StartupNorth

Category: Ontario

  • Tech Capital doubles bets on Overlay.TV and PostRank

    techcapitalOverlay.TV and PostRank (formerly AideRSS) have both recently secured second rounds of funding from Tech Capital Partners, Overlay.TV raising $4.6M and PostRank raising a ‘significant round that will last well into 2010’. Also participating in Overlay.TV’s follow on financing were their other existing investors Edgestone and Celtic House.

    In the current environment, it makes tremendous sense to top up the portfolio companies’ coffers so they have all the fuel they need to reach an exit. Of course, we would never cheer on VCs throwing good money after bad. Fortunately for Tech Capital these two portfolio companies have been making nice progress this year. Jacqui Murphy, Partner with Tech Capital Partners had this to say:

    “We are very pleased with the progress the companies have made since our initial investments and are even more pleased to support them again.”

    Overlay.TV has secured a number of high profile partners and users including the Jonas Brothers (no relation). And AideRSS has rebranded as PostRank and released a number of exciting new enhancements including Google Reader integration and a Full Access API.

    Congrats to both Overlay.TV and PostRank on the recent raises!

  • Kontagent is a big winner – $250,000 from the fbFund

    kontagentKontagent, who we wrote about back in July, is one of the winners of $250,000 from the fbFund.

    The company is based in San Francisco and Toronto, which has seen co-founder Albert Lai doing a lot of traveling.

    The problem of measuring and understanding behavior within social networks is still generally unsolved. There are no ready-to-go analytics packages as you would expect and the problem is only going to keep growing in coming years. I am placing long bets on Kontagent.

    I can’t wait to see Kontagent grow in the next few years. Perhaps even Rick will pull up a lawn chair, open a beer, and watch the game.

    Kontagent is the leading viral analytics platform for social network application developers. The Kontagent platform has been built from the ground up to provide deep social data visualization and analysis that delivers actionable insights delivered via a hosted, on-demand service.

    The Kontagent platform works directly with the Facebook API, and will soon support OpenSocial and the MySpace platform. Kontagent was founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneurs Albert Lai/CEO (5th startup, most recently founder/CEO of BubbleShare) and Jeffrey Tseng/CTO (2nd startup, most recently founder of Aevena) . The company is headquartered in the SOMA district of San Francisco, California with a presence in downtown Toronto, Ontario.

  • Reminder: Office Holiday Party

    There are a few geekmas parties going on this December, and they are selling out quickly. Both have been organized by members of the community, and look like they will be a blast.

    Montreal has CelebrateCamp on December 18th.

    Come out an celebrate 2008 with the Montreal Technology Community. We have many things to celebrate as a community. A successfull year of Barcamps, StartupCamps, Democamps, Podcamps and a number of other community events flourished this year. We’ve seen more startups launched, more investing activity and a number of our local friends have personal & professional success created in 2008.

    and in Toronto there is #hohoto, which came together on Twitter in a matter of days. It is taking place at The Mod Club – Monday, December 15, 2008, 7pm. There will be DJs, cheap drinks and all the proceeds are going towards the Daily Bread food bank.

    Update:

    Halifax is having a Geekmas event on December 17th raising money for Feed Nova Scotia!

    Which other cities will get on board and start raising money for charity?

  • VeloCity Project Exhibition

    Joey offers his summary of the University of Waterloo VeloCity Fall 2008 Project Exhibition.

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    Velocity is a student residence, it is a dorm for 70 University of Waterloo students that encourages students to form teams and build projects to be showcased at the end of term Project Exhibition. This was the first group of students in the dorm and there were 16 student projects created. Each team of students provided a 3 minute pitch to the audience in the lobby of the Davis Centre. Amar Varma from Extreme Ventures had a Cdn$1000 prize for the “project team deemed worthy”.

    Sparknav was the winner of the $1000 from Extreme Ventures.

