StartupNorth

Category: Competitions

  • Apply for Strata Launch Pad

    Some rights reserved by GibZilla

    It’s no secret that Big Data is hot. At O’Reilly’s upcoming Strata conference in New York, a panel of VC judges will be choosing the top firms with a Big Data story, who will present on stage during the Strata Summit on September 22.

    I’m one of the organizers of Strata, and it’s a fascinating sector of the industry. New ventures live or dies by their ability to analyze data. Big companies can revitalize ailing product lines with data-driven sales. And elastic computing atop public clouds make new kinds of services possible.

    If you’re a startup with a story to tell around data, or an established business that’s disrupting its industry with a new approach, we’d love to hear from you. You can apply at http://strataconf.com/summit2011/public/cfp/176, but don’t delay! Applications close on Monday, August 22 at 11:59 PM.

    If you’re chosen, you’ll get access to the Strata Summit, gain exposure to hundreds of industry influencers, and get a chance to launch at the leading Big Data event.

  • More GrowConf tickets via ShinyAds & Nokia

    Grow Conference - August 17-19, 2011 - Vancouver, BC

    Need a ticket for the Grow Conference?

    The generous sponsors of the Grow Conference are continuing to offer a few free tickets to some starving startups over the next week. We call this Conference Ticket – Ramen Class.

    Today’s tickets comes from ShinyAds.com and Nokia. These are two very different companies. One is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, the other is a small startup trying to get companies on to their ad serving platform. They see the benefits for startups to attend Grow.

    To win these passes tweet the following today:

    RT to enter! “Hey @nokia – Please send me to the @growconf #growconf in Vancouver http://www.startupnorth.ca/ .

    Tuesday August 9th, Grow Conference organizers will pick the winners who will get a pass for Days 2 and 3 at the 2011 Grow Conference. *Note that travel and accommodations are not included, pay for your own flights and hotels and drinks you cheap and resourceful founders.

    The Grow Conference is a unique three-day conference that brings together the top minds in business, entrepreneurship, technology, and capital to inspire and engage the next generation of disruptive entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter if your business is on or offline, the next-gen entrepreneur knows where their customers are and how to engage them. Today’s entrepreneurs are creating new opportunities, disrupting age-old markets, leveraging technology on their path to being tomorrow’s leaders. The Grow Conference is bringing the best minds of Silicon Valley and Canada together to share lessons learned and inspire action. Be part of this entrepreneurial revolution as we work together to drive innovation for the future. GROW is more than a conference, it’s a movement.

    Follow #growconf on Twitter @growconf

  • Can’t make it to GrowConf? Try TechTalksTO

    Tech Talks TOWe’re big fans of all of the technical community efforts going on across the country. I have the privilege of going to Vancouver next week for GrowConf, but we want to return the favor to local entrepreneurs and students in the GTA. We have 5 tickets for TechTalksTO.

    The effort to encourage participation by local students was led by the team at Uken Games.

    Uken is planning on sponsoring tickets for 3-4 students to attend http://underground.techtalksto.com/. We’ll also be sponsoring the event in general. I was wondering if we could promote this giveaway through an article on StartUpNorth. We haven’t figured out the criteria for selection but we’re thinking either a short paragraph of why we should choose you and a short code puzzle.

    I have purchased my ticket for the event, but I am unable to attend. We will give away one ticket per day starting today until all 5 tickets are gone. Someone else can figure out when that is.

    Uken Games

    How to win a ticket TechTalksTO?

    To win these passes tweet the following until Thursday:

    RT to enter! “Hey @startupnorth @ukengames – Please send me to the @techtalksTO Underground ($INSERT_LINK_TO_YOUR_BLOG/COMPANY).”

    This is a great local event. For developers by developers. Must attend, like the venerable events like FutureRuby and RubyFringe. It is great to see Toronto Ruby Brigade, TechTalksTO, TechnologicTO, AndroidTO, HTML5 Web App Developers and others engaging and supporting the community.

  • Win $5000 – Kik Launches In-Phone SDK and Competition

    In February this year, Fred Wilson wrote a great piece about the need for mobile app “glue” (my words). Here is the exact phrasing:

    “When I was at the music hackday a few weekends ago, I noticed that it was easy to build something interesting by simply snapping together a few web apps and then building some light glue between them. I suspect it will be even easier to do that on mobile and the era of “meta apps” that deliver functionality across multiple apps is upon us. And I think that has the potential to create some new startup opportunities.”

    Well, Kik has become one of the first gluemakers. Read their blog post – The Kik SDK: Build Real-Time Sharing into Your App in 10 Minutes.

    Kik has provided a device resident SDK so that application developers can build sharing into their apps. It is such a powerful idea – sharing done on the device. Until now, if a mobile app developer wanted to do sharing, that capability had to be basically hosted “in the cloud”. Think about picplz & instagram. They have had to use Facebook, Twitter and other “web” platforms, and connect to them via some cloud servers. Well, with Kik’s SDK, mobile apps can now share “natively” on their mobile platform. No more cloud – huzzah!

    ‘Everything is better with friends’ By giving your users the ability to share with each other in real time, your app will be that much more fun and compelling (see the Sketchee story below). Sharing can also give a big boost in adoption – when a user who doesn’t have your app receives a Kik content message from it, Kik offers to take them directly to your download page where they can install it. All of a sudden you aren’t asking your users to share your app with their friends, but to share content from your app with their friends – content that requires them to get your app to view and interact with it. It’s the difference between inviting someone to join a social network vs. tagging a photo of them that requires them to join the social network to view it. And best of all, it will only take you 10 minutes to add this kind of functionality to your app.

    On top of all that, Kik is giving away $5000 to each of the top three applications built on their SDK. Finish your app by August 8th and you can get in on that.

  • 2011 CIX Top 20 Nominations

    CIX Top 20 ApplicationWe’ve written about the work that CIX is doing in building Canadian Technology Accelerator with ties to the US. They continue to build a showcase for Canadian startups in a variety of emerging fields. They have recently announced the nomination process for companies to the Top 20 competition for 2011.

    Robert Montgomery (LinkedIn), Mark Greenspan (LinkedIn, @markgreenspan) and the team at Achilles Media has been working hard to deliver value to the startups that participate in CIX. And we’re seeing a number of past winners have success, traction and exits. Cognovision, the 2009 winner, was acquired by Intel. The 2010 winners included:

    It’s a great opportunity to get access to some of the movers and shakers in digital media and ICT in Canada. And hey, the press coverage doesn’t hurt either. The 2010 short list of 20 companies included an impressive set of digital media and software (ICT in larger player lingo), including:

    Hopefully the entrants for the 2011 cohort will be just as impressive.  If you are a Canadian startup working in Digital Media or Technology and have less than Cdn$10MM in revenue, you should consider applying.

  • Startup Weekend Toronto

    Some rights reserved photo by Seattle Municipal Archives

    Startup Weekend Toronto, which kicks off June 3, is almost sold out; if you’re on the fence, don’t wait much longer, StartupNorth readers can save 20% by using discount code: STARTUPNORTHSW

    This June’s event will have a strong focus on lean startup principles. A fantastic set of speakers are lined up to provide practical advice so you can take what you learn well beyond the weekend itself. While there is no “right” way to start a company, Startup Weekend is here to help provide you with as many tools and connections as possible to help you succeed.

    A great set of speakers for Friday night will kick things off and prepare you for what’s ahead. Throughout the weekend there will be mentors dropping in helping teams with their projects. Saturday night, founders will share war stories. The judging panel includes experienced investors and entrepreneurs who you will have a chance to connect with. Startup Weekend  will round up with dinner and awards at an awesome venue to be announced shortly.

    The winner of Startup Weekend will enjoy more than just street cred, in addition there will be a cash award to help move the project forward, entry into the Ryerson DMZ for 4 months, video production to help on the marketing front, pro bono legal services, a chance to demo at the next Democamp Toronto (June 9), and more.

