Category: Toronto

  • Win $5000 – Kik Launches In-Phone SDK and Competition

    In February this year, Fred Wilson wrote a great piece about the need for mobile app “glue” (my words). Here is the exact phrasing:

    “When I was at the music hackday a few weekends ago, I noticed that it was easy to build something interesting by simply snapping together a few web apps and then building some light glue between them. I suspect it will be even easier to do that on mobile and the era of “meta apps” that deliver functionality across multiple apps is upon us. And I think that has the potential to create some new startup opportunities.”

    Well, Kik has become one of the first gluemakers. Read their blog post – The Kik SDK: Build Real-Time Sharing into Your App in 10 Minutes.

    Kik has provided a device resident SDK so that application developers can build sharing into their apps. It is such a powerful idea – sharing done on the device. Until now, if a mobile app developer wanted to do sharing, that capability had to be basically hosted “in the cloud”. Think about picplz & instagram. They have had to use Facebook, Twitter and other “web” platforms, and connect to them via some cloud servers. Well, with Kik’s SDK, mobile apps can now share “natively” on their mobile platform. No more cloud – huzzah!

    ‘Everything is better with friends’ By giving your users the ability to share with each other in real time, your app will be that much more fun and compelling (see the Sketchee story below). Sharing can also give a big boost in adoption – when a user who doesn’t have your app receives a Kik content message from it, Kik offers to take them directly to your download page where they can install it. All of a sudden you aren’t asking your users to share your app with their friends, but to share content from your app with their friends – content that requires them to get your app to view and interact with it. It’s the difference between inviting someone to join a social network vs. tagging a photo of them that requires them to join the social network to view it. And best of all, it will only take you 10 minutes to add this kind of functionality to your app.

    On top of all that, Kik is giving away $5000 to each of the top three applications built on their SDK. Finish your app by August 8th and you can get in on that.

  • Under the Hood – Chango

    I am always curious at what startups are using for the technology under the hood. It helps define the technologies that frontend and backend developers looking for jobs might start using. It helps understand what skills are being developed in the ecosystem and where competition or coopetition for talent may exist. And I am always curious at the emerging trends of technology adoption by local firms.

    I have enjoyed the coverage of the technology at Toronto-born startups like BackType and the work of the team at BostonInno (in particular Kevin McCarthy’s The Tech Behind) and Phil Whelan in Vancouver. Dan Morel (@dpmorel) has started looking at the development processes used at Canadian startups (see: Supersize your Startup Dev Productivity & One is the Loneliest Number). If you are a Canadian startup that is building “interesting” technology, we’re actively looking for startups to profile.


    Chango

    We start the series with Chango and technical Q&A with Chris Sukornyk (LinkedIn, @sukornyk) and Mazdak Rezvani (LinkedIn, @mazdak) looking at the technology and the evolution of Chango platform. Chango closed $4.25MM in a Series B financing round led by Rho Canada and included iNovia CapitalMetamorphic VenturesExtreme Venture Partners and others. The Chango team has doubled over the last 6 months, they are roughly 25 people (including Hot Sh!t List member Josh Davey).

    The online advertising landscape is changing rapidly, Chango is taking advantage of Real-Time Bidding to allow marketers to buy ads on the web in real-time. It means big data where time is critical because small fluctuations in price or users can have big impact on the overall effectiveness or cost.  The best analogy is a stock market, where instead of stocks, marketers can buy billions of ads each day based on how they think that websites ad slots will perform for them. The cool part about RTB is that you can combine data to put the right ad in front of the right user. This requires huge data processing skills and Chango processes information on about 60,000 ads a second.

    What does Chango do?

    We are an ad-buying platform that is built for online marketers looking to find new customers using display (banner ads). Our main goal is to eliminate wasted marketing dollars through smarter targeting. Specifically we show ads to people based on what they’ve searched for in the past – a technique we are pioneering called “Search Retargeting“.

    Unlike traditional ad networks we exclusively buy ads using real-time bidding, a new technology that is rapidly changing the Display advertising industry and allowing marketers to layer data on top of their media buys.

