Red Flag Deals has a passionate bunch of users ? they love to save.
Founded back in 2000 the site has grown from a handful of page views a month to over 18 million. They recently hit 100,000 registered users and now serve over 750,000 unique visitors. Red Flag Deals can in all earnestness claim to be ?Canada?s Bargain Hunting Community.?
Congratulations to the Red Flag Deals Team on hitting this milestone. We look forward to following this Toronto company’s continued success.
Infonaut is in the bird flu business. The Toronto startup (incubated at MaRS) provides governments with a Health Informatics GIS solution for pandemic preparedness and emergency response planning. Plain English: Healthcare Map Mashup, on which one can layer predictive indicators such as emergency response times, demographic data, hospital service areas, and even poultry density reports (don?t ask).
The Canadian Government knows all too well about dealing with pandemics (remember SARS), but don?t write off Infonaut as just making a quick sale using scare tactics. The web service is employed by a diverse set of clients; health insurance companies are using it to target populations interested in supplemental insurance plans.
I saw a demo of the product and it looks like a full featured web app. While other epidemiology GIS tools are available, few if any have preloaded data sets, map relative rss news feeds, markup tools, multi format import / export, streamlined document sharing, and most impressive – automated information propagation to healthcare providers.
Prevention is the best medicine and Infonaut is on the path to success.
The rumors are true, The Toronto Venture Group is no more.
The TVG, like the Toronto Angel Group (which is probably dead too, more on this soon), is one of the many often-flirted with, rarely treaded on groups that court Canadian Startups to get on stage, or to send their business plans around. The effect on the startup was feeling more like they were being asked to take their pants off in the waiting room before going in to the Doctor’s office. More often than not, it was some sort of witch doctor behind the door anyway, and you would have kept your pants on if only you had known.
That leaves us with a slew of angel groups who are all still asking Startups to take their pants off well in advance of a typical show-all timeframe for a real relationship.
Do these groups actually work? One telling aspect is that many of them claim to model themselves after Silicon Valley groups. The problem is, there is no evidence (and conversations tell me otherwise) that these groups actually do many deals themselves. The world of Angel, Venture or other investment is about relationships. When you, as a startup, start to meet Angels and VCs, your focus should be completely on building a relationship with them, the deal can flow from that.
There are always exceptions to the rule, I know that b5media was funded out of a TVG event in Toronto pretty quickly. I don’t know of any others though.
Like I do our friends in the Den, I tend to question the value of these groups, especially the ones that charge upwards of 3000$ to the entrepreneur for participation (like First Angel Network), but it’s also important to recognize that the members of these groups can been keen, hungry and able investors. The trick is to pick them out of the pack and focus on dealing with the individual directly. Your $250,000 deal doesn’t need 4 weeks worth of legals holding it up when a simple note and issuance of shares could do the trick.
The obituary after the jump. Who wants to sing the requiem?
Skymeter is set on replacing parking meters, toll booths, and monthly insurance bills. Talk about big aspirations!
A prototype location payment system (think GPS black box) has been developed and the Toronto company is forging development relationships from Holland to Singapore. London?s congestion pricing program has perked the interest of governments around the world. Insurance companies such as Aviva and Progressive are considering implementing pay per mile vehicle insurance. And what city wouldn?t want ticketless parking? Greens are excited about Skymeter, as road use charges have the potential to reduce automobile emissions.
The business model is to capture a percentage of payment just like credit card companies. Sure getting the systems into vehicles is going to be a challenge, but we have high hopes for this MaRS incubated company.
myhood.ca is a Toronto focused apartment finder and review tool. Considering that the site was launched just 1 month ago, I find it amazing that there are over 900 reviews of various apartment buildings on the site already.
The site is a Google Maps mashup that lets you find apartments based on location and marks the location of grocery stores, subway stops and shopping malls on the map. This model is even better in Toronto, where people tend to be particular about what neighborhood they want to move to.
I already made use of myhood.ca by reading reviews of our new condo building on the site. I think that providing a service that allows condo owners to review their buildings would be useful, although there is a large disincentive to being critical of a building your currently own in. I turns out that the building manager is hard to deal with and that I should make-nice with Janice, the front desk lady. I did that today, bypassing the manager, and introduced myself to Janice. I was glad to know I didn’t need to waste time.
I also know how painful it can be to find an apartment in Toronto having moved up here blind to both Toronto and large city living period. I can still remember the shock at the sticker price for a 2 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment, not knowing the ups and downs of one building or another just made it all that much more confusing.
Right now, myhood.ca is trying to use a referral fee model for sending people back to the site where a particular listing originated. If they can make this work, and pay, with all the providers out there, then it could be a lucrative model. There will also be some banner advertising and allowing landlords to purchase “featured listings” that will be displayed more prominently.
myhood.ca is self funded to date and they are thinking about looking for investment to help them take the site to (I presume) other markets.
Jeff Hersh is the one-man show behind myhood.ca. It’s pretty evident that he is able to execute well on an idea. A large marketing firm teaming up with a web development shop would not have turned out anything close to myhood.ca for anything less than a 500k budget for the first phase. Jeff has done it solo and is off to a great start.
myhood.ca was showcased on MapleLeaf2.0 already and The Torontoist has a great review of the site.