     

  • The Art of the Pitch

    There are a lot of different formats and presentations about how to create a pitch for investors. I’ve included my favourites about the structure and template – the resources include Viagra, Sequencing, Hacks and the Art of it all. These are great resources about the structure of your presentation and about what to do (or not to do) in your presentation.

    “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus

    For me one of the best ways to learn is to see real world examples and to rip, mix and burn these into my one words and formats. And we are trying to gather a list of great sample pitches. I’ve included Mint.com, Zapmeals, and an awesome angel pitch from Ali Asaria at Well.ca. But we’re looking for additional examples of great pitch decks to help entrepreneurs see what has worked for others.

    The Art, Hacks and Dysfunctional Love of the Pitch

    How to Pitch a VC (aka "Startup Viagra")

    View more presentations from Dave McClure

    The Art of the Pitching

    View more presentations from huer1278ft

    Pitching Hacks at Stanford

    View more webinars from Venture Hacks

    Sample Pitch Decks

    Mint.com Pre-Launch Pitch Deck

    View more presentations from Hiten Shah

    Zapmeals: Sample Startup Pitch Deck (from SuperNova 2007)

    View more presentations from Dave McClure

    Well.ca Angel Presentation

    View more presentations from Ali Asaria

    Submit example pitches

    [gravityform id=5 name=TheArt of the Pitch ajax=true title=”false”]

  • OCE Discovery + Special DemoCamp + One Day Pass

    Editor’s Note: This post is written by Paul Vice. Paul works the OCE team to enable special projects. This includes community outreach with groups like StartupNorth and DemoCamp. OCE has been a proud sponsor of DemoCamp and other StartupNorth events for the last 4 years. We’ve written about OCE Discovery in the past and the support that OCE has offered local startups like Bumptop, Verold, and others is unparalleled. We are excited to be able to offer StartupNorth readers access to OCE Discovery 11 » see below for details about ticketing. – David

    The Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) has teamed up with the StartupNorth team to present a special DemoCamp on May 19th at 3:30pm at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre as part of the Discovery 11 conference.  It is a chance to put DemoCamp in front of a different audience, drawing all the Discovery attendees. In 2010 we had a standing room only crowd. We have space for 300+ this year.

    Discovery is the annual showcase of the best of innovations in Ontario hosted by OCE. Recently named Canada’s Best Trade Show 2010, Discovery has become the premier innovation and commercialization showcase in Canada with over 2500 attendees & over 300 exhibitors.

    OCE Discovery picture of show floor

    Some of the highlights of Discovery this year:

    • Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences is the keynote speaker on the morning of May 19
    • A hot panel on the direction of mobile app development in Canada, moderated by Kunal Gupta, CEO and Founder of Polar Mobile.
    • A full track on Stereoscopic 3D technology including S3D gaming development
    • Indra Laksono from Toronto’s own ViXS Systems on the future of digital technology in the home. (btw, ViXS is a very cool company, check them out.)
    • The return of the Elevator Pitch competition – Dejero Labs and Gridcentric were past award winners.

    Check out the full agenda.

    DemoCamp at Discovery

    Moderated by David Crow (@davidcrow), with guest speaker Anand Agarwala from Bumptop (now at Google) kicks things off with a unique “Art of the Hustle” (Street Smarts for the Startup World) presentation, followed by a showcase of 5 unique selected startups to pitch in front of an audience of over 300 participants, including panel members:

    Discovery is not the usual DemoCamp venue. But, we are looking to accomplish 2 goals:

    • Put some interesting, exciting new DemoCamp start-ups in front of an new audience; and,
    • Put DemoCamp in front of that new audience and inspire some of them to join future DemoCamps

    Want to demo?

    We are looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight from a highly connected, if occasionally cynical, crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, and pitch advice and the opportunity to deal with the hecklers.

    Apply to Demo

    Want join the audience, offer advice, heckle and get to explore the full conference floor?