    1. Grocerus – A location-aware web app that matches grocery lists against hand entered grocery store data. Built in PHP.
    2. Gruup – A group buying service.  Built on Pligg in PHP.
    3. Sparknav – A mobile navigation application for use in enclosed (non-GPS) spaces. Prototype build for Android.
    4. Emoshion – A mobile application for location-based fashion news.
    5. Find It Off Campus – A web application for helping UW students use geography and location to find housing. Built in Rails.
    6. Szello Mobile – A mobile consultancy focusing on mobile user experience and UI design.
    7. Fading Hearts/Magical Aces – An anime styled choose your own adventure.
    8. Ufansi – A web application that helps connect donors with charities. Built on Drupal in PHP.
    9. Giftah – A web application that creates a marketplace for gift card exchange.
    10. ClassAlbum – A web application for managing classroom schedules and finding vacant rooms.
    11. Comic Battle – A multiplayer online fighting game built in Flash.
    12. My Story – A publish platform for authors.
    13. CashIn – A wallet with an electronic financial advisor that tracks your spending and provides warnings based on personal budgeting.
    14. inPulse – “Send email to my watch”. A Bluetooth watch that connects to your mobile device to display email, SMS, caller ID on your watch.
    15. Threadband – A causal game for the iPhone.
    16. Metacast – A YouTube or Blip.TV competitor. Allows users to create channels of existing RSS feeds. Built in PHP.

    The projects ranged from a series of ideas expressed on posters; to functioning software. As Rick Segal and Austin Hill conveyed at StartupEmpire, it is great to see entrepreneurs get up in front of an audience and give their pitch. One of the main reasons that entrepreneurs in other locations (particularly Silicon Valley) are better at giving pitches is the number of times they give the pitch and the amount of feedback they receive.

    Generally, the projects and the presentations were uninspiring. This is not to say that the entrepreneurs should be discouraged. But that I was underwhelmed by both the content and the presentation style. It leads me to one of the key takeaways from StartupEmpire. It is that we need to build a better formalized mentoring network for young entrepreneurs. When I look at programs like Techstars in Boulder, CO they are built on the notion of mentorship. Just look at their Mentors (there are 59 listed on the dang page): Brad Feld, David Cohen, Howard Lindzon, Jeff Clavier, Stewart Alsop. The mentors are from all over the US and cover a wide range of expertises in different industries and functions. If an entrepreneur can’t find a mentor that can listen to their situation and coach them on how they could perform, then the entrepreneurs shouldn’t be in the TechStars program. To this end, Jesse Rogers called me out on providing mentorship to the VeloCity students. I will be following up with Sean Van Koughnett to offer my time to mentor any of the teams or students.

    For the hell of it

    “If you build it, they [sic] will come.” – Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams 

    My first piece of advice for any of the VeloCity student is be realistic about what you are building. So many entrepreneurs appear to take the “Field of Dreams” approach to project selection. There is nothing wrong with this approach, however, just because you’ve built software that solves your problem doesn’t mean that there are customers, a potential market or any reason to raise funding. A programming exercise does not by default equal a multi-million dollar company. There are a great number of projects and tools that were developed as to solve problems for a developer (look at rake, ant and Capistrano) that are not businesses. They enable developers to be more productive but are not great businesses.

    Glimmers of hope

    Some of the projects like Sparknav, Emoshion, Find It Off Campus showed the first steps to becoming real businesses. They demonstrated the ability of the team to deliver functioning, stable code. They demonstrated a need in the community – Find It Off Campus already has 108 rental properties after less than 2 weeks of being live. And Emoshion, while too narrowly focused as pitched by the founders to be a great business, it demonstrates a potential white-labelable mobile social networking application that I’ve seen requested by ad agencies and marketers. These startups could benefit from time with experienced technologists, business development persons, investors, and marketers about how and when to monetize and grow their offering.

    It was great to see 16 short presentations from the residents of VeloCity. It will be interesting to see if the quality of the projects and outcomes increases at the end of the Winter 2009 term.

  • MaRS Phase II in the Deadpool

    The MaRS Center is seeing the second phase of development go on hold.

    Phase II, which involved the development of a second tower on the west side of the property, has been cancelled, despite having been ahead of schedule so far. The reason given by Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc, the American developer behind the project, is that they just couldn’t secure enough leases to make the project move forward.

    I first heard about this a few days ago when an unsubstantiated rumor was posted on Urban Toronto (a great forum that I lurk in). Then when I was up in the area yesterday I noticed that the site was pretty quiet, but still wasn’t sure. That was until I looked at the National Post this morning and it was right there on the front page.

    The MaRS center is a confusing thing for tech entrepreneurs. There are a few startups in there, and it is home to a Celtic House office and RBC Ventures. They also have some really fantastic people working there, such as Peter Evans and Allen Gelberg, who have reached out to the startup community in a big way and who have provided a venue for things like Mesh and the Facbook Developer Garage.

