Category: Toronto

Ryan Coleman blogged about the Dragon’s Den the other day and made a good observation that the actual makeup of the Dragons makes them almost useless.

Ryan also mentioned one of the “deals” that got me to do the most screaming at the TV. Jodi Sinden had launched her stationary business (HomeBox) only just over a week earlier, and had one the #1 prize at a trade show in New York, she came on the show offering 20% of the business for $50,000.

The cast, I mean: Dragon’s, came back with the usual demand for control and offered $50,000 for 50.1% of the company. Jodi took the deal.

The story however, is not a nightmare, it has a happy ending. Jodi commented on Ryan’s post and said:

There was a missing piece that wasn’t put to air, but only hinted at: I would’ve needed large future investments of capital to finance inventory, and $50,000 wasn’t even close. The extra little push that made it an attractive deal was that they said future cash investment on their part would never reduce my equity in the company. That is very different than most venture capital groups, where every further investment is in return for another percentage. At the time of the filming, I had a good idea but it launched only a week before, so I only had $5000 worth of sales. Over the two months of negotiation time afterwards, my FIRM orders grew to twice the value of the dragon deal. So I did. Run away that is! Speaking of which, now looking for investment to finance that inventory… Look for the Homebox this friday on The Shopping Channel and in the spring at Indigo and Staples!

She went from $5000 worth of sales to $100,000 in just a few weeks and told the Dragon’s to take a hike. It sounds like Jodi still has some need for cash to holdover her inventory to handle big orders, but that is a typical bump in the road for a startup that is producing real goods.

Jodi is not only on to something, but she is executing as well. She went out and got order before she could fulfill them and then worked out the details — smart move.

You can buy the HomeBox’s online during the holidays. I have bought one already as a gift and think I will go back and buy some more.

Digg.com, a client of Canadian web development firm silverorange, is now partnering with another Canadian company: Idée. Idée, who we previously profiled here, will be providing software to detect multiple submissions of the same image to Digg.com’s new dedicated images section.

Fans of Digg know that a dedicated images section has been in demand for some time now and by avoiding the noise of having multiples of the same image uploaded, Digg can provide a much better service than their competitors.

From the Digg.com Blog:

Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
We?ve added a new sort to the images section called ?mosaic? view ? it?s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images, we?ve added image recognition technology from Idée Inc.

Congratulations to everyone at Idée on this deal and on the new website, it looks great.

Idée has a follow-up post with a lot of information here.

In the world of RSS, and with users creating more of the actual content that popular sites are reselling to other users, we all start to create little islands of stuff out there on different sites, and rarely do we get the chance to pull it all together.

I create a lot of my own stuff. I twitter, create seesmic videos, have a facebook profile, have a blog, this blog, and post on another blog, I use last.fm, and so on. It gets hard, or impossible, to serve all of this content up to someone else in a meaningful way. On their own, each tidbit I leave on a site can often lack context, but aggregated together, the lifestream starts to tell a story.

Onaswarm is a new release from David Janes, based in Toronto, Ontario, that is one of the first movers in the personal aggregation space. There are others, such as friendfeed, but everyone in the market so far is early to the game.

RSS is a real market, and you have to think of it that way.

To some people RSS is at best just a file format, the vast majority of people don’t even have a clue what it is, but to a few, RSS is a market that is in a lot of pain right now. A market can be defined as “The opportunity to buy or sell; extent of demand for merchandise” and we are seeing that there is increasing demand for products and services which make RSS more useful and consumable to end users and businesses. In the same way that AideRSS and Feedburner have provided specific and useful tools to their target markets, there are subsets of the RSS market that remain open to a lifestreaming player.

The Consumer Market

Whoever gets the consumer side of the RSS market right is going to do pretty well. You only have to look at any set of internet usage estimates to get an idea of just how much consuming people are doing. An aggregator that can help people pull in all the content they are leaving all over the place will have a lot of opportunities. As each individual gets more accustomed to creating, and then reading content created by other amateurs, the need to have an adequate aggregation toolset will become more and more real.

