StartupNorth

Category: Ontario

  • StartupDrinks – September 30, 2009

    startupdrinks[1]It’s happening again. It’s great to have a monthly social event for high tech entrepreneurs in Toronto.

    Bryan Watson of NACO and Robin Gittens of CEOFusion have stepped up to help coordinate the next installment of StartupDrinks in Toronto. Heri of Montreal Tech Watch and Robin Ahn & Raymond Luk of Flow Ventures are hosting the Montreal event. Scott Lake of StartupOttawa is hosting the Ottawa event. And Dan Silvestru from Covarity is stepping up to host an Waterloo event (the Waterloo event will be on October 6 to avoid a conflict with DemoCampGuelph).

    The Toronto Startup Drinks followed hot on the heels of DemoCamp with Yossi Vardi, which was a great event.  We are keeping the startup community alive, one pint at a time on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at local fave Fionn MacCool’s on the Esplanade! Waterloo is happening on Tuesday, October 6, 2009.

    It’s a simple concept: a grassroots effort to make sure startup folks get in touch and stay in touch.

    Toronto

    Montreal

    • Wednesday, September 30, 2009 starts at 5:30pm
    • Brutopia, 1215 Crescent St

    Ottawa

    • Wednesday, September 30, 2009 starts at 6pm
    • Cornerstone Grill at 92 Clarence Street (in the Market)
    • Register

    Waterloo

  • Assetize: Adsense for Twitter

    This is part of a series on Extreme University and the first group of graduates from the Summer 2009 program.

    assetize A Toronto-based startup that first went live in May 2009, Assetize has been focused on helping people turn their accounts into assets. The premise is that, similar to domain names, online accounts like email addresses and Twitter accounts also have some fundamental value because of their usernames or audience reach. However, unlike domain names – which are sold and parked in a multi-billion dollar industry – these values haven’t been realized yet.

    I met Saif and the Assetize team recently when I visited the Extreme University program, where they are one of the startups in the incubation program by Extreme Venture Partners. Assetize is trying to be the AdSense for Twitter. Just as people are able to monetize their websites and blogs through AdSense, Assetize lets users include ads in their Twitter accounts effortlessly, and helps advertisers reach their target audiences. They have built a proprietary technology in-house that analyzes each account’s content to ensure that the ads being served are relevant to followers.

    Quick Analysis

    Management Team

    The management team consists of Saif Ajani, Mike Rhemtulla and Minaz Abdulla. Separately, they have worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies as tech consultants, and have also launched 2 previous startups together. This is a young team that has shown that they can deliver in a short time period. Building a strong set of advisors and continued demonstration of traction will help them go a long way. As a side note, I’ve worked with Minaz in the past (at Ambient Vector), he is an incredibly talented engineer that has demonstrated his ability to produce and ship great code.

    Market

    According to the online marketing research firm, eMarketer, companies are expecded to spend upwards of $32B in online advertising by 2011, with almost $2.9B of it going towards social networks. Although MySpace and Facebook have been the most dominant networks thus far in terms of drawing ad dollars, Twitter is exploring advertising. As people spend more of their “media time” on social sites, agencies and brands are seeking new channels and opportunities to create connections and advertise to audiences. This is a growing space that is ripe for innovation and new opportunities.

    Product

    The goal of the product is to help users increase the value of their social media assets. For Twitter users this is a combination of relevant content, reach and connection. Users can use Assetize to find content to attract, retain and engage their connections. The process to setup the Assetize service for a Twitter account seems very simple and straightforward. Users have a one-step process to register their accounts and provide a list of topics that they tweet about. Assetize provides access to over 100,000 feeds that can be used to find and publish value-added content. The idea is that more and better content attracts a larger base of users and inject ads into the Twitter stream that have a higher response rate. Analytics is provided on links and conversations.

    The company is currently working with advertisers to build out the functionality. The core of the Assetize product is an ad matching engine that analyzes previous posts and matches users to available/relevant ads.  AdSense’s value comes from making its ads targeted to the content on web pages, and the Assetize engine aims for contextual, relevant Twitter ads for each author based on posts and conversations.

    Business Model

    Similar to other online ad networks, Assetize earns a commission basis, and share revenue with Twitter account owners. Since this commission is performance-driven, it’s a good incentive for Assetize and its members to optimize accounts so that advertisers receive good returns on their investments. The business model requires scale to have a large enough capacity of users and a large inventory of ads to continue to ensure relevancy to each party.

