StartupNorth

Category: New Brunswick

  • 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?

  • Rick Segal announces tour dates [lessons for VCs]

    Rick Segal is going on tour. The idea? Get the message out there about what he, and other VCs, are looking for when they evaluate new opportunities, and help entrepreneurs get a better understanding of what VCs try to do. He will also be providing some useful tools, like sample term sheets.

    This comes as there has been more publicity about the performance of private Venture Capital funds in Canada, and a significant amount of discussion about whether or not it is a good idea to start a company in Canada.

    There is definitely a perception out there of VCs in ivory towers who expect everything to come to them. This is in stark contrast to the attitude that most entrepreneurs encounter when in the valley or elsewhere with a strong VC ecosystem. You get used to seeing VCs out at practically every community event, listening closely and watching as entrepreneurs grow. Those traits are rare here. As someone said to me recently “In any other business, if you complained you had no customers, everyone would tell you you are an idiot. We need to get out there an hustle, we need to find those customers.”

    What Rick is doing is an example of how you can get out of your tower and start mingling with the plebs. The fact is, Canadian VCs aren’t poaching all sorts of great deals from other places, instead they rely on Canada to produce investible startups, and the best way to recognize that is to get involved and to take a long-term view. Venture Capital is only one piece of a big picture, but it is critical that VCs begin to mature along with our Angels and Entrepreneurs.

    There has been a significant amount of anti-VC sentiment in the Canadian startup community and it is probably more related to a feeling of VCs being an unknown than anything else.

    Here are the dates that are set up so far, starting on the east coast

    • April 14th Morning – Halifax NS
    • April 14th Evening – Moncton NB
    • April 15th Evening – St John’s NF

    If you want to register, email rick at jlaventures dot com with “VC Roundtable” in the subject.

  • WalkingSpree.com inks pilot deal with Calgary hospital

    WalkingSpree.com, a Calgary, Alberta based startup run by MeshEast editor Lisa has just signed a deal to run a pilot project in a major hospital

    ” . . .selected patients under the care of local Calgary West Central PCN family doctors will be given USB Pocket Pedometers from WalkingSpree.com to track and automatically upload their walking data to the WalkingSpree website. The patients can add other activities such as swimming or cycling to get a full picture of the calories burned. Patients can also track calories consumed with the online food and nutrition tracker to balance their daily “energy in-energy out” equation, thereby assisting with weight loss and weight-loss maintenance. These patients will receive support from WalkingSpree’s online Fitness and Nutritional Coaches.”

    WalkingSpree provides a USB pedometer which can upload data to the WalkingSpree website, which provides coaching and tracking features. It seems to be a lot like NikePlus, but with more value added features (and I assume upsell opportunities).

    Nice work on getting this pilot together, I am looking forward to hearing the results.

  • mesheast.com – East Coast Startup Blog

    picture-2.pngMeshEast is the latest entrant on to the Canadian Startup blog scene. I was excited to get an email from Lisa Rousseau, who is also working on her own startup, to see that the east coast would finally have a local startup blog. Lisa is going to have some work to do in finding and profiling those elusive east-coast startups, but my guess is that she will find more than enough to get started in her home province of New Brunswick.

    So please, head over to MeshEast and subscribe. We have been covering some of the bigger happenings on the east coast, but there are always a lot of things we just can’t cover. We are working on our own profile of what is going on in Atlantic Canada, and so far I have been excited about what I have seen.

    We have been trying to do as much as we can to encourage local blogs that will cover smaller regions in more detail. Montreal is the luckiest with MontrealTechWatch, which is run by Heri (who might be the hardest working blogger in Canada these days), and Ottawa has StartupOttawa, which is really starting to pick up steam. There are some gaps to fill, so if you are passionate about startups then it is time to get off your butt and step up to the place. I can think of dozens of local blogs I would love to see: Waterloo, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, and the Prairies all come to mind as the biggest gaps out there.

    So get started, and get in touch. We want to help!

  • Coast to Coast: Amateur Sports Teams 2.0

    One of the first startups we profiled on StartupNorth was New Brunswick based Yourteamonline. Since then Yourteamonline has launched version 2.0 of their sports team management suite and added a slew of new features. In the meanwhile, Victoria based TeamPages has also risen in prominence.

