StartupNorth

Category: Ontario

  • NYC Seed versus IAF

    Wow, NYC Seed is an interesting fund focused on seed-stage technology companies in NYC. It sounds familiar to the IAF program by the Ontario Centres for Excellence.

    The NYC Seed fund is a joint venture between ITAC, New York City Investment Fund, The New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation, New York City Economic Development Corporation, and PolyTechnic University. In addition to investing up to $200,000 per startup, the fund aims to give entrepreneurs support via a network of "notable entrepreneurs, technologists and venture capitalists," and plans to help the companies it funds seek series A round funding when they reach that stage?

    The fund currently has $2 million under management.

    The Investment Accelerator Fund (IAF) is similiar, it allows up to $500,000 in the form of convertible debt for early-stage companies.

    Fund Requires
    NYC Seed
    • A team (2+ people) with a compelling idea that makes sense today.
    • Your team should be technically savvy, with members possessing a proven record of completing complex technology projects.
    • We will ask to review a prototype of your product.
    • Company must be based in NYC.
    IAF
    • Technologies or intellectual property (IP) the company intends to commercialize must have
      unique and protectable aspects that establish a sustainable competitive advantage
    • Full and unencumbered legal right to the commercial use of the company?s technology or IP
    • The products and services the company intends to bring to market must meet a defined
      market need and have a significant and sustainable advantage over competitors
    • The addressable market should be at least $20 million and clearly defined
    • The management team must have the skills and domain expertise to be successful,
      or be willing to replace or augment the team as necessary
    • A clear path to commercialization and a plausible plan to support it
    • The company must be incorporated, or be incorporated by the time of IAF investment
    • Total revenues should be less than $500k from the time of incorporation
    • Intend for at least 50% of salaried employees to be based in Ontario

    There?s not a huge difference in the funding, or the requirements. But the NYC Seed option just feels cleaner. The IAF eligibility requirements are verbose and at times a little obvious. The big difference might be in the size of the fund, NYC Seed is just $2M where IAF is a $29M fund. And the differences in focus, NYC Seed is focused strongly on ?software and web-oriented technologies?, the IAF fund is part of the Centre of Excellence for Communications and Information Technology covering diverse areas as wireless and wireline communications, the Internet, human-computer interaction, health and medicine, software design, network planning, education, security, among others.

    NYC Seed aims to provide ?entrepreneurs support via a network of "notable entrepreneurs, technologists and venture capitalists?. Very similar to the Business Mentorship and Entrepreneurship Program provided by MaRS.

    There?s a different feel in the web copy used to describe each program. The IAF program just feels more cumbersome. However, it offers many of the same advantages for Ontario companies.We need to do some work to help local entrepreneurs understand the availability, benefits and people at OCE to connect with John MacRitchie, Bryan Kanarens and Charles Plant.

    I think all entrepreneurs looking to raise funding should be able to answer the questions on the NYC Seed application form. My offer, any Ontario-based entrepreneur that wants a connection to OCE, just send me an email with the information from the NYC Seed application (see below) and I will forward it to John MacRitchie.

    1. What?s the idea?
    2. Why now?
    3. Who are your competitors?
    4. How will you make money?
    5. How will you use the funding?
    6. Please describe your product development roadmap. How long will it take to complete your first version?
    7. Please provide bios for each founder.
    8. Please provide 3 references for each founder.

  • Founders and Funders Toronto Wrapup

    Founders and Funders Toronto took place this week and we had another sellout. We had just over 100 people who came out to hang out, pitch their startups and find fundable companies.

    A lot of food went cold however, as people could barely stay in their seats. The room was buzzing and so far the reviews have been great.

    Ali Asaria, from Well.ca, sent us a note that I think summed it up:

    “This was the first time we as a company were approached by investors, instead of us having to approach them. The atmosphere was relaxed, but at the same time there were always four simultaneous, deep discussions happening at our table on the subjects of investment, entrepreneurial stories, and industry trends.

    In one single night I was able to talk directly with five different VCs, and we had the time to talk about details of our business, without the “what’s your pitch?” awkwardness. I had the chance to sit next to some of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs from whom I learned so many lessons. What a great event — it’s the next day now and I return to my desk energized!”