    Strategic Relationships

    Assetize is a young company. They are starting to build relationships with advertising agencies to help bring their clients to Twitter. As use of social media continues to grow, particularly among the lucrative 18-24 audience, no doubt many brands will look for easy, familiar steps to test advertising on Twitter. The team is eager to explore these relationships, if you are an advertising/marketing/social media agency looking to explore a relationship, they are actively looking at how to partner and work together.

    Competition

    Izea, the company behind PayPerPost for blogs that has a raised a total of $10M in VC funding, recently launched SponsoredTweets, a service that pays Twitter users to write short posts about its clients’ products. It requires more effort from Twitter users than Assetize’s service. The Twitter advertising ecosystem is continuing to develop and evolve, there is most likely room for a variety of models and engagement strategies.

    Other competitors include Be-a-Magpie, a service based out of Germany and Great Britain, and RevTwt. The coverage they received earlier in the year undoubtedly led to a good user base, but their list of advertisers seems to be lacking. If Assetize is able to overcome these two startups, they’ll need to gain better access to advertisers than its competitors were able to.

    There is always existing social media ad networks. Each of these companies has relationships and inventory, though they are not easily translatable into an effective 140 character campaign. 

    Summary

    It’s a very interesting product. There is an opportunity around defining effectiveness of advertising for social media sites, but early the familiarity of CPM and CPC that is brought Assetize may help drive early adoption with agencies and brands. There are challenges in securing a large audience, a large inventory and strong relationships with agencies. Assetize has an interesting value proposition for users looking to monetize their Twitter “assets”. Great start for an ExtremeU company!

  • ExtremeU 2009 – The Graduating Class

    extremeventurepartnersWe first covered Extreme University back in June 2009.  The 12 week program has completed and there are a great crop of early stage software startups.

    What is ExtremeU?

    ExtremeU is an investment and educational program run by Extreme Venture Partners. It is a 12 week program that provides small founding teams (2-3 people) with US$5,000/founder and shared office space for the 12 week program in exchange for 10% of the company. You gain access to shared resources (mentors, servers, outside speakers, the odd beer and/or lunch). It’s a program that is in the same vain as TechStars, YCombinator and SeedCamp, though there are significant differences in the programs, funding and delivery between these four incarnation.

    Who are the graduating companies?

    assetizesuperheroesallianceMy first commentary is only one of these companies, Assetize, manages to have a corporate web site. It’s like everyone did very well in Extreme University, but 2 out of 3 failed the required course on corporate marketing. Unbelievable, though it is possible that I’m being a cranky old man that wants to see a standard web site/blog with a home page, an about us page, a contact page, etc. One of the companies, Locationary, is launching in stealth mode. And it’s unclear if they’ll be cooperating to provide details for their launch.

    Over the next week, I’ll be providing deeper posts into each of the 3 startups (maybe) that include details about each of the companies, their market, the problem they solve, and their founding team.

    Stay tuned.

  • Hire a co-op!

    Looking for ways to get new talent? Hire a co-op! The Ontario Government has a great program to help offset the costs. It’s interesting how all of these programs are located in and around Waterloo. This is one of the benefits of starting a company in Ontario.

    I know that Kontagent, Extreme VP, Bumptop, LearnHub, Sysmos, FreshBooks, Well.ca, Idee and others have hired co-ops in the past. Here is some basic math, pay your students $15/hour for a 40 hour week for 16 weeks. It will cost you $9,600. The program will return you 25% which is $2,400. Cost for you for the 16 weeks is only $7,200. A steal!

    For each co-op student hired, your organization can take advantage of the Co-operative Education Tax Credit.  The Ontario Government recently increased the credit to 25 per cent of salaries or wages and benefits (30 per cent for small businesses) to a maximum of $3,000 per student, per term. For more
    information:

    Anyone know the contact details for UofT, Seneca, or Ryerson’s coop programs?

  • GigPark.com acquired by CanPages

    Gigpark logoIt’s hard not to like Pema and Noah. The two founders of GigPark have been two of the hardest working and (more importantly) most focused founders to have come out of Toronto in the last few years.

    We first covered GigPark in February 2008. I loved the site, and the focus on maintaining the integrity of the social network, but I wondered whether they could build the mass needed to go from walled garden to healthy ecosystem. Then, earlier this year GigPark partnered with Metro, a free national newspaper.

