idée on StartupIndex.ca

  • CIX – Our chance to create something great?

    I think a lot of people considered CIX, held in Toronto last week, to be a simple extension of the defunct Canadian Venture Forum. The Canadian Venture Forum, which was dealt a fatal blow last year with the death of the Toronto Venture Group, did look very similar in a lot of ways. A slew of companies were all hawking their wares and pitching for financing from Canada’s Venture Capitalists, and while there were at least 20 startups there vying for attention, actual VCs seemed to be hard to come by regularly.

    The CIX is not perfect. The concept of pitching a room full of VCs for money has some serious flaws, not the least of which is the fact that the majority of the VCs who attended CIX in the morning did not stick around to see the pitches in the afternoon. Add on top of that the likelihood of this conference giving birth to a successful deal directly from the pitches, and you are in for a lot of disappointed attendees.

    It is my hope that CIX will look a lot different next year. Normally that would be too much to ask, but in the last few months I have gotten to know Robert Montgomery, the invisible hand behind the CIX conference, and he gives me hope.

    In order to remain relevant, the CIX organizers need to now connect with the community and find out what was relevant, and what wasn’t. The two communities that the CIX touches, Startup Entreprenurs and Angels/VCs, will have different needs, and the trick will be to address both.

    I do not believe that what the two groups need is either pitch sessions with 10 back-to-back pitches, nor does either community want a series of panels that offer little real value. What we need are connections, rapidfire demos and a venue for the best and most aggressive Startups AND VCs to stand out.

    The way I see it, Robert and his staff have a lot of work ahead of them, but they aren’t the only ones. If Robert will step up and listen, we have to be ready to pitch in and do our part.

    In the next few days I will post a few of my experiences at CIX. Some were very positive and some were a lot less encouraging.

    What would you change? Is this a hopeless beauty contest? Should we boycott CIX next year, or should we embrace it?