StartupNorth

Author: Thomas Purves

  • DemoCamp Toronto 29 Wrapup

    Last night marked amazingly the 29th event of Toronto’s increasingly supernumerative DemoCamp scene. To warm up the crowd we had a little help from legendary Canadian investor and the man with a few more twitter followers than you, @howardlindzon. In case you didn’t make it, here’s my notes for you, of varying coherency, of the course of the evening.

      The job of entrepreneurs is to get in the way of trends. You don’t need to predict the future you just need to get in the way of trends. The larger and longer the trend the better. Lindzon is not a value investor, he’s a momentum and sentiment investor.

      Lindzon started his company through social leverage. But it didn’t come over night, he met Fred Wilson over the course of a year and becoming friends before starting Wallstrip which they sold to CBS. And gained some more cred. But once you sell your company you lose control of your vision. Then he passed on Twitter at 20M valuation. You don’t always catch the winner. You make mistakes. But he could see when he was wrong so he was, by force of will, able to get into Tweetdeck, Bit.ly and others, the idea was to put himself in the way of the trend. I didn’t understand Twitter but I knew it was a trend and was able to buy everything around Twitter. You have to use social leverage to find investors that understand your domain and understand your passion.

      Raising money is an art. We’re in a great environment to raise money but that doesn’t entitle you. You have to have a great angle of attack against your competitors, you have to be great at telling your story. You have to explain the benefits of the product not the features.
      Dashboards, I want to get my life down to as few screens as possible. Also I read Hackernews and TechMeme in order to understand the sentiment of my industry.

    On to the Demos:

    500 pixels – Oleg Gutsol @500px
    There are many picture websites like it, but this one is ours. Very pretty pictures. We promote the best pictures in the world. Recently closed funding, getting some media buzz. Also a premium themed galleries for photographers. What we nailed was not just the product but the community. Something that they doing better than Flickr “Flickr has become a dump site” 500px is an art site.

    TitanFile
    Sending secure files, slick interface. Common demo gods, Soo… “lets assume that you received the email…”. No, wait it’s there, to the adulation of the crowd, stupid Gmail delay. You send an notification email and then it also calls you to IVR read you a passcode. Then everything is tracked. Wants to thank Assange for helping to push their business forward. Accountants, lawyers anyone who needs to make sure their documents get there every single time. And delivery receipt is an added value.

    High Score House – turn household chores into a game for your kids
    Great playful signup screen that sets the tone. Brilliant super obvious reminders and rewards for doing stuff like making a bookmark and remembering your PIN. App awards virtual currency (stars) that parents can set the price for like what the value of helping to make dinner and what points are worth for tv time or a new toy. The Ah Ha! moment is when kids are running up the stairs to do clean their room. Also great for kindness points, what have you done that’s kind today? Cool! You rock! You earned it! This app really rocks and has so much character. App works great on the ipad. Beta testing is spending just a tiny bit of money a day on facebook to bring on 10 moms at a time. Key dashboard metric number of exclamation points in emails from moms. Lookout ClubPenguin, with a little work, High Score House could will be the next big exit that gets Canada to a billion dollar year. Judging by Twitter response, High Score House wins Democamp this round.

    Money quotes: we’ve got moms all over loving us, but like, in the acceptable way
    Top question: Can you make a version that works on spouses? [I don’t know, but in our household we’re already debating who’d the “parent” side of the account…]

    Vizualize.me – is a startup that won startup weekend. It’s a 5 day old startup.
    Problem is how do you display yourself in a different way than a resume. It’s an infographic that scrapes your linkedin profile and makes really pretty graphs. Sign-up rate they just hi 12 thousand users 5 days after launching the company… [holy crap] Product itself is nicely viral because you post your infographic to twitter or facebook or linked and other people see it and feel compelled to create their own. Feemium businessmodel. We want to be the site you go to brand yourself visually and socially. Could easily expand into other personal visual branding applications… but that can wait at least until next week.

    WeAreTOTech – A new community service launched by @Michele_Perras, @LeilaBoujnane & @AprilDunford
    A Toronto-based Directory that will profile, showcase, promote and connect profiles of local tech heros in Toronto, to help you make connections, to help you find advisors, mentors and conference speakers. Inspired by WeAreTechNY and “in the hopes of connecting everyone, shining a spotlight on developers, CEOs and founders, executive, hackers who make our tech community what it is, we decided to give you We Are TO Tech.” This is a fantastic idea, and what they need right now is you if you fit the description to fill out this form here.

    Xtremelabs – Alpha Slides demoed by James Woods
    Remove some of the failings of presentations, by making a simple mobile app that broadcasts slide decks to everyone in your audience’s devices simultaneously. Works in a coffee shop, boardroom or conference. Alpha Slides is in the App Store now. I can cast a mini slide deck from one mobile device to another. When I slide a slide it slides on your slide too. Cross platform is the key (apple now has mobile keynote for iphone but only does iphones). Business model is to sell app space, and freemium features. You can follow a conference when not at a conference or I can follow a conference when I’m at one even if I can’t get close to the screen and take it with me when I’m done. A company like Dell could have their own secure instance if they want to as an internal meeting tool. App has potential, could see this taking off in the enterprise as well as the personal or conference usage.

    That’s it folks. Awesome caliber of demos again this round. We’re now looking forward to the big DemoCampTO 3-oh. You know what they say, thirty is flirty.

    Further reading: @Sachac’s nifty sketchnotes of DemoCamp Toronto 29

  • Rogers out to woo mobile devs with Catalyst APIs

    This a.m. in Toronto, the folks at everyone’s favourite big red carrier, invited a collection of local developers and partners to give a sneak preview of their new carrier services API called Catalyst.

    At first swoopy-rosy-red blush, Rogers’ Catalyst looks almost oddly familiar to that old software branding of a certain other Markham-based technology heavyweight. Functionality wise however, Catalyst has a lot more in common with the similar multi-carrier initiative called OneAPI (also supported by Rogers btw). The difference with Catalyst is that it signals a split with OneAPI to give dev’s access to supposedly deeper/better but also proprietary integration with Rogers network. for now, these are services like messaging, location and billing. For developers, richer but proprietary api is either good or bad news, depending on your appetite for carrier-specific app development. Rogers and Fido may be Canada’s biggest mobile operator. However, tying your app to their network is obviously no way to reach every Canadian, let alone the world market.

    Those caveats aside, there is good stuff in this API. First up, everything is build on web and “SOAP and restful standards” promising to abstract away historically crufty telco interfaces, dedicated lines and slow/expensive integration certification.

    Functionality wise in this release we get:

    • Messaging: Web-based SMS origination, SMS delivery confirmation, and “instant” shortcode provisioning
    • Location: Server calls at various levels of accuracy vs speed that allows your cloud to geo-locate and track any handset on the network. A scary thought, but the service also comes with built-in opt-in and privacy controls.
    • Billing: the ability to bill up to $100/month to Rogers bills for apps or content. The revenue split is 30% Rogers, 70% developer, no need for CWTA shortcode to start using billing
    • More stuff, apparently coming soon

    So what does it mean for entrepreneurs and tinkerers? Sure you won’t yet take over the whole world with Rogers-only API integration. However I see a few great use cases: as fast/cheap proof of concept sandbox before you invest in scaling your app with many carrier integrations, for enterprise app development, for academic or mobile research projects. Now if only Rogers would also provide subsidized (or at least more flexible) hardware, sim cards and data plans with their developer programs they’d have a real winner. Where are our api’s for Canada’s aspiring hardware hackers I’d like to know? Where are our api’s for helping us do real commerce over mobile not just virtual goods? I may just be biased, maybe we’ll get there in time.

    The big picture here is we are seeing carriers trying to claw their way back into digital content value chain. It remains to be seen how well a single carrier can compete on alerts, location and content billing which, let’s face it, all smartphone platforms nowadays support some pretty decent version of natively. But notionally that’s fine. More choice and competition is good for developers. I’d like to see more big companies opening their kimono’s and offering up interesting APIs. Once they’re in the wild, have at the Rogers Catalyst APIs and let me know what you think.