Alright, here is one I am not sure what to think about. Easypost.ca is a dead-easy way to send letters anywhere in Canada. Type in an address, type in a letter and they print it and send it.
Seems silly right?
Well, there could be a lot more to this service, which is in a free-beta right now, that could make them more than just a letter sending website. Right now there are API‘s for everything you can imagine. When a programmer wants to add a service to their web-app, they use an API to tell another site to do the work for them. You might, for example, tell Google to draw you a fancy GoogleMap, or you might tell YouTube to tell you what the most popular 10 videos are.
Freshbooks is one of the few sites doing ground-mailing services right now, but I can think of a few other places I would like to have the service. For example, I wouldn’t mind being able to upload an Word Document, Email or Powerpoint Doc and have it mailed on occasion.
So, theoretically (and I haven’t asked them), easypost.ca could become a sort of API to connect websites to the real world and make ground mailing super easy.
Even if they don’t go that route, I think there will be a suprising amount of people who would like a really, really, simple way of sending ground mail, without having to get up from their office chair.
We will follow up with Easypost later on and see how things are coming along.
Workspace is an Ottawa-based startup co-founded by Obaid Ahmed and Marc Windle.
Workspace provides an online collaboration environment for web development projects, allowing for management of many remote servers through a single interface, a built-in editor (no local machine IDE required) and support for six programming languages. A potential boon to freelancers and consultants, Workspace has 2,000 beta testers from around the world providing feedback on bugs and feature requests since beta testing began at the end of March. Pricing has not yet been determined, but will likely follow the freemium model familiar in Web 2.0 applications.
Beta users were identified early on (prior to development) by starting with a blog and using Digg to get some attention to the idea from likely customer/users and signing people up with a simple online form. Workspace is currently working closely with their beta users and will be looking for seed funding this summer to expand the team to add more features and to support scale at launch.
I was invited by Catarina von Maydell, formerly of the Toronto Angel Group, to attend a gathering of investors (mostly angel) at ISCM, the Innovation Synergy Centre in Markham north of Toronto. Investors learned about the services that this hub of so-called “4th pillar” organizations offers to small-medium sized growth companies. The invited investors had an opportunity to learn about and meet with some of the companies that ISCM helps prepare for investment.
This “one-stop shopping” non-profit innovation hub in Markham’s tech office heartland puts the ISCM’s own staff together with partners like NRC/IRAP, Ontario Centres of Excellence, the Health Technology Exchange, York University and Seneca College. It provides mentors, access to a number of business and technology advisory resources and access to an investor network intended to facilitate deal-flow that appears particularly catered to angels.
Those familiar with Mars in downtown Toronto will be familiar with the basic model. Interestingly, some companies in the 416 apparently make the trip up the Don Valley Parkway to work with them. The scale, however, is smaller and the investment side seems more angel than VC focused.
I was struck by the experienced team and the attitude of CEO Bob Glandfield and Director of Operations Rod Graham that was very supportive of the grassroots realities of the small-medium sized technology growth company. Bootstrapping garage web startups may be a little too small for ISCM to help, but they are worth getting to know for the high quality of the advisors they have available.
Ron Smith is a Mentor at ISCM who is beyond the stage where he needs to be working for a living, but who clearly has a passionate connection to the companies he mentors. His low-key, almost folksy, tone and approach was palpable and left me with the impression of a place that had a human touch that is critical to working with businesses that are ultimately very personal.
What is your experience with ISCM or other similar “innovation hubs”? What are others of note across Canada? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Canada’s most loved, and arguably best, startup, Conceptshare has been doing the conference circuit lately, and this past week at Mix’07, Scoble did an interview and demo with Bernie Aho.
The lesson for startups? When you can afford it, it really is a good idea to get out there and pound the pavement to get some exposure.
A review, and hopefully interview, with the ConceptShare guys will be coming soon enough.
ConceptShare is based in Sudbury, Ontario.
clearRoot is a Toronto based startup that is building a back-end system for flower shops that allows thousands of independent stores to place orders with each-other as easily as it is for them to fill an order themselves.
clearRoot manages all of the complexities associated with a large Business-to-Business network, and they provide very user friendly front-end software to the flower shops who participate. ClearRoot first started to take shape in May of 2004, but has been growing quickly since April 2006. With over 100 paying customers already (and that’s BEFORE they have even released the software), clearRoot is clearly making sense to their customers.
The clearRoot business model is based on a pay-per-use fee on each order sent through the system. This is similar to Interac, and if it is priced right, this will drive a lot of growth for clearRoot. Because clearRoot was born out of a team with experience running an independent flower shop, as well as their current ethos of building their software and network directly with customers, they have a great chance of building the next big disruptive B2B platform.
Until now, clearRoot has been doing a lot of direct selling of their network, but they have also been growing organically in their vertical. Later on, they are planning to do joint-promotion with other complimentary services in the florist industry.
While growth has been strong, the market for something like clearRoot is also growing and my guess is that is why they are currently looking to raise financing.
clearRoot is currently run by Jeff Richman and their team is built of people experienced with the florist industry, or developers who are working on building their platform out.
Contact Jeff Richman