StartupNorth

Category: News

  • Start Building Empires

    StartupEmpireJevon and I apparently picked a conference name that exists as a registered trademark. We have been informed by our lawyer that our usage of the name did not infringe on the existing trademark. Rather than start with a potential tenuous situation, we decided we would just rebrand the conference.

    StartupEmpire is the new name. Does it remind you of Star Wars? Or the British Empire? It is ostentatious. It is bold. It is intended to inspire entrepreneurs to start building empires. History remembers the legacy of successful entrepreneurs. JP Morgan. Andrew Carnegie. Howard Hughes. Henry Ford. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Jeff Bezos. Mark Cuban. Our goal is to provide the tools to help build the next generation of entrepreneurs build their empires.

    What: StartupEmpire
    When: Thursday, November 13th and 14th, 2008 (all day)
    Where: Diesel Playhouse 

    56 Blue Jays Way
    Toronto, Ontario M5V 2A2

    We are focused on practical, real-world advice from entrepreneurs, investors and industry experts that will help early-stage companies at different stages. How do you build a cashflow statement? What does a marketing plan and budget look like for a startup with no money? What tools and services are available to set up your development, testing and production environments? How important is source control and bug tracking? What does a product roadmap look like for a startup practicing agile development? What does a basic shareholders agreement look like? How do you avoid getting sued? What do you do when you get a cease-and-desist letter? What is a term sheet from an investor? How does a developer do business development?

    We?ll be announcing the next set of speakers in the next couple of days. We?re also interested in learning about what you would like to see at StartupEmpire. Drop me a note with what would make you attend StartupEmpire in an instant.

  • Announcing StartupNorth – Canada's Conference for Startups – November 13-14

    A lot of you have probably been wondering why we haven’t announced any events lately. That’s because we have been working on something really fun.

    I am happy to finally go public with StartupNorth, the Conference.

    David and I wanted to create something that would give us all a place to come together, connect, learn and that we would all walk away from feeling inspired.

    We will be making announcements here over the next few months as we get closer to the conference. We are still working on bringing on more great speakers and a day of pragmatic, hands-on, workshops.

    We are going all out to give you a world-class conference right here at home, and we will be asking you for your help, a lot. In the next few days and weeks we will taking your votes on what sessions and workshops you want to see and really need.

    What is it? Canada’s conference for Startups
    Who will be there? Students,?Entrepreneurs?and Funders
    When is it?? November 13th and 14th, 2008 in Toronto, Ontario
    Day 1: Practical hands-on workshops and speakers to help entrepreneurs learn how to get started or, for those with a startup, how to take it to the next level.?Workshops will include:
    ? Asessing your market opportunity ? Why should I use your product?
    Strategies for getting users
    ? Presentation skills for developers ? Legal pitfalls for startups
    ? Shaking the money tree ? Pricing Models
    ? Product Design ? First customers and other business development pitfalls?
    ?
    Day 2: Networking, speakers and in-depth panels with a focus on Canada’s role in the international startup ecosystem.
    ?
    Speakers include:

    Can’t wait to see you there, this is going to be fun!

  • Tineye now in Open Beta

    For everyone who didn’t get in on our rounds of TinEye invitations, suffer no more! The service is now in open beta and you can get a free account.

    The launch is getting a lot of coverage including Ars Technica, Information Week, and PC Pro. 

     

  • Tip of the week . . .

    . . . do stuff with email. That gets people all hot and excited.

    For example “We are going to enable Web 2.0 collaboration via email“.

    That one is a freebie. Heads will nod.

    I even did some market research for you: 183 billion email messages are sent per day. So if you can just capture 10% of that market, and monetize each email for 10c . . . .

  • Kontagent – Deeper Social Network Analytics

    Kontagent, which straddles Toronto and San Francisco and Toronto, and is co-founded by Toronto native Albert Lai (no relation to Rick Segal), launched today at the Facebook Developers Conference. This is one of a few Canadian announcements coming out of the conference.

    The application is an analytics suite focused on social networking platforms, not unlike Refresh Analytics who we profiled several months ago.

    Kontagent claims to offer a deeper level of analytical reporting than other available tools and, based on the previews available on their website, they have taken a page from some of the larger analytics suites.

    The platform has been under development for almost a year and requires deeper integration in to the application it is monitoring than other suites might. It is also currently free, but is in Alpha testing.

    It’s good to see Albert take the shroud off of what he has been working on, he has been pretty quiet since he left Kaboose, inc., after selling his last startup, BubbleShare.

  • praized.com – Local, niche, reviews and communities

    Lets say that you run a highly successful online community of blond vegans who have a penchant for Prosciutto. You would like to manage local reviews for that community, but you do not have the technical ability or the data you need to get it kick started.

