StartupNorth

Month: January 2009

  • Defensio.com acquired by Websense

    Defensio.com, who we first wrote about in November 2007, are announcing today that they have been acquired by Websense. The Montreal based company also presented at StartupCamp Toronto in December 2007.

    This acquisition, the size of which is undisclosed but I am assured it is “significant”, send a few signals to the startup community. The biggest one is that things are still happening even in this “nuclear winter” as some are calling it, and more importantly: Good products and businesses are still worth something.

    When Defensio launched, I took some flak for endorsing them. A lot of people said that “akismet does that”, and it was true, Akismet did do a lot of the same things. In using the service it was noticibly better. I am planning on going back to them.

    Carl also assures me that the Defensio anti-spam service for comments on non-commercial blogs will remain free under their new parent company.

    Websense remains committed to the Defensio developer community and plans to support and enhance the platform for personal users, as well as for commercial use.  The company also plans to continue to offer the comment spam filter at no charge for personal use, while offering a new six month commercial trial at no cost. “The combination of Defensio and Websense is a coup for Web 2.0 developers looking for strong anti-spam and security capabilities,” said Carl Mercier, who founded Defensio and has joined Websense as director of software development. “Imagine if Web 2.0 developers could access an API so their applications could determine if user-generated content is malicious or unwanted – without having to embed anything in their applications or products. We see strong potential to partner with social networking platforms, enterprises and hosting providers to enable advanced  Web 2.0 security with the Defensio solution.”

    When I profiled defensio in 2007 I said that while they might take a run at Akismet’s main business (blog comments), their real opportunity is to find new markets for these collaborative anti-spam tools. That is just what they have done and it is where Websense sees the future of the tool. Websense offers a suite of security and content related tools and Defensio looks like a perfect fit.

    If Defensio can provide a higher level of integration support and a better protection product, then they will be able to win some customers over from Akismet, but it is absolutely going to be a hard-fought battle, with everyone trying to row the boat a little harder in order to win.

    The real opportunity for Defensio however is to raid the markets that Akismet has left untouched. Where Akismet has proven the technology, and opened an initial market which Defensio can sell to, they are also leaving peripheral markets completely alone. – 2007

    The team at Defensio deserve credit for a win and a good start to 2009 for the Montreal community and Canada in general.

    There are rumors of more great announcements to come, pehaps 2009 won’t be so bad afterall?

  • Dex goes on the road – Social and Personal CRM

    Dex, a new social CRM application from MercuryGrove is doing a roadshow for the next few weeks to demo their release and spread the word.

    I have been excited about Dex since Mercury Rising was announced.

    This has been such a great, collaborative journey that we decided the best way to tell people about dex was to go tell people about dex. So we’re packing up our best suits, dressing dex up really nice, and taking her on the road to tell people about our development experience, show them the final result (beta), and hopefully get a lot of great feedback that we can jam into the first release!

    Here is the schedule:

    • Toronto – Tuesday, January 20th @ CSI
    • Ottawa – Wednesday, January 21st @ The Code Factory
    • Montreal – Thursday, January 22nd
    • New York – Monday, January 26th @ New Work City
    • Boston – Wednesday, January 28th @ BetaHouse
    • Philadelphia – Thursday, January 29th, 6pm @ Indy Hall

  • Weekend Reading – January 17, 2009

    Nuclear WinterIn the News:
    Rypple in the Economist.

    Idee in Entertainment Weekly.

    And LoyaltyMatch on Fox.

    Well.ca founder Ali Asaria interviewed for Allentrepreneur.

    Warming your heart this Nuclear Winter:
    FreshBooks’ CEO on Distribution 2.0 Winners & Losers.

    Wellington Financial topped up their Fund III with $25M for a total $150M.     And, Wellington’s Mark McQueen continues to hilariously rail on the fund run by Kevin O’Leary of Dragon’s Den.

    First Round Capital held Office Hours in Vancouver this week. Any reports?

    Mark MacLeod says Just do it!

    b5media’s CEO Jeremy Wright took a IZEA (PayPerPost) Coke Zero offer. More paid posts to appear on b5 blogs?

    Why your web startup will fail! vs Why your startup will succeed!

    Netshelter raised $11M from Rho, GrowthWorks, and JLA.

    8 companies were funded by the Investment Accelerator Fund including: C2C Link, Echologics, IPeak Networks, Kneebone, Regen Energy, Skymeter, Nulogy, and Sysmos. What a great way to start 2009!

    Check out the StartupNorth Calendar for upcoming events in your city. Montreal ical feed is acting up, but we are working on it!

  • Update #2: PWC SR&ED Seminar – Thursday, Jan 29

    Those tickets went fast! By popular demand, the good folks at PWC are going to run an Afternoon SR&ED Seminar Thursday, January 29 as well.

    SR&ED is easily the largest tax credit program available to Canadian companies for recouping R&D spending with over $4 Billion being distributed each year. SME’s can recoup 35% of their R&D spending from the Federal program and then layer on Provincial tax credits as well. Thousands of tech entrepreneurs across Canada have used SR&ED to bootstrap their companies and stretch R&D dollars. This is not a government program you want to ignore. So you might be concerned by the recently announced changes to the SR&ED claims form (T661) and process.

    pwcWell then register now for the upcoming PWC SR&ED Breakfast Seminar. There is no cost to attend, but seating is limited, so you’ll want to RSVP as soon as possible.

    PWC SR&ED Breakfast Seminar
    *Update #2 – Morning & Noon sessions have reached capacity, but an Afternoon session has been added.*
    7:30 a.m. – 8:00 a.m. Registration
    8:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Presentation and Q&A

    11:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Registration
    12:00 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Presentation and Q&A

    2:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. Registration
    3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Presentation and Q&A

    PricewaterhouseCoopers
    King West Rooms 1 and 2
    145 King Street West, 11th floor
    Toronto, Ontario

    Please register by January 26, 2009 at http://www.pwc.com/ca/sred or contact Simone Knott by email [email protected] or phone 416-941-8383 x14498.

    We invite you to join senior members of the PricewaterhouseCoopers SR&ED group as they discuss the implications of these recent changes on the preparation of your SR&ED claims and your claiming processes.

    The seminar will highlight:
    • What the changes are (and what has not changed)
    • How to adapt to the changes
    • Transitioning from the old form to the new form
    • Old vs. new terminology

    We hope you can join us. We know you will not want to miss this opportunity. If you have questions related to this topic that you wish to be addressed during the seminar, please include them in your RSVP.

  • identi.ca gets funding, and a case of bad timing

    I learned through GigaOM this morning that Montreal-based Identi.ca has taken a round of funding from Montreal Startup. I was, and remain, a big supporter of Identi.ca and first covered it back in July, 2008.

    It appears that Montreal Startup is the sole funder in this round so I will assume that GigaOM is right and the amount of funding is probably in the $200,000 to $400,000 range.

    This is exciting news for the Canadian startup community, but just after hearing it this morning I came across this announcement from Google. In November 2007, Google acquired Jaiku, a “lifestreaming” service that resembles Twitter and which preceeded services such as Friendfeed which largely copy its functionality, and it was founded even before Twitter.

    Google is announcing today that they are going open-source and will be making Jaiku freely available. On top of that, you will be able to easily deploy it to the Google App Engine.

    I am not sure of the exact impact of Jaiku going open-source, but it no doubt has some impact on Identi.ca’s plans. I am confident that Evan and Montreal Startup will take this development in to account, and I certainly believe that there is more than enough room for a few open source applications to thrive.

  • Pitch coaching – YowTRIP

    Thanks to everybody who has submitted a pitch in response to my post on pitch coaching. As I mentioned in the post, I’ll post some of the pitches & my feedback to help people refine their pitches. I’ll focus my commentary on 3 main questions:

    1) Have you clearly outlined the problem & how your product/service addresses it?
    2) Have you covered the main areas investors are interested in?
    3) Have you generated a sense of interest that your company has real potential that people will want to take the time to learn more in a more in depth meeting?

    As I’m not familiar with every company’s domain, I’ll more focus on the structure of the pitch and leave the fact checking of the content to the wisdom of the crowd.

    For YowTRIP, the presentation is located here.

    My feedback I gave is as follows.

    Have you clearly outlined the problem & how your product/service addresses it?

    Yes – this was well communicated

    Have you covered the main areas investors are interested in (market potential, revenue model, competition, management, go to market strategy, exit, deal terms)

    This needs some work. Some key questions I would have would be:

    a) How does your site make money (ads, taking a commission on travel booked, etc)?
    b) What is the market potential? How much revenue do you think your company can make based on point (a)?
    c) Who are your main competitors (direct and in-direct)?
    d) Who is on the management team?
    e) How will investors likely realize an exit (acquisition, dividend stream, etc)?

    Have you generated a sense of interest that your company has real potential that people will want to take the time to learn more in a more in depth meeting?

    Granted this is subjective, but to me this seems like a very specialized niche in an already crowded space. i.e. on-line travel sites, other social networking sites could be used to offer a solution to your problem statement. I’m not sure what your previous business model was, but since you have some past history, if you can show some traction that people would use your site (i.e. visits, user sign-ups), this would go a long way to showing the viability of your idea. Otherwise you are in the same position with other social network based start-ups – the viability of your company will be largely based on how many people you can get into your network and how achievable is this in a crowded marketplace with already established dominant players.

  • More Crowdsourced Capital – Colektivo readies for launch

    ColektivoColektivo is a new debt-financing startup that appears to be attempting to bridge peer-to-peer loans with crowdsourced investing. A sort of Kiva for entreprenurs, bridging the concepts behind startups like CommunityLend and Vencorps. Startups are asked to fill out a loan application, and a group of lenders then decide if they want to make a loan to that startup.

    Colektivo runs the first investment fund on the Internet managed by a group of investors. The investment fund sole purpose is to supply local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with debt financing. This synergy between SMEs and savers represents a real alternative to banks and traditional investment products. The incomes of interest generated by the loans are redistributed to the savers whereas the principal portion is reinvested in other SMEs. With a minimum investment of 100$, investors are able to buy investment fund units

    My first impression is that Colektivo is taking the worst from both worlds and attempts to bring them together to form an idea that seems full of risk and that promises minimal reward.

    The peer-to-peer loans industry has been under a lot of pressure and has lived under a cloud of uncertainty in almost every jurisdiction so far. Prosper.com was shut down by the US SEC in November 2008, and in Febuary 2008, IOUCentral launched and was then quickly shut down here in Canada. My sense is that they are trying to avoid regulatory hell by managing it as an investment fund, which may or may not work, I am not qualified to say.

    So, take the peer-to-peer model, and then layer on the further uncertainty of the crowd-sourced investment model and I get jittery. I hope they can prove me wrong though.

    I am, however, feeling more and more bullish about Vencorps, which uses crowdsourcing to find good investment opportunities, but which uses its own money to make the actual investments. I have been watching some of the pre-launch contests they have been running, and I do see the potential.