    Chango is unique in that it has access to billions of search terms, billions of incoming ad impressions, and has devised machine learning techniques for combining data from different sources to deliver more efficient and better-targeted campaigns for our advertisers.

    What does your product architecture look like?

    Software development that deals with “Big Data” typically has two types of challenges: big volume, or low latency. Chango has to deal with both of these issues simultaneously.

    We receive over 90,000 requests per second (and growing monthly) from our ad exchange and data partners at peak times of the day. To make matters more interesting, we have approximately 80ms to respond to any incoming bid requests. Unfortunately 30-50ms of this limit is used up because of unavoidable network latency, this leaves us only 30ms to process each bid request. As a result, we have to constantly optimize our bidder subsystem around this challenge.

    What are some of the tools and technologies you use?

    Open Source is at the heart of our technology stack. Python is the common thread that binds all of our subsystems. Our entire infrastructure is written in Python. We use a (modified version of) the Tornado Web Server for our realtime servers, and Django for the front-end.

    When dealing with super fast response times it’s critical to have a super-fast datastore at your disposal. That’s why we use a NoSQL database technology based on the proven memcached server.

    The unsung open source hero of our infrastructure is HAProxy. HAProxy handles our load-balancing across the board. We use the “keepalived” feature of Linux to keep these servers in high-availability mode.

    As far as our architecture is concerned we try to not have any major dependencies on any specific features of the third-party systems we choose. They just happen to work well for our current environment.

    How did you get here?

    Scalability is as much an art as it’s a science, but most importantly, it’s about keeping things simple. It took years of hard work, and careful tuning and measurement to arrive at where we are.

    Originally we used Java for all server-side development and Ruby on Rails for front end development. The thinking was that we needed a rock-solid language for server architecture and a rapid development environment for front-end work. This concept served us well for a little while; however, in early 2010 we realized that Java was drastically slowing down our ability to iterate quickly and effectively. A single feature was taking days to build, test and deploy.

    We bit the bullet and rebuilt the platform entirely in Python and it was probably the best decision we ever made. Not only do we have a consistent language across front end and server side development but it has enabled us to rapidly add features or test new ideas. We are fortunate to have access to the fantastic ecosystem created by the Python community.

    Where do you host?

    Our first approach back in 2009 was to leverage Amazon Web Services EC2 as a scaleable and cheap way to prototype the platform. That served us well for a while; however, the shared virtual environment meant that we had wildly variable server resources.

    We shifted to Hosting.com knowing that we ultimately needed our own equipment and if we wanted a VM environment we would need to set one up ourselves. While Hosting.com provided good support at the time we wanted the rapid provisioning we were used to at EC2 with the power of dedicated hosting.

    Ultimately we chose SoftLayer as our hosting provider of choice. SoftLayer offers a VM environment in addition with their “express” service that allows us to get 10s of new servers provisioned in about 3-4 hours! They have been extremely good about allowing us to occasionally provision a whole new parallel cluster as we do capacity planning.

    How do you monitor your systems?

    Monitoring is done through a combination of Nagios, PagerDuty, and Circonus among others. We have also built a real-time data visualization system that let’s us monitor both infrastructure, and campaign performance. We use this dashboard as our own NOC system hooked up to a TV that is mounted right in the engineering area!

    What are your biggest development challenges?

    We’ve got two distinct challenges. Our real-time, data processing, and systems engineering teams deal with problems of scalability and big data. As our business continues to grow, we need to re-examine our infrastructure and design choices. We have a very healthy culture of team collaboration, code-review, and refactoring.

    Our Dashboard team has a different set of challenges. Our self-serve ad platform is very much like Adwords in that marketers can put down a credit card and launch a campaign themselves. We need to make this an extremely user-friendly system, while keeping it powerful enough to enable people to perform sophisticated reporting and campaign optimization.

    How do you win?

    The Chango business is all about putting the right ad in front of the right user at the right time. We made an early decision that data you know about a user (ie. search data) is only effective if it is combined with a proprietary bidding engine that can make decisions in real time.

    Almost every DSP, data provider or ad network out there today does this by storing information about users in a client-browser “cookie”. They call this a user segment. The problem with user segments is that they are pre-computed and stored within the users browser. If you decide half way through your campaign that you need to adjust your audience (due to lack of performance) there is no way to do so since the information is hard coded in the users browser. The only option is to continue serving ads to this under-performing group of users and wait for that cookie to expire (typically 30 days).

    At Chango we’ve decided to make everything real-time, including our decision about who to bid on, and how much to bid. Nothing about the user is pre-computed. So the Chango ‘cookie’ contains nothing more than a unique identifier that anonymously points to all the raw data we know about that person in our database.

    Chango is hiring!

    Python Developers! There are multiple open positions in Toronto, New York & San Francisco. But if I could have anything it would be talented developers that either know python or want to learn Python.


    Interested in being profiled in our Under the Hood series, we are actively looking for Canadian startups building “interesting” technologies and solving “interesting” problems. Contact me by completing your initial Under the Hood submission.

  • BackType acquired by Twitter

    Backtype has been acquired by Twitter

    Congratulations Christopher Golda (@golda) and Michael Montano (@michaelmontano) on Twitter acquiring BackType. We’ve written about BackType since their acceptance in YCombinator (fortunate that we didn’t give iPartee their previous startup too much attention). This is another amazing acquisition of Canadian startups by a Silicon Valley company (make it 16 acquisitions since Jan 2011 see TechVibes). I think Dan was right, this could be a $1B year for Canadian startup acquisitions.

    The BackType team had already relocated from Toronto to San Francisco. And it looks like the relocation to the Twitter offices should be much easier:

    Our team’s relocating to the Twitter office. We’re very excited to not only join an amazing company that’s changing the world, but to continue building products in pursuit of our shared vision with Twitter.

    Finally, I’d like to thank all our investors and advisors, especially Y Combinator, Toni Schneider and True Ventures, Josh Felser and David Samuel from Freestyle CapitalManu KumarChris SaccaRaymond Tonsing and Seth Berman.

    What is amazing/disappointing is that there are no Canadian investors along side the group of amazing investors assembled by Chris and Michael.

  • Founder Fuel Jam Session in TO

    FounderFuel

    Nothing like the last minute planning around here. Ian Jeffrey (LinkedIn, @ianmtl) from FounderFuel is planning on being in Toronto today (June 27, 2011) and tomorrow (June 28, 2011). He is planning on meeting with startups and founders to share his experiences launching FounderFuel, the mentorship and incubation/acceleration plan for participating startups and to talk about tech startups generally. If you are interested in talking with one of the emerging technology company incubators/accelerators you should come and talk to Ian and learn about what is being offered in Montreal. There is a lot of choice in the marketplace for entrepreneurs, and the best way to see the differences are to connect with the people behind the scenes like Ian and the FounderFuel team. This is a great way to evaluate the program, get introduced to the people, and connect.

    FounderFuel Jam Session

    Date:
    June 28, 2011
    Time:
    7 PM EDT – Presentation & Overview
    8 PM EDT – Startup 1-on-1s and discussion
    Location:
    Camaraderie Coworking, 102 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, ON, Canada [map]
    Register to attend:

    From the looks of Alexa Clark’s (@alexaclark) photo exposition at Camaraderie, it is a great space to host a startup. I know that Matt (@mattskilly) and Aron (@defrex) at Hipsell have their startup offices there. It is a great space for startups requiring a great work space, a central location, and the benefits of an enabled coworking culture.

    Beer Station at Camaraderie - Some rights reserved by LexnGer
    AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by LexnGer

  • WaveAccounting raises from INKEF Capital

    WaveAccountingOur friends at WaveAccounting announced yesterday that they had raised a $1.5MM seed investment from INKEF Captial. We’re big fans of WaveAccounting, in fact, it’s what we use to manage the receipts and books for StartupNorth. It means that others see the huge potential with this application. And we’re happy that our accounting provider continues to grow and demonstrate traction. I like stability 😉

    Wave also announced the addition of 2 new senior managers: Scott Zandbergen (LinkedIn) formerly of Sage Software and Stephen Dixon (LinkedIn, @sdixonhalloween) formerly of Deloitte & Touche. Looks like to great additions to the senior management team.

    This is the first investment from Peter Carrescia (LinkedIn, @pcarrescia) who is one of the two new Managing Directors at the INKEF Capital fund which is a ~$200MM fund from OMERS and ABP pension funds. This is really interesting for a variety of reasons. It means that INKEF is now capable of actively deploying funds, they have set up the necessary funding vehicles and mechanisms to be live. This is fantastic news. It also means that John Ruffolo (LinkedIn, @ruffoloj) has hired a team and is actively seeking out Canadian deals. This is great news to for entrepreneurs. John and Peter are well respected and very entrepreneur friendly, this is a plus for entrepreneurs. And simply additional growth capital is a good thing.

    Congratulations Kirk, Jame, and the WaveAccounting team.

  • DEMO Innovation tour returns

    Some rights reserved by The DEMO Conference
    AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by The DEMO Conference

    The Demo Innovation is Everywhere tour is coming back to Canada with stops in Toronto & Montreal. The event includes 2 parts, a chance to pitch/present to local VCs (Rogers Ventures) and a social party. Last years event was fantastic.

    We invite you to submit an application for a 30 minute private meeting with the DEMO team and leading Venture capitals in a city near you. We have ten spots available per tour stop. Each company selected will also have the opportunity to address a larger audience at the DEMO Tour party in the evening open to the entire DEMO community of VCs, investors, media and PR professionals.

    Location Date Register
    Vancouver, BC Canada June 23rd, 2011
    Toronto, ON Canada June 28th, 2011

  • DemoCamp with Howard Lindzon – June 9, 2011

    DemoCamp Toronto # 28 by hyfen
    AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved photo by Andrew Louis (@hyfen)

    DemoCampToronto # 29 – The Dirty Details #dct

    Date:
    June 9, 2011
    Time:
    6:30 – 9 PM EST
    Location:
    Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, 55 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON
    Register to attend:

    Keynote Speaker – Howard Lindzon

    Howard LindzonHoward Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits® – a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. StockTwits was recently named “one of the top 10 most innovative companies in web” by FastCompany and one of the “50 best websites” by Time magazine.

    Mr. Lindzon has more than twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. With a unique vision for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he is the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses. Howard continues to manage a hedge fund he started in 1998.

    He created Wallstrip, and more than 400 original web video shows, which was purchased by CBS Corp. in 2007. He is an active angel with many success angel investments including: Rent.com, (purchased by Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), and Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Mr. Lindzon’s new media and internet business investments also include: Limos.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Buddy Media, Ticketfly, Assistly, Bit.ly and Tweetdeck.

    Mr. Lindzon received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management.

    We are looking for amazing entrepreneurs & demos

    The goal at DemoCamp has been to provide a platform for local companies to launch, get product or pitch feedback, to establish a presence for recruiting, to help with PR and social media awareness. We try to get a group of highly connected and apparently highly cynical entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, investors and others in a room to watch entrepreneurs in a safe environment. It’s something between a graduate seminar and a show. The goal is to demo your product and get feedback about your demo, your design, your market, etc. You decide. (It’s a work in progress, but it’s a social event).

    We’re also looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight from a highly connected cynical crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, pitch/presentation advice. Startups seeking advice should apply to demo.

    Apply to Demo »

    Sponsors

    We need a few sponsors to help cover the cost of food and travel. If you are looking for coverage in the newsletter, blog and at the event ping me at david at davidcrow dot ca for details. Sponsorships start at $500.

    • KPMG
    • Thunder Road Capital
    • Research In Motion
    • Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade
    • National Angel Capital Organization
    • Ontario Centres of Excellence
    • StartMeUpRyerson

     

  • Startup Weekend Toronto

    Some rights reserved photo by Seattle Municipal Archives

    Startup Weekend Toronto, which kicks off June 3, is almost sold out; if you’re on the fence, don’t wait much longer, StartupNorth readers can save 20% by using discount code: STARTUPNORTHSW

    This June’s event will have a strong focus on lean startup principles. A fantastic set of speakers are lined up to provide practical advice so you can take what you learn well beyond the weekend itself. While there is no “right” way to start a company, Startup Weekend is here to help provide you with as many tools and connections as possible to help you succeed.