    Rogers Catalyst Beta is not publicly available just yet, but should be launching in beta form within a week or so at rogerscatalyst.com

  • How to pitch a business plan

    Sometimes folks ask us, I’ve got this great idea. How should I sell it? So assuming you do have a great idea for all concerned (less common than you’d think, and truly step one), here is one philosophy on the art of the pitch:

    Like all investments decisions, business plans are governed by two famously primal factors fear and greed.

    So there are two pieces to any pitch:

    1) The Greed: getting the audience excited about the proposition and bought-in to the concept and to the idea that your idea will choose one: a) make them enormously rich or b) get them promoted c)save the company

    2) The Fear: sufficiently allaying all their fears that you are not a total liar, not charming and honest but totally delusional, that the thing could possibly work, that even if it did work that you could deliver it, that there aren’t hidden crazy risks, that you can protect the IP, that the competitors won’t steamroll you/them, that you can distribute it, that you can market it, that you have the experience to run it, that there is an exit strategy (someone will clearly buy it/them/you for millions/billions) or that it will contribute somehow forever to their bottom line, that it makes good money for them not just you, that they won’t get fired for it etc.

    Just like any day on the stock market, your audience’s decision making process is going to be dominated some days more by the greed, some days more by the fear.

    Depending on the audience, the nature of the idea and especially depending on what stage your business is at, the audience may be mostly interested in quantitative business case or a qualitative case.

    There’s a catch that you won’t always know what kind of audience you’re facing before you walk in to the room. But this is why you are good on your feet, and not fixated on following a particularly rigid script or slide sequence right?

    The more mature the business proposition, the more you should depend on numbers (and correspondingly the more likely the chance the actual results will measure anywhere close to your crazy-ass assumptions). For very early stage ideas, your investors or customers tend to be placing a bet more on you personally than they are on the exact specifics of the idea or the specifics of crazy numbers you happen to be sputtering. For mature business ideas on the other hand, it’s more about the proven case studies or the solid comparable proxies for similar or identical products in adjacent markets.

    Try to never say things like “these are our conservative projections…” or “if we convinced only 1% of everyone in China to buy our product…”. Smart audiences will immediately, and correctly, interpret either of these statements as “you have no idea what you are talking about”

    Anyway hope this helps

    The best way to write a business case is always “it depends”

    Mostly it depends on what you audience wants to hear, and how they want to hear it.

    If you have your own grizzled words of experience, drop em in the comments.

  • Live notes from DemoCamp24 w/ Gary Vaynerchuk

    gary

    DemoCamp24 in Toronto is sold out, for those following at home, some live notes:

    First up: Gary Vaynerchuk:

    Greatest takeaway: big game is patience, way too many ppl give up right before it’s about to happen. If you don’t have the passion, if you’re not bleeding out the eyeballs for it you won’t make it, if it’s about cash you won’t make it. Patience and passion the pp theory. If you talk to ppl in their 90s they never say I wish I made more cash. The people who wake up in the morning who are pissed are losing.

    What you can do is put down the wii, maybe not watch a lost marathon every weekend, you can start a company. That wasn’t true years ago. The fact that the internet, the most underrated thing in our society.

    Question: How do you find your passion? Really hard. People roll up to me and say Gary what’s my passion? What am I fucking Yoda? What I can say you can’t be afraid of having more than one passion. Don’t limit yourself just skiing or rockclimbing, by doing that you limit your audience. We are in the personal brand business now, there are no editors to control who you are.

    I never want to hear from people a 5 year plan? 5 years? 5 years ago there was no twitter, 5 years ago you needed a .edu to get into facebook. I react to what’s out there, I worry about what I can control.

    Stickiness is important. You could get a trillion hits and it wouldn’t matter two foundations: quality content and customer service. Zappos is massively underrated. Zappos was the only competitor Amazon really worried about. Because Zappos wasn’t competing on price with Amazon. People cared more about Zappos. How many of you out there personally email to thank anyone who posts a comment on your blog?

    First pizza, now on to the Demos:

    Jason Roks – founder of guigoog now called zero.in thanking the DemoCamp Community and announcing his Angel funding which he closed thanks to his demo at DemoCamp22. PROTIP: close Angel faster with convertible debentures and avoiding the challenge of valuing your company.

    GridCentric.ca – cluster computing demo. Virtual cluster. Normally when you scale out your cluster, you need to scale out the same machines, with virtual clusters you can add anything, you can even move the virtual machines while running from machine to machine. With GridCentric you can grow the scale the datacenter by instantly cloning running machines. Demo’s drawing a purple elephant on a paint app on one virtual machine, cloning that virtual machine and we see the same drawing app running on the new virtual machine. Idea: if you need a hundred machines you can scale them out to hundred virtual machines then throw them away when done. How does this compare to EC2? This is an EC2 on steroids for people who have their own clusters. Q: It is based on Zen hypervisor, modified with their control stack. Moneyquote: “I don’t want this to sound super nerdy.”

    DataTO. Helps the city of Toronto prioritize and release data. Have a site like a dell ideastorm with digg-like interface for people to submit and vote on requests for the city to open data. Now that the city has opened data, they really need help because they don’t have resources to open everything at once. The whole site was built in a week (wow) with developer time (@thody‘s) donated by his employer Architech Solutions. This is a great cause. Since the launch of this service many other cities Paris, London, Ottawa, Victoria have expressed interest. Intention is to open source the project, contact @remarkk if you want to contribute to the project.

    5BlocksOut solves the “lost in a big city problem”. It’s an online community where you ask questions or create missions like “where do you like going out for a drink?”. So far, looks like a gigpark crossed with digg for super local places and events. It also has a rather cute little hedgehog in the graphics. Other missions: I’m a hairy beast can you suggest a good esthetician? Indoor winter fun for little kidlets? site also let’s you drill down on hundreds of very local neighbourhoods, follow them and follow other “locals” twitter style. Request an invite, and metion DemoCamp to get a beta invite.

    Datamartist is (another) excel killer for desktop data analysis. Let’s you build db queries using a combination of visual drag and drop blocks and excel-like formula expressions. It’s a scratch pad for data, merge sets, cut paste columns from various source, with quick visualizations like distribution or ven diagrams of what data from one set that can join to another. Pretty neat, $750 a license, if you need this, we guess you probably know who you are. Moneyquote “we’re very oldschool (we’re a windows desktop app and,) it has business model: you buy it from us”. bonus points: for non-profits, it’s free.

    Equentia. is a news and, um, tag cloud aggregator of vertical news. Here’s an Eqentia portal for Canada Tech News.

    Cadmus is a neat idea. It answers the question: “what has been talked about on twitter, on rss etc. since the last time I was online”. What it will do is aggregate, crunch down and thread conversations for you. Algorithm works by looking at how important is the source and how important is the content. Moneyquote: “yes you can filter out foursquare updates from twitter”

    That’s all folks. Congrats and thanks to all the brave demoers. Time for beer.

    Follow DemoCamp24 on twitter: #dc24 or #democamp

  • Toronto mobile meetup Thusday night

    Headsup! Startup and Community North’s sister site (better half?) WirelessNorth.ca is sponsoring a mobile developers meetup in Toronto this Thursday (that’s October 9th, 2008) at the Bedford Academy on leafy Prince Arthur street. There will be beer, fellow developers, tasty nachos and some prizes to give away. This meetup is focused on iPhone developers in celebration of the lifting of your NDA, but all mobile devs and startups with a mobile angle are welcome. Hope to see you there.

    Deets: Toronto Mobile Developers Meetup Thursday on WirelessNorth.ca

    Eventbright Registration link

  • TTW Startup day: Albert Behr on Exit Strategies

    I attended some of the sessions on Wednesday for Toronto Tech Week, here are my notes from Albert Behr’s session on exit strategies:

    “If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there”. Was the headline advice at the “Designing for Liquidity” startup day event of Toronto Tech Week. Kudos to the organizers for pulling together some great startup content, the day was a great warmup for startupempire soon to come.