    Today CanPages is announcing that they have acquired GigPark. The deal also received a nice mention in the Globe and Mail.

    Pema and Noah are examples of what a laser focus on product will get you. They released early and they continued to develop GigPark with regular releases and improvements. The key here though is that they got the product out early and didn’t try to come up with the perfect product from day one.

    When I first started using GigPark, I didn’t remember to go back to the site regularly, but over time GigPark became an integral part of how I found new places to eat and businesses to call. As my network slowly grew, it became not just useful, but critical.

    I am feeling especially proud to know these guys and to have had the chance to watch them grow from first release to acquisition. They have been behind-the-scene supporters of a lot of the community and have always encouraged the entire Toronto community.

    Noah and Pema will be staying in the CanPages family for a little while, but I am sure it won’t be long before they are back in action.

  • Toronto Startup PagerDuty Launches Beta of their Web-based Alert Service

    When a critical server crashes in most businesses, an alert email is sent out, often to a group of people, in the hopes that someone will look into it. But who should handle the problem? What if they are unavailable? Or what if no one was checking their emails? A crashed site can result in lost revenue for a company but the problem of alerting the right people in the right way was traditionally only available to large enterprises.

    PagerDuty is a new Toronto startup that aims to solve this problem through their newly launched web application at PagerDuty.com. Started by former Amazon employees, the newly launched (and currently free) beta service is a well-executed, easy to use to solution to a common and costly problem.

    landing_page

    channels_smallI love how it works. To use it, you sign up using a one-page form, and you’re then set up with your own account (accounts are free during their beta, but it’s not clear how long they’ll be in beta). You then set up your own alert software to send emails to PagerDuty whenever you want a notification (this is the most time-consuming part because you’ll need to set up each monitoring software individually). PagerDuty doesn’t do the actual monitoring; rather, it receives alert messages via email and routes them to the right person on your team based on rules you build. Alerts can be in the form of SMS, phone calls, or email.

    Picture 1One of my favourite parts of the software is the great UI on the built-in calendar that allows you to set up which person on your team is on-call at any time.

    Here’s how PagerDuty’s Alex Solomon describes the service:

    PagerDuty prevents a sysadmin’s worst nightmare: coming in to work on a Monday morning and finding out that their site has been down for the entire weekend. […]  When something goes wrong, PagerDuty springs into action by calling, SMSing, or emailing the engineer on duty.  If for some reason, PagerDuty can’t get ahold of the person on-call, it automatically escalates the alert to someone else.”

    Everyone on the PagerDuty team spent some time working at Amazon which uses sophisticated internal tools for handling problem alerts. According to Solomon, they created PagerDuty because, after leaving Amazon, they “spent some time looking for something similar to what Amazon has, but the solutions we found were either lacking key features, or were priced well beyond what we were willing to pay.”

    The team had the option to possibly start up PagerDuty somewhere in Silicon Valley, but in the end, they chose to start in Toronto because of reduced costs and the fact that they had a better network here. “the Valley wasn’t really an option for us. We chose Toronto because all of us grew up here — most of our network is based here, so it really made sense to try not to stray too far from home,” says Solomon.

    PagerDuty has done many things right. The website looks slick and the UI is smooth. (Some have commented that the front page may look a lot like some other Web 2.0 startup websites but that’s probably a good way to start, in my opinion). The problem they deal with is a real one that their team has experienced in the past, and they’ve solved it elegantly. Some of the challenges I expect they’ll have is that the market will be limited to a specific segment of companies that already use server management utilities that send emails – marketing to the right people in these companies and gathering enough adoption will be a challenge at least in the beginning.

    PagerDuty founding team is Alex Solomon, Andrew Milkas, and Baskar Puvanathasan.

    You can learn more about PagerDuty’s service and sign up for a free account on their website at PagerDuty.com.

    I’m going to try using the service at my company.

  • J2Play Acquired by Electronic Arts

    J2PlayThat was fast! Earlier today Electronic Arts announced the acquisition of J2Play in their latest quarterly report. Congratulations to Rob and the entire J2Play team!

    Waterloo based J2Play was founded by Rob Balahura in 2006 to create the world’s first mobile multiplayer game and SDK. The product that ultimately emerged was a “social wrapper” for online games, the first incarnation, a Facebook App that enabled games to be embedded within the social network and extended with chat and leaderboards.