    A big thank you to our sponsors

     

    Founders and Funders Vancouver

    Boris has announced Founders and Funders Vancouver for June 17th. If you would like to attend the dinner, please fill out the following form and let us know who you are.

    As with the Montreal and Toronto dinners, Microsoft was gracious enough to sponsor Vancouver as well. These dinners really would not have been possible without them taking the lead and having a vision to help Canadian early-stage companies.

  • Mercury Rising: Watch a Startup reinvent itself

    The guys at MercuryGrove, who last year came out with a product called Web Groups are now reinventing themselves as a multiple product company. In the next few months they will be re-developing Web Groups and introducing a new set of products, including a CRM, an E-Mail Campaign Manager, and finally something called a “Customer Page“, that provides an easier way of working with customers.

    I have had the chance to get to know Scott Annan over the last few years, and he has been one of the guys behind StartupOttawa, so it is cool to see him show some of the inner workings of MercuryGrove.

    There is no doubt that this is partially just a PR stunt, but that is fine with me, because Scott has all the street cred he needs and I know that he does the right thing for the Ottawa community every chance he gets.

    I’ll be watching along, and we will post some updates here. Follow along on the blog.

  • StartupCamp Waterloo 3 Recap

    This is a guest post by Mic Berman, one of the instigators of StartupCamp Waterloo. Thanks Mic!

    We had great turn out and interesting crowd, lots of new startups first time demonstrating in a public forum. The event was sponsored by TechCapital, WatStart, CommuniTech and SunStartup – thanks to those folks for supporting the community.

    We tried something different and hosted a panel at the start made up of Iain Klugman , Larry Borsato, Ali Asaria, Melanie Baker, Sandra MacDonald, and Gary Will. The basic question was “why, why do a startup?” The answers varied from why not to do one to a very philosophical approach by Ali that centred around passion and drive.

    The start ups that got to present (based on audience voting and time available) were:

    Semacode (on StartupIndex) – Simon showed off his technology for the first time. A fully integrated viral marketing based service integrated into FaceBook as a great way to manage events and conduct mobile marketing campaigns. The issues that came up in discussion were privacy (how does the user control information that is captured in their barcode/name tag), which target market they should go after (i.e., advertising/marketing/event type companies or the end user/enterprise running the event). Simon has partnered with SuitedMedia Inc to help them sell the service.

    Navarra run by Avery Pennarun was a somewhat controversial concept for outsourcing development of your founder ideas. The concept being they would charge a flat rate to develop against particular specifications provided by the “business founder”. Avery figures lots of business people/founders with great ideas need a good development shop to develop out their ideas. Issues that came up were: “are you mad?”, “that will never work”, and ” how will you ensure specifications are crystal?”. Maybe they are on to something (as is typically the case when faced with great controversy)?

    Clutterme presented by Mark Molckovsky & Alex Curelea was a totally fun demo of a cool technology that enables you as a user to instantly create a webpage that effectively becomes your “cork board” online. Great job to whomever did their brand and logo, as it so clearly defines what they’re up to. Their key questions of the audience were “what’s your business model?, how will you make money?”, usability issues, and how to get the word out there. They’ve asked for community support on testing their beta about to be released in 2 to 3 weeks. Check them out 🙂

    UbietyLab – Developed by local Waterloo professor, Todd Veldhuizen, demonstrated some very powerful visualization technology that quite frankly the audience was very impressed by with folks throwing out many many applications for its use. Hence the professor’s problem. What market with what offering, considering “I’m really doing this in my spare time and not really as a business person?”

    AdvertisingShowdown.com – I’m sorry guys, I missed this one because I was in conversation at the time (oops). The just is a powerful new online advertising metrics application. You can check out the recording of the presentation on www.spaetzel.com

    Let’sCube (which is currently a Firefox plug-in you can download) is an instant sharing technology for cool sites you want to share with your friends and for which you can receive results as the owner of the site that’s being shared. Differences between StunbleUpon, Digg, Twittr, etc and their service is they aggregate your interests into your own let’s cube page – so it pulls for you and filters by your friends. Does it go both ways? Can you share and pull? That was the biggest issue posed by the audience and yes, it does. Lots of other ideas about how to leverage the Firefox plug in to test additional features.

    IndigoFire presented by Karim Shaehata is solving the problem of website registration and sharing among friends real, business and otherwise. His product is not yet live (powerpoint presentation). Solving the problem of how you create differentiation among your usage across community sites like Facebook, Flickr, etc. for the people you want to share with and the public at large. Good questions and may be interesting technology yet to come 🙂 Kareem’s basic question was what are the potential business models for which the audience offered several alternatives e.g., server side, small user charge, middleware approach, etc. and would you use it?

    The audience participation rocked, thanks everyone who came and asked and offered great questions, suggestions and comments. You can check out a recording of the event on spaetzel.com

  • Mesh Conference – 15 Minutes of Fame

    One of the startup-focused parts of Mesh is the 15 Minutes of Fame they do evey year. Each day of the conference 3 companies are given 5 minutes each to pitch themselves or their product to the audience.

    What I love about it is that it really is completely open to whoever applies, and it is not an opportunity for the conference organizers to just give stage time to whoever will pay. (paying to do something like 15 minutes of fame is far more typical than you might realize)

    The lineup this year was solid, with some new companies and some more established startups.

    15 Minutes of Fame is a great way to get your startup in front of a new crowd in Canada, so think about doing it next year.

    • Carbonetworks, which has developed software that helps companies create effective carbon emissions strategies to reduce costs and capitalize on emerging global markets.
    • GigPark, a place to receive recommendations about a wide variety of services from friends and their friends.
    • AidesRSS, which has created technology to make reading RSS feeds more effective and valuable.
    • Well.ca, an online health and beauty store that ships across Canada.
    • OverlayTV, an interactive media company that provides a video commerce platform that lets Internet users, content owners and e-commerce sites to monetize and customize their video assets.
    • Enomalism, an open source consulting firm that focuses on solving the cost and complexity for enterprises that run large technical server infrastructures.

  • Reminder: StartupCamp Waterloo tomorrow (June 3rd)

    Just a quick reminder that StartupCamp Waterloo is taking place today, June 3rd 2008, at the Waterloo Accelerator Center at 6pm.

    I just got off the phone with Mic Berman, one of the organizers, and she says that instead of a speaker this time, there is going to be a panel to kick things off. The question for the panel is “Why start a startup?”

    Just over a year ago, I wrote something along the same line: No better time than now. It remains just as relevant today as it was then.

    All the details are here.

  • The Code Factory – Ottawa Co-Working Space

    The Code Factory is having its grand opening tonight in Ottawa. The Code Factory is a shared office space for startups and freelancers.

    Here in Toronto we had The Indoor Playground for a few years, but due to some problems with their landlord, they had to close up shop. Co-working spaces tend to be indicators of healthy entrepreneurial communities and it is nice to see Ottawa get such a great looking option.

    The grand opening takes place tonight, at 5:30pm at Suite 200 – 246 Queen Street (between Bank and Kent).

    David Crow recently covered co-working in Canada on our sister site CommunityNorth.ca where is also included a list of other known co-working spaces in Canada.

  • Pride and Prejudice – Why startups need community

    I was feeling extraordinarily proud of Idée last night when I saw that they received glowing coverage on TechCrunch. It is well deserved, and it seems like they are just getting started in terms of press coverage. They recently had a huge profile in the Financial Post, written by David George-Cosh (who has been getting more and more connected with the Toronto community as of late). We have been tracking Idée for a while now.

    Then as I kept flipping through my news feeds, I came across an embarrassing update about MediaScrape, which Heri and Mathew Ingram both covered well. When we first posted about MediaScrape, Tyler Cavell, the founder, responded in a much more succinct way than he did to TechCrunch’s latest post. Heri had even convinced me to lay off and see how things work out.