    Montreal based Praized is an innovative solution in the heavily contested local listings and review space. Praized is designed a white-label platform that integrates seamlessly with editorial content by using either an API or plug-ins that are compatible with SixApart?s MovableType and WordPress. Bloggers and site editors can embed snippets of merchant information within posts or news articles to drive traffic to their Praized-powered local section. Praized also designed its platform to be available to Facebook application developers and others through an API.

    Praized communities enable users to search, discover and discuss places with like-minded people. Users benefit from discovering the ?long tail? of places via discussions on lesser known local merchants that struggle to be found through Web search. End-users also get real value from social tools that allow them to tag, comment, bookmark, share and vote on places that matter to them.

    Praized is bringing a really novel and sensible approach to local listings. Realizing that you can bridge the gap between the hype-local and centralized business models can bring opportunities in a lot of markets, and that is what Praized is doing here.

    The first Praized-Powered community is now active at Mocolocal and they also recently announced distribution agreements with Yellowbook in the US and Yellow Pages Group Co. in Canada.

    Other Canadian local-search and review companies include iBegin, who have moved in to the data wholesale business, and ZipLocal (TSX:ZIP) who recently launched ZipDating. Praized does go beyond just reviews and listings, they also have a recommendation system that allows users to suggest places and things to friends in their social network, including Facebook.

  • Conceptshare launches new desktop companion

    Sudbury, Ont. based Conceptshare launched a new desktop companion application today to make it easier to keep track of your Conceptshare workspaces.

    Conceptshare, who we have covered a few times before have been constantly improving their product and this update comes just over six months since their last major iteration.

    The companion application is currently in “beta”, and there were a few obvious problems when I tried it out, especially the part where it told me I had no internet connection, but I am confident that it will be in good shape by the time they are pushing it out more aggressively to customers.

  • Follow a Canadian Startup Story

    Michael Parkatti and Michael Marrone, both from Calgary, have recently gone to Cambridge, Massachusetts to join the latest group of startups at YCombinator.

    They will be keeping a diary on globeandmail.com as they go through the journey of building their new company.

    We have also arranged with the guys to do a series of interviews with them here on StartupNorth. The first interview will be done by Austin Hill. Keep an eye out for it.

  • Lessons in Social Media, with MediaScrape

    We have covered MediaScrape a few times, and when I joked that they might be the next Capazoo, their CEO came through with a great reference to Cocain.

    Well, they are back. Since this post is not an opinion piece, I will just link you to a recent Montreal Gazette article and quote a few bits. In the interest of presenting the other side of the startup-ecosystem argument, I present the one… the only…

    He’d rather make deals with media conglomerates and Silicon Valley giants over fancy lunches than share ideas over blogs or hobnob with venture capitalists at technology happy hours.

    He doesn’t go to local networking events where entrepreneurs talk about their projects and share feedback:
    “Why would I go? There’s no money – there’s no content at those things. I’m busy. I’m making deals. And the times I did go I just heard a lot of whining that there’s no money in Montreal.”
    He doesn’t have a blog where he logs his company’s progress, details its challenges, and invites dialog from the tech community, in the hopes of increasing his Google cred:
    “I don’t need to be a destination site. For us to use social media gimmicks, to drive traffic to our site would put us as competitors with our clients.
    “We’re a behind-the-scenes enabler.”

    Yet this hardly seems to faze Cavell. He doesn’t feel he needs to satisfy doubting bloggers.
    “Screw them,” he said. “We’re a private company. I don’t have to tell them shit.
    “Blogs are great for open-source editorials, but they’re no substitute for researched journalism.”
    One could chalk up Cavell’s philosophy to his lineage. He’s the son of Charles Cavell, the former head of what is today Quebecor World Inc., when it was still a mighty printer, and former chairman of tabloid chain Sun Media Corp.

    An in case you are wondering, yes: Comments are turned on.

  • As the Web Turns: Spielo – Co-Founders for Sale?

    Just how bad ass of an entrepreneur are you? Will you kick your friends and co-founders to the curb when the time comes? When the money is about to roll in, will you put the rub on your original startup buddies? Should we all be watching our back now before things get too hot?

    According to Yves Doucet, former Vice President and partner in Spielo, a Moncton-based VLT producer, he was stabbed in the back by his partner, John Manship, when their company we on the brink of going from $5 a share to $100.

    Yves and another colleague are now launching a lawsuit for just over $5million that they say they are owed, and another $10 million is losses. The story has been covered a bit by the CBC and TimesTranscript.

    Spielo was, in 1991, just a small startup based in New Brunswick fighting for 60-machine contracts, run by a couple of guys who were dreaming of the big time. The Big Time came when the company was sold to GTech for $180million. In the end though, something went wrong.

    It is impossible to know what really happened, and the court hasn’t made a ruling yet, but the question for me is: How can something so good go so bad?