    Discovery is a full conference and trade show at the MTCC with all the typical costs and overheads. We run it on a cost recovery basis with a lot of very generous help from sponsors, but costs are a lot more than your typical Democamp.

    But, we want you there. You can join us at DemoCamp and visit Discovery  with a one day pass May 19 for $250 if you use the promotion code DC250 when you register. (The full price for the 2 days is $895, $75 for students with ID.)

    OCE Discovery 11 May 18-19, 2011

  • Choking online media growth in Canada

    So let’s review what I did yesterday:

    1. Read about how video and social networks are helping to re-shape the Middle East
    2. Worked a bit on a start-up I’m advising called Shiny Art, which rents video art over the Internet
    3. Watched the amazing UGC documentary Life in a Day on YouTube
    4. Read Canada regulators are allowing ISPs to impose ridiculously low bandwidth caps on consumers and charge extortionary prices on those who exceed those caps

    The first three activities rely on (or at least are vastly improved by) high bandwidth availability. You need bandwidth to connect people, to share images and video, to communicate world-changing ideas, and create economic growth by (hopefully) getting a new business off the ground.

    Every day witness the trend of how social and video based applications are changing the world, but by allowing artificially low bandwidth caps to come into effect, Canada is essentially saying it is not interested in communicating ideas, fostering new media and business models, or growing its own online media industry.

    For an hour and a half yesterday, I watched YouTube’s elegant documentary about that looked at life on a single day on Earth. The documentary was shot  entirely by everyday  people from around the world. Could such an initiative ever be successful in Canada?

    It is laughable for Canada to say it wants to grow online media, and then allow caps bandwidth caps that choke off that very growth. Low bandwidth caps and online media are mutually exclusive ideas, they cannot occupy the same space at the same time. The economics are really simple, if you make bandwidth expensive, bandwidth-hungry applications (read: online media) will not take root.

    Case in point: as mentioned, I’m advising a company that I think has a pretty neat idea, let customers transform their HDTVs into canvases for contemporary art by providing video art rental over the Internet. Last weekend, when I explained the concept to a relative in Canada, he said it would be too expensive for some consumers. At first I didn’t understand what he meant but now I get it. If you only have access to 25GB/ month (or about 12 hours of viewing) would you spend that valuable bandwidth experimenting on a media service you know little about?

    Canada has for years fretted about how to build a cultural industry and in the digital age, it is harder to imagine a policy more damaging to that goal. Bandwidth caps basically say that if you have an idea to build or offer an online media service, do it someplace else, Canada isn’t interested.

  • Giveaway – 2 Tickets to Art of Marketing on March 7, 2011

    The Art of Marketing on March 7, 2001 in TorontoStartupNorth and The Art of Marketing are giving away 2 tickets to the March 7, 2011 conference in Toronto. The conference features:

    It’s a great line up of speakers. I’ve seen Guy Kawasaki speak in the past. He hosted a conversation with Steve Ballmer at  Mix08 in Las Vegas. And comedy ensued:

    Guy Kawasaki at Mix08

    Guy has written a number of books that I have enjoyed reading including: Reality Check, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy and The Art of the Start. Very entertaining speaker, and I’ve been told that we should try to organize a startup hockey game for him while he is here.

    I’m most excited about hearing Dr. Sheena Iyengar. I did not know that she was born in Toronto. Her TED Talk about The Art of Choosing and cultural biases is a very engaging and insightful presentation.

    Dr. Sheena Iyengar at TED on The Art of Choosing

    Giveaway

    This is a giveaway. We have 2 tickets. The tickets have no cash value. Someone from StartupNorth will randomly select 2 emails submitted before 11:59:59 EST on Feb 27, 2011. There might be a skill testing question. Please only one entry per person. What’s an entry? Your name and email address. It’s our promise that we will always respect your privacy. From time to time we may email you to inform you about future events, or updates about the giveaway.

    Entries are closed.

    The promo code: LD27 gives you a $50 discount off the regular ticket price, or $100 discount for groups of 3 or more for The Art of Marketing March 7, 2011 event.