    I almost feel like I am doing Idée a disservice by mentioning them in the same post as MediaScrape. Where Idée has focused on perfecting their technology and winning customers, MediaScrape seems to be prone to distraction and tends to make simple matters much more confusing and difficult than necessary.

    Heri made the point in his post yesterday that when entrepreneurs are disconnected from their local community, they seem to be more likely to go off the rails. I think Heri is on to something that investors need to take in to consideration when investing.

    Again, Leila and the crew at Idée are a great contrast and example of how to do things right. While Idée is possibly the busiest startup in Canada, and one that is spending its own money (ie: they have no time to waste), they still manage to be tightly connected to the community here in Toronto. Leila is constantly organizing, co-organizing or speaking at events, and when she isn’t doing that, she spends a lot of time each week mentoring other startups.

    Capazoo and MediaScrape, according to Heri, have never made it out to a single Montreal event and have generally kept a distance from their local startup community.

    Perhaps one of the measures that investors, both Angels and VCs, take in to account when deciding whether they want to put money in to a startup or an entrepreneur should be whether or not that person has been able to take the time to connect with a community of startups. That way you know they have a social and professional circle that will keep them accountable, demand progress and that will criticize their execution, rather than patting them on the back and telling them they are going to be rich.

    If your friends tell you that you will be rich and famous, then you have the wrong friends.

  • MeshU: One day developer mini conference that rocked

    This is a guest post by Chris Long, the lead developer of Well.ca and a partner in the launch of the StartupIndex.

    MeshU, which took place on the day before the Mesh Conference here in Toronto, was a developer focused mini-conference with 3 streams of sessions. Each stream had a distinct focus such as: development, design and management. While the Mesh Conference is in its third year, this was the first ever MeshU, so I was curious to see how well things would go.

    There was a lot of variety in attendees, with people from management, sales, and development and from varying sizes of companies in attendance. One of the biggest reasons people had for coming to MeshU was the unique lineup of speakers, especially for a Canadian conference.

    After much deliberation and coin flipping, I settled on attending: Avi Bryant’s “Turning the Tables: Moving Beyond Relational Storage”, Daniel Burka’s “Iterative Design Strategies”, Alistair Croll?s ?Watch It ? How to Monitor Web Applications?, and Ryan Carson’s “How to Start Your Own Start?up”.

    Avi Bryant really did change my view on relational databases. For most web applications, storing data is done with databases such as MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL. Avi challenged this and described how large web companies (Yahoo, Google, Amazon) approach this, and then described what smaller companies can possibly learn from the large companies.

    The “Iterative Design Strategy” session was packed, and I ended up joining more then half the audience on the floor. Daniel Burka did not disappoint his audience, as he explored what iterative design meant to him. The example he used was the iterations of Digg’s comment system.

    Alistair Croll’s powerpoint on monitoring web applications numbered 135 slides, he just had that much information. The slides covered the types of tools available for monitoring web sites and the kind of information they give. He weighed the pros and cons of every type of monitoring tool, and left everyone with an understanding of why and how they should monitor their websites.

    I finished off my day with Ryan Carson?s presentation on starting/running a startup. At the end of it, I think a lot of people had the urge to apply for a job at Carsonified (they give iPhones, 30″ screens and Aeron Chair to all their employees). His ideas and comments, while not revolutionary, were still of use to a lot of people. I can summarize it in two words: “Be Friendly”.

    The MeshU organizers did a good job of getting an awesome lineup of speakers, and promoting a relaxed more workshop feel to the day. I will certainly be there next year.

  • $4,000,000 for IGLOO

    IGLOO Software, an enterprise social software company based in Waterloo, has raised $4M from RBC Venture Partners. Kevin Talbot, Managing Director of RBC Venture Partners, has joined IGLOO’s board, which is chaired by Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research In Motion.

    The Kitchener, On based company has spring out of development of IGLOO.org.

    “Founded in 2003, IGLOO’s social networking platform helps hundreds of organizations globally reduce email burden, remove distances across branch
    offices and inspire teams with new productivity and collaboration tools. The platform was initially developed to support an online international network of researchers, practitioners and educators working on global issues.”

    Igloo Software on StartupIndex