    The Liquidity event panel had good stuff from Tim Lee of Gowlings on the legal side of selling your company (hint: you’ll need a lawyer), Tim Lee of GrowthWorks on the VC perspective (yes virginia, there still is VC activity in Canada, just as much as pre-bubble …but… to fewer companies and you can forget about early stage, how you raise your first 0-4M is your problem, learn to love angels, government handouts and your bootstraps). But the real barn burning presentation was Albert Behr on how to get from zero to sold in three years. Here’s my hasty notes:

    First off: the IPO is dead. SOX killed the IPO, so did the bubble. There’s only two ways to a happy ending these days, keep running your company into the sunset or get bought out.

    Tech is still a great market. 3 Trillion a year. But here’s the challenge. We’re 30 years into the industry and it’s now an oligopoly. Doesn’t matter what tech you build there are only, maybe 30 players out there that matter that are your exit strategy for acquisition. And the list is getting smaller, the list of companies on the Nasdaq is down 25%.

    And the tech cycles are getting faster. You are only hot when you are hot, you will never be hot again. There’s only one company in the history of tech that has been hot twice, and that’s Apple. You are not Apple. You have maybe 3 years, or 30-36 months to make it. So build a 3 year business plan and get the hell out there. Forget 5 year plans.

    Here’s the strategy. Choose you 2-3 likeliest suitors and and “antagonize” the hell out of them until they buy you.

    But remember we are Canadian we have to play to our strengths. Everyone makes the same mistake and tries to sell direct. Canada is great at producing engineers, we are not good at scaling. Do not go toe to toe with direct sales forces of your American competitors, they will have 3 times as much money, they will blow you out of the water (anecdote, one time I raised 27M, a lot of money for a canadian company right? Wrong, my one competitor raised 90M, the other 140M. I had one sales guy in NYC, they had 14. Don’t take the market head on.

    Instead, build your channels, license your technology, go the OEM route. Don’t worry about margins 100% margins of nothing is still nothing. All that matters is footprint, getting your stuff distributed. You’ve got only 30months to get your product on to every “Walmart shelf” [insert top three distribution channels for your industry here].

    So first, lock down your IP. This is very important. Provisional file everything, it’s not free but it’s not that expensive either. Provisional filings are cheap, do it in Canada, the US and Europe. In Albert’s companies he gives the CTO’s quota’s of 1-2 IP filings a quarter.

    Canada is good for starting out, build your first 0.5M in revenue here, not to prove that the distribution works, but that the technology works. The dogs will eat the dog food. That the product/beta is ready. Then look south, focus on (only) the US and western parts of Europe. You need the distribution deals here to drive you to the 5-10M revenues where you start to become interesting to acquisitors.

    Tightly integrate your stuff with 2-3 existing players, both technically and businesswise. Create the app that gives blackberry an edge over iphone, give microsoft an edge over IBM etc.

    Then go to the big guys with a deal. Don’t be a Canadian wimp, use linkedin and go straight to the general manager or VP in charge. In the US they do deals, if you have something that might grow their business, they will give you 10 minutes of their time. White label your technology, let them slap their brand on it. (Only after you’ve locked down the IP). Make it a product that brings them incremental sales, and or a competitive edge.

    Use exclusivity deals, but tie it to revenue targets and make it time limited so they have incentive to move it and you get your product back if they don’t.

    Then, this is how you antagonize them. They’ve now outsourced engineering to you by proxy. As the sales grow and they keep having to pay royalties, they will see where this is going and you’ll drive their CFO crazy. The company will come to you to buy you out. Sell at 4x revenue multiple and move on, next company…

    easy right?

  • Lift08 Venture Night: 5 Panelists and one MC and 8 pitches

    I am here at Lift08 in Geneva, Switzerland. Tonight is “Venture Night”, a startup launch-pad that had 50 submissions, which were narrowed to 8 startups who all demoed and presented their business case tonight. The format is a good one, and it is similar to Under the Radar: 5 minute demo and business model, 5 minute questions from panelists and 5 from the audience. This is a posh event, wine and Swiss breadsticks no less and the turn out is substantial for this “pre-lift” event (I’d estimate 400+). And the inimitable Guido Van Nispen as MC.

    A venerable panel featuring techcrunch europe, VCs and Angels, a top euro blogger and long time LIFTer Robert Scoble.

      1) Viewdle.tv
      A video search company. Find people in video, images, using contextual and voice cues. More than just tags. Very slick and ajaxy. Searches for clinton, then narrows by Iran, shows in search results streamable clip of Hillary speaking of Iran. Options: sort by tag, by content channel, and by timeframe and, oh god, they have video tag clouds (what is this 2006?). But the seach works in the demo, and it’s cool.

      Have widgets for blogs. Business model is video search sold to content producers (reuters) or video aggregators. Processing is computationally intensive, not trying to crawl or index web on their own (smart).

      2) holistis
      Converting online store visitors to buyers – 98% of online shoppers don’t make purchases. Uses past behaviors, intention and behavioral targeting to convert viewers to buyers. Turn known visitors into loyal customers through targeted content. Theory is to grow the 2% end of the funnel as more profitable than the 98% end.

      3) wuala
      Free and simple online hard drive. This has been done before. The twist, using distributed storage and bandwidth. You have to share your own HD and bandwidth to us it. Their catch phrase is to be the “skype of online storage” (great catch phrase). Judges are throwing softballs until vc asks about copyright infringement: do they have the same issues as youtube or ftp servers. Revenue streams, ads, photo prints, or sell premium services. They make sure data is available even if large part of network is down, they also back up on their own servers and their system works on bittorrent principles: fast downloads through fragmented storage

      4) Mixin
      What are other people doing?, I want to plan my Friday evening. Like a dopplr for activities with your friends. Nice looking screens. looks like a jaiku/twitter calendar mashup. This begs the question: why not bundle, or at least mash this up with existing social networks instead of creating a new one. I asked this question. They want to, and will support integration.

      5) IO
      Digital is more present in the physical world like table top computing, surface computing and like bumptop but real. For public spaces, skinnable walls and tables gorgeous interactive surfaces, rippling water and blooming flowers, more art than tech. VC panelist says there are a few funded competitors – which also means this is a validated market with some action in it. I’d like one of these for my living room. But they have no interest in making it cheap, it is not a consumer technology.

      6) cocommentwas launched way back at Lift 2006 syndicates and collects and aggregates blog comments tries to solve the problem of bog comment viability trouble is blog comments are less interesting than blog posts. Cocommenters comment more and are stickier. Rev model is ads, and conversation tracking. A lot of “former” users on the panel asking ome questions about performance, usability.

      7) clipperz
      Do you trust online services, do you trust them with your data? You should have control of your data. Keep it to yourself. Data is stored on cards that aggregates all your secure data and logins. talk about a vulnerability, get hacked once and they get everything. Admit that I don’t really understand this play or how it’s differentiated. Authentication and security is important, but in reality, mostly people say they do, but, in practice, don’t care. Many many startups before them have leapt onto this sword of federated online security management.

      8 ) Pixelux entertainment
      Digital molecular models. animate materials like materials instead of scripted animations. Metals bend like metal, trees bend like trees, great for realtime video game animations. It reduces the costs of video game production through procedural physics rendering. DMM physics engine, realtime animation libraries, based on glass, metal, wood, etc. the algorithms know how it will break, bend or shatter. For movie market or for games and animation. Flat fees, and licencing business models on titles sold by the millions. nice.

    Whew, a solid deck of demos. Now this is a larger scale of event (and these are later stage companies) than our typical democamp or startupcamp, but I’m left feeling that we in the Canadian community need to step up our game. A lot of good Tech here (with a capital T). Good polish of apps, good polish of demos and some impressive technology that could actually work (mostly). Bravo.