    Both TeamPages and YourTeamOnline provide player pages, statistics, team pages and league interaction. It seems like we have a coast to coast fight for the amateur sports team demographic.

    clash.gif

    The market for amateur sports related spending in North America alone is $111 billion. More than enough room for two leaders, and even better if they are both from Canada. The amount of targeted advertising dollars up for grabs is staggering. Add on the amount of money that changes hands for local team sponsorships every year, and things are looking up!

    The first similarity I noticed was the abundant use of blue on both companies’ websites. The choice of colors is not where the similarities end however. And this is where I start to wonder a little.

    Both YourTeamOnline and TeamPages are marketing themselves as a generalized sports team management toolkit. If I were calling the shots here (which I am not!), I would approach each sport differently. YourTeamOnline is starting down this path, they have customized versions for Hockey and Soccer, but their marketing is still focused at a general market, which is going to be tougher to capture. This is the same strategy that every other competitor in the marketplace is using and it is going to be tough to stand out, even with a much better than average offering.

    YourTeamOnline and Teampages both focus on letting individuals, teams and leagues build social networks, and each have unique characteristics that, in my opinion, make them the two best team/league platforms out there. Where most competitive packages focus on the minutiae of managing a team, YourTeamOnline and TeamPages focus on the individual users, whether they are coaches, parents or players.

    I am also impressed with the roadmaps that both companies allude to on their sites. YourTeamOnline has plans to launch youtube-like video uploading and a feature called “SportsWire” that helps get team statistics out to the public, newspapers, and other consumers of team data.

    Is this a clash of the titans? A fight to the death? Jackie Chan vs. Chow Yun Fat? I think it is probably more the result of an overdue idea and a huge market, with scalable revenue opportunities. Will there be one winner, or two? We’ll be watching to find out.

    YourTeamOnline and Teampages have each taken early-stage funding.

  • New Brunswick Startup Competition Finalists (Breakthru)

    breakthru.gifThe finalists have been announced for the New Brunswick startup competition we covered a few months ago.

    I have to say, without having seen the actual products, that this list of startups really surprised me. Things are happening in New Brunswick! The mix is as creative, smart, useful and even as frivolous as any mixup of startups I have seen in other regions. Congrats to NBIF for running this contest and getting these startups some exposure.

    I am looking forward to seeing how this shakes out and who comes out the winner. Read on for the full list of finalists.
    (more…)

  • Go East! Another Startup Competition – New Brunswick

    The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, another quasi-governmental agency in Atlantic Canada, is running it’s own startup competition for New Brunswick startups.

    There aren’t quite as many prizes as in the Innovacorp competition mentioned earlier, but it is still a pretty serious prize package, including a 100,000$ equity investment by NBIF in the winning company along with a mishmash of services that are provided to the various winners.

    Submissions are due September 28th, 2007. You can get the submission form here and there is a Participant Handbook you need to read.

    These competitions are worth your time whether you are established, just getting started, or even just thinking about getting a startup off the ground. The pressure of developing your business, pitching it and then, hopefully, being rewarded handsomely for your work, is all worthwhile.

    Hey, I won one a few years ago and really enjoyed it. That startup, Blogtrack.com, probably wouldn’t have been launched in the end if I hadn’t received the funding that came in due to that competition. It also meant that angel investors came knocking anew. The rest, they say, is history.

    Hat tip to Harold Jarche for pointing us towards this.

  • yourteamonline.ca – social software for sports teams


    Yourteamonline.ca is a Saint John, New Brunswick based startup that is building an online sports team management app, which first launched in November 2006. YourTeamOnline allows coaches and teammates to share game plans, schedules, statistics, photos, videos and information with eachother in a central place.

    YourTeamOnline generates revenue by providing targetted advertising space to (presumably) both local and national advertisers. Knowing how important hockey is in most Canadian communities, I can see how yourteamonline could become a huge hit, but it will probably also fly under the radar of most people. With over 550,000 minor hockey players just in Canada, there will be a lot of opportunity to grow in the coming years if yourteamonline executes properly.

    It’s also important to note that most local advertising is still limited to newspapers, radio and TV. Very few sites can offer targetted advertisement to the minor hockey aged kids and parents in small canadian communities. If Yourteamonline can sell those ads, I think they could do very well.

    YourTeamOnline only has 2 employees right now, but have recently taken on seed funding in order to develop their business further, and they are currently seeking Round A funding in the first part of 2008.

    With 282 teams already using YourTeamOnline, they are off to a great start and I will be watching their progress in the last half of this year.

    Contact Chris Nadeau