Category: Toronto

Clay Tablet Technologies, a Toronto, Ontario company made a few interesting announcements today. The first is that they are partnering with SDL as a partner to allow SDL clients to glue their translation technologies in to content management systems.

Clay Tablet has an interesting position in the market. They sit between large content-focused systems, like a document management system or content management platform, and outside providers of translation services. Clay Tablet automatically manages the routing of content by connecting directly with content management systems, allowing for the immediate and automatic sending of content out for translation.

What I love about this approach is that once they are deployed, Clay Tablet then plays a vital role in the relationship between the two additional vendors. This means that they can continue to build revenues while having to spend an order less of effort in servicing the customer.

Their client list is growing impressively, and with today’s partnership announcement, we will undoubtedly be seeing a lot of new customers coming on board.

Their second announcement today was that they are releasing version 2.0 of their product, which is a significant improvement over their previous versions.

The long-term opportunity for Clay Tablet is significant. I don’t have to tell you how big the translation business is, or how much it is growing year over year. There is not a company in the world that doesn’t require translation services at some point, and by acting as an easily integrated middle-man, Clay Tablet can profit handsomely from that need.

Contact Robinson Kelly, CEO

SlashID launched today. The Toronto, Ontario based company is entering a market that has slain giants such as Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and IBM among others. This is also the same general market that Vancouver-based SXIP is competing in, although they have a primarily enterprise-focused business model (where they compete with companies such as Australian Atlassian with its Crowd product).

The most successful effort to date in the federated-credentials market has been OpenID, which has seen a lot of acceptance in the developer and service provider world, but still flounders in obscurity for the average internet user. So, the big question really is: is there a federated credentials business to be made at all? Or is this just a big dream?

The benefit to the end user seems obvious: I have one login name and password to remember and no matter which site I go to, I can log in without going through signup hassles or having to reset a long-forgotten password. This has been the promise of every federated credential system to date, and it continues to be a major dream of companies such as Google and Microsoft, who feel that the credential and it’s attached identity are the keys to being the number one destination for web users.

For website owners, the deal gets a little more complicated. Above all else, site owners feel like they are being asked to give up control for the sake of user convenience. The fact is though, there is very little evidence that tells site owners that users will bypass their site or application in favor of a competitor because they do not allow users to use an external authentication system. While the level of control being given up in reality is minimal, if any at all, perception remains the biggest enemy of federated credential systems.

Will SlashID make a break for it? A strong endorsement on Mashable is a great start, and their focus on providing up-to-date and useful developer tools is smart. If SlashID can provide incentives to site owners to include them as a login option, then they could emerge as a clear leader.

Contact: Colin Smillie

John and Malgosia Green started Savvica in Toronto three years ago. Savvica was run on a shoestring budget. John and Malgosia were hitting the pavement hard, working on financing deals, partnerships and generally promoting Nuvvo, a do-it-yourself online course community. It was hard, thankless work, and eventually it was time to make a decision. Running a startup out of your basement can be grueling. If you’ve been there, you can empathize, at some point you have to step back and re-asses.

So, after 2 years, John and Malgosia decided to take jobs in San Francisco. The benefits were obvious: Gain loads of experience, keep working in startups (they didn’t file themselves away in boring jobs), make connections and give themselves some financial breathing room.

Here is where their story takes a turn for the better however. Just when we all thought that Savvica was done for, John and Malgosia did the smart thing. They didn’t “go out of business”, or take down the site. They didn’t declare it a failure and start preaching about all the lessons they learned. Instead, they kept burning a little midnight oil, still looking for a deal or an opportunity, and most of all, they kept their dream alive.

Well, hard work pays off and things have finally turned around for Savvica. They have taken investment from an India-based e-learning company that was happy to have Savvica headquarter itself anywhere in North America. John and Malgosia packed up their things and headed straight back to Toronto.

If you know John and Malgosia, as most of us here in the Toronto tech scene do, you know they are not only hard working, but also incredibly helpful to other startups. We are all excited to have them back here in Toronto and we can’t wait to see them at DemoCamps, Torcamps and whatever other things are happening.

Savvica is hiring a handful of Rails engineers and I am sure there will be more hiring soon.

What happens when you’ve made a business out of publishing hundreds and hundreds of niche blogs? b5Media, a Toronto based startup that has taken funding in the range of US$2-million co-lead by Brightspark Ventures and J. L. Albright Venture Partners, is the owner of a vast amount of posts and articles on a few dozen subjects and finding new ways to capitalize on that asset can get tough.

Today, b5 is taking a leap and is launching Spekked. The project is labeled “Beta”, which either means that the technology is young (it’s an aggregator of other b5media blogs, all based on one common subject), or it means the entire business idea is being tested. My guess is that it is a combination of both.

As any startup begins to accumulate assets, it is critical to put them to good use. Like the guys at AideRSS, who previewed a set of tools at Democamp which uses their existing data, b5 is starting to zero in on larger segments of their market by combining many products (in this case, content) in to one re-focused stream which will have a much broader appeal. Spekked will also act as a funnel in to b5’s deeper offerings in that particular category.

The challenge for this project will be to avoid losing readers who may stop reading 5 regular b5media blogs and instead just tune in to the one aggregated blog.

If this works, you can bet there will be a lot of other branded combination blogs from b5 to come.

We are working on a profile of b5media, which we hope to post soon.

Idee is a Toronto, Ontario based company that has been one of the biggest stars in the Canadian Startup community for years.

Idee is a profitable and extremely original company. Their ultra-cool office on Queen St in Toronto is home to 22 employees.

Now, I have to warn you. I am a bit of an Idee fan, so if I gush too much,. well,. gush along.

Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore are the two founders and brains behind the company. Paul currently runs the technical side of things and Leila is the CEO and runs the business operation. That said, it’s obvious that they are a tightly knit team. Both of them put in long days as they turn out new products and bring on new customers.

What’s so great to see is how well this team works together. As far as I know, they have never strangled each other in public before. Considering that you can walk by Idee at midnight many days of the week and see the lights all on tells you enough about how hard these two, and their team, all work.

What does Idee do? They are the developers of visual search and image/video monitoring technologies. On the visual search front: their visual search software can find similar images in very large image collections. Give their engine an image and it will find all the similar images in an image collection. You can try their visual search technology in the Idee lab.

As to image and video monitoring: Idee monitors and actively tracks millions of clients images and can identify where their clients images have been used in both print publications and the internet. They are the only company in the world to do this. Their image recognition system analyzes each client’s images and creates a digital fingerprint for each image and compares it to images scanned from publications and crawled from the Internet. The image matches found for their clients can be partial image matches as well. This means that a person appearing in one image, and then reappearing in another image but with a different background, will be found by Idee.

Their clients receive timely image monitoring reports that basically provide them with a snapshot of where any of their images have appeared. These reports can be used for automating editorial photo sales, competitive analysis, copyright monitoring. As you can imagine if you are an professional photographer this would make sense for you too 🙂

This video provides the best overview of their services. Their first compute cluster was put together in less than a day (see photo to the left). Today their compute cluster includes over 300 processors and more than 40 terabytes of storage and it is continuing to grow (see glamour shot of Paul below).

Idee has had to deal with all of the classic startup issues and in our next installment we will get them to tell us about some of their adventures. Scaling such a computationally complex business means maintaining (and paying for) a huge technical infrastructure while building an enterprise sales operation. It takes stamina and brains to get that kind of job done. Leila, Paul and their team have done it.

They may not have entierly conquered all media searching yet, but they are on their way. I would place a bet any day that they will get there pretty soon. Once you get to know Idee you realize that the sky is the limit.

Take a look at their client list and you will know what I mean.

The question for me is: what’s next for Idee? Leila won’t say exactly what’s coming, but we can look forward to something huge soon. I know it.

Update #2: 2startup has a review of the beta of Planeteye, confirming that they did launch in to a wider beta. We have no confirm/deny on the specific numbers we posted before, so we will leave the three paragraphs removed and will post the facts as we have them later if they are of any interest at all.

Check out the review, and please post any more links to reviews in the comments if you have them. Also check out 2Startup, which is a startup blog that seems to be just getting off the ground.

PlanetEye, possibly the stealthiest startup in Canada in the last 2 years, is finally ready for launch.

If you aren’t in Toronto, you probably haven’t heard of Planeteye. If you are in Toronto, you may only know of them because they employ some of the coolest developers in town – Slava Sakhnenko and Alan Hietala, along with the newly reshuffled Mark Evans, who used to be at, b5Media.

What is PlanetEye? Well, you have to do some digging to find out, so that’s what I did. Mum is the word for PlanetEye employees — who couldn’t be convinced to show as much as a screenshot pre-launch.

“Users upload images on to Planeteye?s servers and geo-tag them or any existing online photos. Visitors can then enter a location or landmark, and see far-off places through a previous traveller?s photo lens.” – blog

PlanetEye is a site that lets you store Images and allows you to organize them according to their GPS location. I am going to guess that reviews and other annotations are mixed in there. From my understanding, Planeteye has taken investment from Microsoft Research and makes extensive use of the World Wide Media Exchange platform. If you check out that demo, my guess is you get to see the bulk of PlanetEye’s value proposition. Perhaps it is a sort of fancy version of the EarthAlbum.

Planeteye first came to life out of a course at UofT called Business of Software. Rick Segal, a Venture Capitalist in Toronto, was a judge for the end-of-term business plan competition. Slava Sakhnenko, Elliott Tzaneteas, and Jennifer McCarthy (who has since gone to another of Rick’s portfolio companies, MusicIP) were presenting their business plan and it seems Rick liked it. He liked it so much in fact that he decided to put together a company based on their work, as well as the Microsoft Research patents we mentioned before. (Slava has the best account of it all here).

So, go grab your camera, and perhaps your GPS, and perhaps your laptop too, and get ready to geotag the hell out of your town. But first, you will have to sit tight. “Coming soooooon!”

Reports are rolling in from StartupWeekend Toronto, both from various blogs and some more candid reports via the backchannel.

Attendees were as many as 60 on Saturday, with an estimated 40 working away today (Sunday).

The good news? The application is actually getting built. It’s called Lobbythem and it is a very basic platform that lets you create a sort of petition with a few actionable items that come off of it (from what I understand, things like getting key influencers in the lobbying group to push the petition forward, tools to get more individuals involved, etc).

There is a screenshot here of the app so far.

Is a business getting built here? It’s hard to say. The biggest hurdle for a lobbying platform is that the ‘enabling’ or community-based lobbying has not been spectacularly profitable yet. Sites like Petitionspot and loads of others are essentially user-generated SEO content, but they are making some money doing it.

We will get a final wrapup from some participants in a month or so to see how things shake out. In the meantime, keep an eye on the site and let’s see how it all comes together.

Note: Interested in what is happening at StartupWeekend? Want to check it out? Don’t show up at the site — people are being turned away from visiting on the basis of not having signed an NDA.

I am going to send the organizers an email to find out what on earth would fall under an NDA that is going on at StartupWeekend. I can’t imagine much.

Update #2: Just had a call from one of the StartupWeekend organizers. People are not being turned away for not having signed NDAs, but they are trying to keep visitors from dropping by and interrupting the flow. I can understand that completely.

He tells me the app will launch tonight and I can tell from his voice, there is a lot of excitement in the air. We will check in with them tonight to see if it all comes together.

Update #3: Some of the guys from StartupWeekend presented at DemoCamp4 here in Toronto and announced that the site will be live later this week.

Also, there is a bit of backlash starting to surface about how the Toronto organizers handled things.

Startup Weekend Toronto get’s underway tonight at 6pm. They are completely sold out, and even if half of those who signed up actually show up then there will be more than enough people to get a fun, and real, startup off the ground.

A lot of interesting people have been introducing themselves on the forums.

It’s hard to know what to expect from something like Startup Weekend. Like any startup, everything has to start with a good idea. Instead of starting with a business idea however, StartupWeekend is starting with an event and a group of people. That doesn’t have to be a negative thing, in fact, it can probably be a positive thing.

I will be dropping by StartupWeekend tonight and again near the end of the weekend and I will be reporting back all of the non-confidential bits that I can find out about what is coming together.

Experienced Startup founders that I have talked to have all had similar feelings about StartupWeekend. It is something we really want to encourage because it builds a startup culture and exposes a lot of new people to the world of starting a business, but at the same time we feel practically paralyzed with fear at the idea of have our business partners all chosen for us and having to negotiate simply to settle on the ‘what’ that is being built.

StartupWeekend is, however, anything but a joke. A real company will be incorporated, shares will be divided up and various equity incentives will be distributed to those who perform better or contribute more.

Update: Jonas and I came for the opening of StartupWeekend. There were at least 30 participants in the room and there was a lot of energy. It was a mix of people across all disciplines. The only concern I had was that someone mentioned that 7 developers didn’t show up, which would l leave them short I think.
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