    My sense is that MaRS has a much bigger impact on the medical research and commercialization community, but I am not connected to that community and have no way of knowing.

    MaRS was never a center for the tech community however. Simple economics make it impossible for such a high-cost building to truly have an impact at a community level. There are three old garment factories at Spadian and Queen that have had more of an impact. This isn’t a new phenomenon either, when I was building some of my first startups in Charlottetown, the provincial and federal government spent almost $35million building something called the Atlantic Technology Center.

    In terms of the size of the city and community, the Atlantic Technology Center was even more ambitious than MaRS, and it was even more disconnected from the community. While some of the best startups were moving in to great historic office spaces, government contractors and service firms piled in to the Tech Center. It was high-cost, anti-septic and too ambitious.

    The truth is, if you want to transform the tech community in a place like Toronto or any other city, you don’t need $20million, or $200million. For all the dreams of trying to turn some city in to the “next valley”, the point gets missed every time. You could put Toronto, Montreal, Halifax, Calgary or Vancouver on the world map with almost no money. Put a couple million together and find the right people to deploy it. We need to start loving our cities and the communities that are coming to life in them.

    The problem is that government officials can ascribe value to real estate. We all love to build big things that people can see, touch and talk about. Until those same people can understand the value of a vibrant and productive community, then we will never get the participation that we truly need.

    It is worth pointing out that MaRS has billed itself as a home for academic research and eventual commercialization, not simply a home for the tech community. I believe that the same fundamental principals are in play however, and that the task of building a commercialization engine in this city is not a real estate problem, but a social one.

    I don’t know what this means for MaRS and their efforts in the community, but I hope it is a chance for them to step back and refocus. They have a great team that I believe will still do great things.

  • Clutterme.com is for sale, on ebay

    Clutterme.com a do-it-yourself website builder and domain purchasing site is for sale, on ebay. This isn’t the first startup to put themselves up on Ebay, Toronto based Tucows bought kiko.com in an ebay auction for almost $260,000 a few years ago.

    Will Clutterme get bids well past $200,000? Probably not, but I think the service is worth something, and a registrar such as Tucows, GoDaddy or another could really make good use of it. Clutterme is what they say it is: A really, really, easy way to make a website. It is the kind of really simple website builder that your mom would be happy to use. They also have a really slick domain purchasing system set up that lets people get their own domain and website builder all wrapped in to one.

    I have had a chance to hang out with Mark and Alex and I know they are going to be successful. They are hard working and passionate guys and they have stuck with this project through thick and thin. It is too bad that ClutterMe isn’t going to be their winner, but I will be the first one waiting to see what their next project is.

    So head on over and place your bids. Someone with the right sales channel and a little elbow grease could make this thing work.

    You can try a demo of the tool here.

  • StartupEmpire: Thanks, that was fun.


    Well, it’s over. StartupEmpire was, by most measures, a success. Almost 300 people in total come by to either the conference and/or the after party and we didn’t lose our shirts in the process.

    I would be lying if I told you that putting StartupEmpire together was easy or even fun (despite the title of this post!). It wasn’t. We struggled with the format, got it wrong, and then had to re-iterate the whole thing in the final stretch. Taking a conference from 2 days to 1 day, and changing venue basically doubles the work.

    We stubbornly pushed forward with the conference for a few reasons, but the biggest one was because of what we saw by the time everyone had piled in to those just-a-little-too-small chairs on the dance floor of This Is London at 9am. The crowd everything I had hoped it would be, a mishmash of students, entrepreneurs, angels and VCs.

    A few people pointed out to me how this wasn’t the typical conference crowd, most people were taking notes like they were going to be tested on it, and the buzz during the breaks was unmistakable.

    There are some people I want to thank, personally, for what they did to help make StartupEmpire happen:

    Michele Perras put up with David and I and kept the rudder of the ship on course. Michele can run the entire operational side of a businessnes, but she is completely unique in that her abilities as an organizer/operator aren’t even her greatest strength: She is one of the most creative and biggest thinkers I know. When I dove in to minutia, she pulled me out.

