StartupNorth

Year: 2010

  • Open House at Bootup Labs

    Bootup LabsJevon, Jonas and I are all heading to Vancouver for Grow Conference happening Aug 19-21, 2010. But I’m hear in Vancouver hanging out at Bootup Labs.

    Bootup Labs is holding open office hours this week. Basically if you’re a startup and you’re in Vancouver and you want need some touchdown space, you should visit Bootup Labs.

    Bootup Labs
    163 West Hastings Street
    Vancouver, BC

    David Crow at Bootup Labs
    Hanging out in the middle of Bootup Labs

    This is a fantastic place. There is a fantastic vibe. There seems to be real evolution and growth of Bootup Labs since the dark days. I’ve been hanging out the past day or so with:

    There are a lot of companies, entrepreneurs and things to like happening at Bootup. I am really impressed with a few things.

    1. The space – it is gorgeous. It’s the right mix of location and finish. The offices are safe, comfortable, and interactive. There’s a great mix of open working areas, private meeting rooms, a kitchen and private offices with sliding doors. The natural light. And it’s nice but not posh. As companies demonstrate traction, there is incentive to find different space, for example Dimerocker has moved out. Having Mozilla and Strutta as “anchor tenants” also reduces the risk to Bootup Labs. It also means that there’s a lot of fun interesting people flowing through.
    2. The location – it is right on the edge of Gastown. There is a great mix of restaurants and other things going on. I had breakfast at the Medina Cafe just around the corner from the office (best breakfast I’ve ever had). There’s the Fluevog store. It’s a great neighbourhood that has come a long way since I first visited Bryght in 2005.
    3. The companies – all of these companies and the entrepreneurs working there are pushing really hard and demonstrating traction. There are exits, see Layerboom acquired by Joyent. And there are a lot of good things happening.

    My recommendation is that if you’re in Vancouver you come hang out at Bootup Labs with us. Ping me @davidcrow or @startupnorth or just drop by 163 West Hastings St in Vancouver. I’ll be here until August 20.

  • NextMontreal.com launches – "news and opinion on technology and startups"

    NextMontreal.com is going live today. It is the result of a push by Ben Yoskovitz to create a new source of information for the Montreal community after MontrealTechWatch went dormant over a year ago.

    Why now?
    When first thinking about this project, Ben wrote:

    When the site was active it provided a great deal of exposure to Montreal, and helped build a stronger community. There’s a lot going on in Montreal for tech startups and entrepreneurs, but without adequate reporting, too much of it doesn’t get the attention deserved.

    At that time, MontrealTechWatch had been more or less dead for over a year and the tech community was very quickly gathering momentum again.

    What about MontrealTechWatch?
    In the time since Ben began working on NextMontreal.com, Heri started blogging regularly on MontrealTechWatch again. I advocated for the community to restart MontrealTechWatch, so I was glad to see that. The existence of two community sites in Montreal will cause some confusion, but I think it is fine. Both sites compliment eachother, have very different operating models, and will most likely each find specific audiences within the Montreal tech and startup community.

    The role of community sites
    There is a broader discussion that we need to have about the role of community blogs in Canada’s tech hubs. We need blogs which aggregate people, ideas and events in order to showcase the activity in places like Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Quebec City and Atlantic Canada. There are cool things happening in all of these places, you just have to scratch the surface to see what is going on.

    Running a community site is hard though, and it takes dedication. NextMontreal will be testing a new model, which will hopefully bring scale to this concept and a broader set of voices to the community.

    No matter what, Montreal should count itself lucky to have so many people who are so passionate about making the startup community in the city thrive. Most do it for little or no direct reward, and those are exactly the people you want behind the wheel.

  • Week in Review

  • EmpireAvenue raises seed funding from W Media Ventures

    EmpireAvenue, the world’s first influence stock market, where you can buy and sell virtual shares in your friends and brands has raised it’s first round of seed financing from W Media Ventures. Something hinted at in yesterday’s City of Champions round up.

    The Edmonton based startup, founded by former BioWare, Electronic Arts, and MySQL employees, has in a matter of months developed a robust social trading platform and attracted over 15,000 users. The new capital will allow the company to continue development and launch Avenue Rewards, a platform that connects brands with influential individuals. A similar business model is being pursued by Klout, a competitor in the influence market.

    As part of the financing, Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures will be joining EmpireAvenue’s board. Boris is easily one of the most active early stage consumer internet investors in Western Canada, with a portfolio that includes: Tynt, Suite101, Indochino, Yapta, and many more. He brings an incredible depth of experience to the venture; EmpireAvenue’s stock is rising in a major way.

  • Hanging out in the City of Champions

    One of the first things that strikes you as you are driving in to Edmonton from the airport, besides how long the drive is, is the entrance sign to the city. It is declared the “City of Champions”, and it kind of takes you off guard. St John’s is the “City of Legends”, Montreal the “City of Saints”, “Toronto the Good”, the list goes on, but nobody seems to aspire quite like Edmonton aspires.

    We are constantly looking to Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver as the beacons of the Canadian startup community, but the truth is that those cities do not always carry their own weight when put up against smaller cities who are hustling to make things happen. Edmonton has an aura of wealth, there is money pulsing through this place, and like Texas before it, Edmonton has a pedigree of entrepreneurialism from those days. This city is punching above its weight. At least, that is the romantic view of Edmonton and Alberta in general.

    When you hit the ground here, it is evident something is going on. Cam Linke and StartupEdmonton are at the center of what has been happening. Cam started running Democamp‘s in Edmonton in 2008 and has gone on to throw LaunchParty‘s, StartupWeekends and other events. Without hesitation, we can grant him the title of “David Crow of Edmonton“. . . (“Don Quixote de la Mancha” ?)

    I had a chance to grab lunch with Cam today while I was in town. We talked about what he is working on, what is happening in Canada and what we wanted to get out of GROW in a few weeks. He also gave me his list of Edmonton’s most promising startups. Here are some of my favorites:

    Fotojournal. A blog platform for photographers to showcase their work. It feels a bit like Flickr did in the beginning in that it is something that aficionados “get” at this point, but photo journaling could be the next evolution of the basic sharing we see today. People love to tell stories, and some people love to tell them with their camera. (See also: Clustershot from PEI)

    Beamdog. An app store for games for the PC. This is taking ambitious to a whole new level in competing with Steam as a distribution platform. They have an impressive number of games in their catalog as of now, but in the absence of large scale distribution deals with publishers, my guess is that it will be tough to get mainstream content. Cam pointed out that they really have the beginnings of a killer app store platform however, and there are a lot of opportunities for them to slide horizontally, or to focus on specific niche’s in gaming. It will be a cool company to watch as I think we will see them iterate a few times.

    Yardstick Software. An employee training and test administration platform. Enterprise HR is a tough market historically, but things are definitely changing. HR departments are making more of their own purchasing decisions these days and consumerization of IT and cloud computing trends are playing out quickly in this market. My guess is that these guys are already doing pretty well. (See Rypple, Toronto)

    Empire Avenue. Buy and sell your friends (I just bought a lot of RANNIE). Empire Avenue is an explicit mechanism to assign value to the objects and people we interact with on the web. In a way we are all doing this everyday: We friend and unfriend people, we subscibe and unsubscibe from newsletters and other things that affiliate us with companies, and we share links and bookmarks. Empire Avenue lets you put a stake in the ground and buy shares in something you think will rise in value. I’ll be honest, I still don’t have it figured out, but it seems just crazy enough that I want to follow it. After I signed up, it was fun and the first few things I needed to do (buy some shares in friends) seemed clear. The rumor is that they have closed a first round and it will be announced tomorrow.

    Edistorm. An online whiteboard for groups of people. “Edistorm takes the metaphor of sticky notes on a boardroom wall and brings it online allowing anyone – anywhere to brainstorm with only a web browser.”. A neat app, the product execution seems good and the price is right for the customer. They have done everything right so far, but I can’t figure out the market side of the product/market fit.

    Other Edmonton startups include

    Smibs -“business network and software products help you connect, share, collaborate and get things done the smart way.”

    Tooq – Contractor and Small Business Toolbox

    TeamRemind -“A simple and effective way to organize your team. Make sure everyone is up to date” (See: YourTeamOnline and Teampages)

    Newspond – Techmeme like intelligent aggregator. (See: Rogers Ventures funded Thoora — might be a good acquisition for Thoora actually, considering they are looking for experienced relevance and ranking developers edit: they were at least)

    Democamp and Launchparty regularly attract 200+ people here and Cam will be organizing the first Founders and Funders dinner this fall. There is talent and ambition here. Smart investors will get on a plane and take a look at what is happening.

    City of Champions? I’m willing to believe it.

  • Week in Review

  • CanCon 3.0

    I was doing some evening reading I came across and interesting  thought on the intersection of social networks and content:

    Media is fast-becoming an important area for the social network. The news feed, long a place for friends to share personal photos and thoughts, is becoming more of a content discovery engine

    I’ve posited elsewhere on the role of content in the evolution of the Internet. In a nutshell, if Web 2.0 is the social web, then I respectfully submit for your consideration that Web 3.0 is the content web. What I mean by this isn’t that the Web 3.0 is about taking traditional content that has been available in traditional media (literature in books; movies on film; music on CDs) and putting them on the web, obviously we are well into that trend. What I’m referring to is entirely new forms of content that have yet to be created for the social web

    Then my thoughts drift to Canada and the potential behind Canadian start-ups. Canadians have always been innovators in content, even if that innovation didn’t happen at home. Note:

    So does all this bode well for Canadian content companies? As we think about national competitive differentiators, aspects of a country’s economy that sets it apart from the rest of the world- should we be thinking content?

    If Canadian start-ups could combine technology smarts and content smarts, could the result be a whole new class of content, the likes of which we haven’t seen yet?

  • Week in Review

  • Finding a future for Venture Capital in this country

    I wrote a guest piece for The Mark News this week, which was published today. I tried to look at some of the endemic problems which gave us our last swell of Venture Capital funds in Canada, why I thought they came in to being, and what might be next.

    I also tried to spread the blame around a bit.

    At the end of the day, those who hustle and build things that people want will win. It doesn’t matter what side of the table you are on, the rules are the same.

    Get out there and hustle.

  • Week in Review