The Enterprise Market

Standards like RSS are becoming prevalent in enterprise software and as more enterprise software platforms start to produce RSS feeds, there is going to be significant demand for aggregators which bring together feeds in unique and productive ways. There is a need to centralize feeds from tools like Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, and Wikis. Perhaps even email.

Innovative, Still not Pretty

Onaswarm has by far the best model for combining all manner of feeds in a reasonable and intuitive way. By reducing redundant information and filtering regularly recurring types of information Onaswarm becomes useful beyond a plain vanilla aggregator. Even better, Onaswarm allows groups of people to loosely combine all of their feeds and then slowly acts as a defacto social network. This is the Toronto Swarm, which gives you a reading of what is happening in Toronto’s tech scene.

The one downside to Onaswarm is that it really needs a decent UI overhaul. Things feel a little disjointed and a bit ugly. I am not the only one who feels that way, and I am pretty sure the guys at Onaswarm know it is something they are going to have to tackle.

Until their business model becomes more apparent (I am sure they have one, but are choosing to more generally test and prove the product before they really go to market), it will be hard to know if Onaswarm will be a winner or follower in the Lifestreaming space and RSS aggregator market. I think they are currently the best out there, in spite of the aforementioned need to fix up the UI. While it is not yet clear how quickly the market will or will not mature, the space should ultimately prove lucrative.

Contact David Janes from Blogmatrix.

GrowthWorks and GrandBanks Capital have announced a $7.5M Series B investment in xkoto. The startup, based in Toronto, is a leading provider of database load balancing solutions. The funding will be used to expand support of multiple database and ISV platforms, grow its U.S. presence, and accelerate sales. xkoto already counts big customers including UnitedHealthcare, Genworth Financial, InGrid, Travelport, and leading Wall Street investment firms.

While the use of load balancing technology is already widespread for deployments of web and app servers, corporate data centers have only recently begun to seize the technology and capture the associated benefits (improved performance, lower consumption of system resources, and the viability of using inexpensive commodity hardware). xkoto claims savings of up to $295,000 on the initial hardware/software and recurring savings of $60K per year for each system replaced with a commodity system using GRIDSCALE, their software product.

In addition to funding xkoto announced today a new Boston based CEO, David Patrick. David hails from Novell where he managed the $450 million Linux, Open Source, and Platform Services Group. Co-founder Albert Lee will become Chief Strategy Officer. Khalil Barsoum an industry veteran and Tim Wright of GrandBanks Capital, have joined xkoto’s board of directors which includes Roger Chabra of GrowthWorks, Mark Stirling of Treadstone Associates, and co-founder Albert Lee.

This round is exciting as it represents continued interest in Canadian software startups. Is a move south of the border imminent? No decision has been made according to Roger Chabra of GrowthWorks. “The CEO is Boston-based solely because he was too good a candidate to pass up.” Rather than get all worked up about headquarter relocation, lets try celebrating it as both a fact of startup life in Canada and more importantly a sign of success in a larger market.

We covered the return of Savvica earlier and expected we’d hear from them soon. I was thinking more like 5 or 6 months, but instead today we see that Languify, a crowd-sourced translation service, has gone live.

It is a service which not only let’s you manage your own translations for your product, but let’s you benefit from the translation work of others. Languify offers a full REST-style API, which allows other systems to programmatically interact with all of the projects, locales, keys, and translations you have on their service.

I woke up this morning to a few messages from a well known entrepreneur that he left me on Skype at 3am, and I am sometimes amazed by the number of late night e-mail exchanges I have with other startups as we work through the night. I have a feeling that John and Malgosia pulled a few all-nighters to get Languify done and released (8 days from start to finish).

While you don’t have to work long nights, and I avoid it most of the time these days, I have to admit that most entrepreneurs I know, who are successful, do it regularly.