  • CommunityLend Raises $2.5M

    Community LendSocial lending is coming to Canada. Founded more than a year ago by Michael Garrity and Colin Henderson and following the successful model of Zopa in the UK and Prosper in the U.S., CommunityLend will be launching a P2P lending service in Canada.

    P2P lending works like this. Borrowers provide their details to CommunityLend, including a public profile and reason for the loan. CommunityLend performs a credit check on the borrowers and then posts the borrower’s story, profile and credit rating to a community of prospective lenders/investors in an eBay-like interface. Investors then bid on pieces of the loan (each loan is typically divided up among many lenders which mitigates everyone’s risk). After the bidding process the loan is then issued at the minimum rate required to satisfy enough lenders to fund the full amount.

    The company will be offering, at first, one standard type of loan – 3 years, fixed rates to a maximum of 25k. Judging by other services like Prosper.com, social lending seems to fill a gap in the product offering of a traditional bank. Rates are typically in the 10-18% range, which fits above bank rates for unsecured lines of credit and below that of high interest credit cards. CommunityLend makes money by charging a small spread to both the borrower and the lender.

    With the current “sub-prime” troubles in global credit markets, the timing may be perfect for CommunityLend. Banks in Canada and the US have been tightening their credit policies making borrowing more difficult, especially for marginal creditors. The transparent, market-based P2P model may well prove to be a solution than can judge and price loans in this segment better than the big institutions.

    In addition to the funding announcement (of mostly non-Canadian investment dollars btw), CommunityLend is also announcing a new slate of directors including Barry Campbell, former MP and Secretary to the Minister of Finance and Jim Jones CEO of GMAC Residential Capital [100B lending portfolio].

    Congratulations to the team for reaching this milestone. We look forward to providing a more thorough review of the lending service once it goes live (we’re told early to mid next year).

    For the time being you can get more info at the company’s newly launched website: CommunityLend.com.

  • Finally, Wireless Competition Explodes in Canada

    The 3 stoogesShove over Rogers, Bell and Telus. In announcing the rules to the upcoming (May 2008) advanced spectrum auction, industry minister Jim Prentice has blasted open the doors to new wireless competition in Canada. Here is a quick overview of the new rules:

    • 40 of the 105 available megahertz will be set aside for new entrants
    • Incumbents will be required to allow roaming on their networks at reasonable rates (this is crucial as any new entrant may start regionally and take up to a few years to establish full national coverage)
    • Incumbents will be required to share towers with new entrants (significantly reducing startup costs and redundant infrastructure)

    The government has given the would-be entrants (and pretty much everyone except for the existing telcos and their bankers) everything they were asking for. The game is on for startups and new entrants in the Canadian wireless space. So get to it. The crew here at StartupNorth are just this minute back at the orbiting headquarters, scrambling beneath couch cushions for the mere few hundred million in change needed to finance a spectrum bid and national roll out.

    Even if launching a whole new wireless carrier is a little out of your league, this is great news for tech entrepreneurs in Canada. Despite recent improvements, Canada has long lagged the world in terms of mobile adoption, open access to networks and affordable data rates. With wireless rapidly becoming ?the new last mile? of the internet, our ability to innovate is going to depend on the emergence of a competitive wireless market. Assuming the new rules bring real competition to Canada, this announcement is the best thing tech entrepreneurs could hope for.

    If you want a hint of where the wind is blowing for open and competitive wireless markets, look no further than Google?s recent announcement of the Android API and Verizon?s move to open their network to non-Verizon devices (even non-phone devices). Time to get out that whiteboard, and dust off those pitch decks.

    As if this weren?t big enough news itself… The other reason that we?re bringing you this story on StartupNorth.ca is to announce that, starting Monday, the North family is getting a little bigger. WirelessNorth.ca will be launching and joins the StartupNorth family as a partner site. Tune in for more coverage of mobile startups, industry trends, device reviews, and everything awesome yet to come from the Great Wireless North.