    A great set of speakers for Friday night will kick things off and prepare you for what’s ahead. Throughout the weekend there will be mentors dropping in helping teams with their projects. Saturday night, founders will share war stories. The judging panel includes experienced investors and entrepreneurs who you will have a chance to connect with. Startup Weekend  will round up with dinner and awards at an awesome venue to be announced shortly.

    The winner of Startup Weekend will enjoy more than just street cred, in addition there will be a cash award to help move the project forward, entry into the Ryerson DMZ for 4 months, video production to help on the marketing front, pro bono legal services, a chance to demo at the next Democamp Toronto (June 9), and more.

     

  • Riding the rails to Waterloo

    Go Train 614 - Photo by Danielle Scott
    CC BY-SA 2.0 Some rights reserved by Danielle Scott

    Why isn’t there a commuter train from Toronto to Waterloo? Ok, you might ask actually ask why Toronto doesn’t have a train from downtown to the airport but let’s leave that for a conversation with more educated politicians and policy wonks.

    I’ve spent this morning with startups in Waterloo, hanging out with people at the Communitech Hub, UW Velocity, and a crazy number of super awesome startups (TribeHRvidyard, 17 muscles, Footloose Games, Willet, Cyborg Trading Systems, Will PWN 4 Food and others). I left Toronto at 6:15am to avoid traffic and be in Waterloo before 8am for my first meeting. The drive was approximately 116 km and took approximately 90 minutes (arrived at 7:52am). I couldn’t help think about why there isn’t a train. The distance is just a little more than SF to San Jose (~74km) and double SF to Palo Alto (~51.5km). I can get a Caltrain from San Francisco to Palo Alto or San Jose.

    Waterloo - Early Stage Companies

    If the assumption is that UWaterloo is a top ranking university (possibly my alumni delusions that cause me to overlook UWaterloo’s non-placement on Times Higher Education rankings). And with more startups like Kik raising money with powerhouses like OpenText, RIM, MKS and Christie Digital. There are less reason for students to have to leave the reason. It makes it more attractive to rent an apartment for the year and stay in Waterloo to manage your costs on your coop program.

    Maybe the argument is that the capital is better spent on more programs for entrepreneurs or road infrastructure. But it seems that one of the greatest assets to the Toronto startup community (UW Coop students and graduates) are disconnected by public transportation. I wonder what my UW alumni brethren like Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar), John Green (@johnphilipgreen), Amar Varma (@extremevp),  Brydon Gillis (@brydon), Ali Asaria (@aliasaria), Razor Suleman (@iloverewards), Kunal Gupta (@kunalfrompolar) think about the need for better connections between Waterloo (assuming a stop in Guelph) and Toronto.

  • StartupWeekend Toronto – Summer Edition

    StartupWeekend is coming back to Toronto this June 3-5. After an excellent kick-off event last September, Toronto is primed to bring it again. If you don’t believe that you can get started building real companies in a weekend then take a closer look. The Toronto community showed its stuff and did some amazing work last time around: TaskAve, RateHub, N20Vuru.

    StartupWeekends are cropping up around the world, the movement is gaining momentum. Only a couple of months back, Zaarly was born at StartupWeekend LA – Zaarly has since raised $1M and was ready for launch at this year’s SXSW. More and more stories like this are emerging as these events gain traction and participants come ready to build. This June’s StartupWeekend is going to be held at the historic Burroughes Building at Queen and Bathurst and will provide an environment to promote true collaboration – not just within the teams but across teams as well.

    We will be working hard at creating an even better environment for all of you to learn, be inspired, and build great things. Just come ready to work hard and have fun. Start getting your pitches ready and watch space for more. Follow us online and via twitter (@startupwkndto) for updates.

    Tickets are on sale now, the first 20 StartupNorth readers to register receive a 20% discount – use the code: STARTUPNORTHSW