    While the J2Play powered games themselves garnered limited user interest, Facebook having reined in on Apps in a catastrophic way for most, the team was hard at work establishing relationships with industry leaders who wanted in on some social network pixie dust.

    extremevpJ2Play was funded by Toronto’s Extreme Venture Partners. Running with the new fund was a smart move on Balahura’s part, they were instrumental in getting the company in front of fbFund and helping secure an additional $250,000 in follow on grant funding. Worth note, ExtremeVP has also since been able to secure follow on funding for Kontagent.

    The terms of the acquisition were not released, but ExtremeVP’s LPs have to be pleased. This early exit bodes very well and has demonstrated some savvy investing by partners, Amar Varma and Sundeep Madra.

  • Backbone Magazine’s Top 20 Web 2.0

    Backbone Magazine announced their “PICK 20 round of Canada’s leading Web 2.0 pioneers” that includes 4 companies form our list of web startups to watch, it’s a great list of Canadian technology companies and startups.

    The List

    1. FreshBooks, Toronto
    2. Myca Health, Quebec City
    3. CoveritLive, Toronto
    4. Viigo, Toronto
    5. Radian6, Fredericton
    6. Filemobile, Toronto
    7. BoardSuite, Toronto
    8. NowPublic, Vancouver
    9. Tungle, Montreal
    10. HootSuite, Vancouver
    11. ThoughtFarmer, Vancouver
    12. AfterCAD Online, Vancouver
    13. TeamPages, Vancouver
    14. The Manufacturing Innovation Network, Kitchener
    15. Well.ca, Guelph
    16. Clarity Accounting, Vancouver
    17. Voices.com, London
    18. Taglocity, Vancouver
    19. PollStream, Toronto
    20. Pixton, Vancouver

    The majority of the startups on the PICK20 list are in Vancouver (8) and Toronto (5). It’s a great list of Canadian startups.

  • GigPark partners with Metro Canada

    gigpark-win-an-eee-pc_1243GigPark has partnered with Metro, Canada’s #1 free daily newspaper, to power local service recommendations. This is exciting news for Gigpark, getting their incredibly compelling service in front of over 1 million Metro readers.

    I have used GigPark quite a bit over the last year to find all sorts of businesses: cross country ski rentals, a barbershop, a mechanic. All have been great recommendations that I can trust because they are from my friends.

    I’ve also recommended over a dozen businesses on GigPark and have received a number of personal thank you notes as a result, business owners really love the new customers GigPark drives. This partnership with Metro will offer business owners an even bigger stage, increasing the value proposition for participating, upgrading, and advertising across the integrated network.

    GigPark has social recommendations nailed. So it is a great deal for Metro, being able to easily drop in the GigPark engine and turn readers into community members and business owners into advertisers. “Integrating GigPark’s unique social tool into the Metro experience makes perfect sense. With this partnership, we’re continuing to redefine the role of traditional newspapers,” said Jodi Brown, Marketing and Interactive Director of Metro Canada.

    This partnership covers both online and print. To accompany the online component, Metro print editions in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Halifax will feature the most recommended businesses in that city on a weekly basis.

    GigPark launches are always fun cause there is a giveaway involved: join the Metro community by July 31 for great recommendations you can trust and a chance to win a 10″ Eee PC.

  • I Love Rewards raises $6.9M Series B

    i-love-rewardsI Love Rewards, based in Toronto, has secured $6.9M in Series B funding from JLA Ventures, Laurence Capital, and GrandBanks Capital to fuel continued growth. This brings the total raised to $11.7M.

    The company, founded by Razor Suleman, offers a web based rewards program used by businesses to motivate their employees. Rewards are tied to performance metrics, everything from sales quotas to reduced absenteeism. Revenue has doubled year over year with keynote customers adopting the solution including: Microsoft, Marriott, ConAgra, and Bell.

    Ryan Moore, General Partner of GrandBanks Capital had this to say: “The I Love Rewards vision of becoming the global leader aligns with our desire to invest in the best growth companies in Canada. I Love Rewards offers a compelling value proposition with its innovative proprietary Software-as-a-Service technology that provides immense value to human resource and sales professionals across North America.”

    GrandBanks Capital’s participation is notable. You might recall that this Boston based fund sent out an open letter soliciting pitches from Canadian startups. It would be fair to say GrandBanks is putting their money where their mouth is, which is great to see!

    Congrats to Razor and the I Love Rewards team.