    Jonas, who has written this blog with me for the last year and a half has been incredibly busy with his own startup these days. When I called him and said “I need your help”, I wasn’t sure he would even have time to step up for the all-hands-on-deck call, but he did. He swooped in and took over contract negotiations, managed a few pages of TODOs and logistics and was there with me unfolding chairs and carrying in stage boards on the night before the conference.

    David Crow, who couldn’t print name badges if his life depended on it, but who still takes the job every time. I’m not sure how Dave and I get ourselves in to these messes, but they usually work out. Dave is one of those guys who does what he says he will every time and comes back with more ideas.

    Rick Segal who stepped up with the idea for StartupSchool and said “let me run with it”. Rick took some of the most dry content of the day (legal, term sheets, etc) and made them a conversation.

    Howard Lindzon who said “do it” back in August when I mentioned the idea of a conference and put his name up to help lead the way.

    Robert Montgomery who helped me navigate a few mishaps and provided support when we needed it.

    The Student Volunteers. Wow, this was one of the most hard working and impressive group of folks we could have hoped for. They took the iniative as soon as they got there and filled in gaps we had left. From creating an ad-hoc system of responsibilities to a make-shift coat check, they handled it all and left me in awe. I’d hire these folks in a heartbeat. A few of them are involved with the upcoming Impact Conference, which looks fantastic.

    The Veterans, those in the crowd who have raised money, knew how to pitch and frankly just didn’t need some of the early-stage content that was on stage. It made me so proud to see some of the tech community’s most seasoned entrepreneurs who get it and were there not for who or what was on stage, but so that they could meet and help the other folks in the audience who are just getting started.

    Our sponsors, who got on board for this event before they knew what would happen with it, and who stuck around when things were changing daily. These companies and organizations are some of the few who truly believe in the tech community and who have proven they are ready to stick by it. When everyone is talking recession and doom and gloom, it is easy to run away and keep your money. Microsoft, HighRoad, Gowlings, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, JLA, OCE all have my gratitude. I dreaded making some of those phone calls two weeks before the event, but they all said the same thing: The community needs this, we want to see it happen.

    Finally, all of you who bought tickets and believed we’d pull it off. I hope you weren’t dissapointed. I met some incredible people through the day and can’t wait to find out more about what you have up your sleeve.

    Most of all, I am thankful to my wife Laurel, who did nothing but support me as I was going between making this conference happen and bringing Firestoker in to one of its most exciting periods yet. At times it was 2+ full time jobs.

    Startups in Canada are not dead, investment in Canada is not dead, smart ideas and innovative companies are not gone. We are just getting started, that is something I believe more than anything right now.

  • Tales of the ridiculous – PickupPal gets slapped

    It has been well covered today, and I am guessing it is going to hit the mainstream press tomorrow. PickupPal, yet another carpooling site, seems to have been the straw that tickled the legal team at the bus companies.

    They were fined $11,000 and now have to restrict their service inside of Ontario to almost nothing. There is an old (well, not that old) law in Ontario that defines what a “carpool” is and it basically forces you to drive with your neighbor Joe to work, everyday, and you are only allowed to pay him once a week.

    A bus company sued PickupPal based on this law and won.

    This case is very simple to me: Greedy bus companies and a meddling government. Bus companies need to innovate and they are either too cheap or too scared to do it. The funny thing about this is that they have now given so much free press to PickupPal that I have no doubt people will be flocking to the site.

    PickupPal is not the only startup here that is dealing with endless beaurocracy and regulatory silliness. I hope they continue to take a stand.

  • Just Launched: Bizzia – b5media's business news portal

    Earlier today b5media launched Bizzia, making their second foray into the world of blog aggregation. Bizzia is centered on business news, initially pulling together posts from 30 established b5 blogs and videos from content partner Your Business Channel.

    The Wall Street Journal it is not, and many of the questions I posed when Starked (their entertainment portal) launched remain. Namely, will consumers of niche content be interested in aggregation around a generic vertical? Time and traffic will tell… For your consideration two data points: First, in under a month Starked has managed to attract an audience size similar to that of StartupNorth (at least according to Compete). Second, Starked does not yet nearly rival other niche b5 blogs like JuniorCelebs.

    Finally a survey for the peanut gallery: any thoughts on the palindromesque brand / logo?

  • Byte Club launches – Behind the scenes at b5media

    A new web video show has launched. It is called Byte Club and the first episode is a profile of Toronto based b5media.

    Here is the first episode: