StartupNorth

Category: Startups

  • StartupDrinks – YYZ, YUL, YYT, YQM, YYC, YHZ, YFC, YSJ

    StartupDrinks LogoFriendly neighbourhood reminder that tomorrow, June 30, 2010, is StartupDrinks (well tonight in Saskatoon & Regina). On June 30, 2010 you can join entrepretreneurs in:

    Jevon is going to be hanging out in Halifax. Ray is going to be in Montreal. Jonas, Bryan and I are planning on being at Grace O’Malleys (aka Granuaile), 14 Duncan St, Toronto, ON.

    It’s a great opportunity to get out of the office. To be social. To connect with others that are struggling building companies like you. What will we be talking about? We’ll be talking about “How to grow your traffic from 1k to 35k on $0” and other things. What do you want to talk about?

    Here’s

  • ScreenScape – Software for screens in public places

    I had a chance to catch up with Screenscape this week after they announced a new round of financing that came in just over $3million. The Prince Edward Island and Toronto based startup will be using the financing to expand sales capability and speed development.

    Screenscape is a web-based tool that makes it easy to create one of the information displays that you see in shopping malls, doctors offices and other public places. Through a simple drag and drop interface you can create a “screen” and add news feeds, local information, and store specific information (such as sales, announcements, etc). They call it “the Google Adsense of place-based media” — and they have some interesting IP that backs that up. The content of a screen can also be tailored based on the overall “power” of the screen. That is: how many people see it, in which demographic?

    The product has also been focused on being a “networked” tool from day 1: Venue owners can share content, advertisements and messages in a marketplace that makes it easy to cross-promote within a specific geography or with partners you select.

    Before Screenscape there were a lot of options for software that would run a single display, or through which you could push content in a pre-determined way to a certain set of screens, but Screenscape is the first tool I have seen that helps decentralize content production, which makes using a display screen a far less daunting proposition for a smaller venue.

    They also plan to add Foursquare and other integrations which could really help make things like Foursquare more accessible and useful for restaurants and retailers. Through the Foursquare API the restaurant could display things like the current mayor, current people checked-in and Foursquare-specific specials.

    Mark Hemphill, the founder of Screenscape, first introduced me to the concept several years ago, before he had the company started or even the first product built. I had some concerns about the usual things: go-to market strategy, product focus and overall product-oriented execution. I was seriously impressed when I first checked in with Screenscape about a year later. The team had grown and so had the product. Mark’s dedication to building an incredibly refined tool for display-management seems to be paying off. The team continues to grow in both Charlottetown and Toronto.

    The pricing, which starts at $10 a month, seems a bit problematic to me, but Mark tells me that they are selling more and more group licenses to brands such as Bauer which are higher volume deals.

  • Mentoring Virtually in Toronto

    C100 is hitting the road (virtually) and will be bringing the next C100 mentoring session to Toronto. We’re working with our partners Extreme Venture Partners and are looking for three companies to participate.

    Interested? Please apply via our application process.

    Finalists will be notified week of July 12.

  • For the love of failure

    One of the main cultural innovations in Silicon Valley is the acceptance of failure. It is an acceptance that extends almost to the point where if you don’t have at least one specatacular mess-up in your past, you haven’t truly lived.

    A healthy acceptance of failure goes hand-in-hand with a passion for risk taking. No one searches out failure, of course, but if you find it and live through it, then that implies you’ve taken a valuable risk and (hopefully) learned from it.

    The traditional view is that Canada is very risk-averse and while this stance has served the country well in some markets (banking sector, anyone?) it isn’t so great for fostering building start-ups.

    Basically, the equation is no failure means no risk. And no risk means no entrepreneurship.

    But again, this is the traditional view of Canada, and one that seems to changing

    So talk about your failures. Heck, begin to celebrate them and wear then as a badge of honor. But in doing so make sure you also mention what you learned and how there is no way you’re gonna do that again.

  • Connect with Wired.com's Evan Hansen

    Interested in attending next Monday’s session with Wired.com’s Evan Hansen? StartupNorth has secured 20 seats, which would otherwise cost $85 each. Register for a free pass through StartupNorth while tickets are available: http://guestlistapp.com/events/24501

    Gone are the days when we scrambled to the set to catch our favourite shows in their scheduled timeslot. Today’s viewers want personalized, on-demand access and a host of high-tech innovators are giving them exactly that. Join Wired.com’s Editor in Chief, Evan Hansen for a discussion on the new realities of entertainment and all things digital.

    Date – Monday, June 21, 2010
    Location     – Events On The Park, 1095 Leslie Street, Toronto, ON
    Breakfast     – 7:30am
    Session – 8:00am to 9:00am

  • Twitter acquires Smallthought (the dabbleDB people)

    Twitter announced today that they are acquiring Smallthought, the company behind DabbleDB and Trendly.

    About 4 years ago, Avi Bryant landed at Democamp 5 and blew us all away. Not only did he show off one of the sexiest apps we had seen yet, his demo set the bar for everyone that came after.

    This does not seem to be a large acquisition by any stretch, and neither side is playing it up as such, but it is a well deserved kudos to Avi and the team for what they have built.

    It is hard to argue: For Canada: it sucks. More of our top talent going south and disappearing from the Canadian scene.

    Those days are over however, with the C100 and an increasingly healthy startup community here in Canada, there will be many opportunities for the Avi’s of our community to contribute back, and perhaps return some day better than ever.

  • Grow – A Conference – Aug 19-21, 2010

    Grow 2010
    Our friends at C100 and Bootup are bringing Dealmaker Media to Vancouver for a great event in August. If you don’t know Dealmaker, you should. It’s run by a Canadian, Debbie Landa. They produce 2 of the most valuable events for startups in Silicon Valley and Los Angeles – check out Under the Radar for a list of events and companies.

    Dealmaker MediaThey are producing an event, Grow 2010, in Vancouver on August 19-21, 2010.

    The event is a 3 day event with an invite-only Day 1 to connect Canadian founders with the best and brightest from Silicon Valley and across CAnada. Days 2 & 3 feature great speakers and the opportunity to build unique lasting relationships.

     If you’re an entrepreneur and you missed MeshU in Toronto (and it’s really too bad, this was one of my favourite events of the past 2 years), you should attend Grow 2010. Buy your ticket today and it’s $185, if you miss the super early bird (or as I like to call it the just getting in from a late night), you can grab an early bird ticket for only $230. This is unbelievable! Add in an approximately $700 flight it’s possible to do this for less than $1500. It’s worth the opportunity to meet the companies, build the connections, and help grow your company.

    We’ll be coordinating shared hotel rooms for entrepreneurs from Toronto, Montreal, Waterloo, Ottawa, Halifax and anywhere. If you’re not local to Vancouver we’ll help you find a shared room to manage your costs. Add a comment if you are attending and we’ll try to help you find a roommate.

  • Engines for Massively Scaleable Startups

    I was excited to attend MeshU (maybe a little too excited). I love it when events over deliver. MeshU was a fantastic conference. I saw two of the best in-the-trenches startup sessions with Sean Ellis and Dan Martell. They both presented ideas that are changing how I think about product design and go-to-market activities. April Dunford then added an updated framework  for product marketing which was a great evolution of traditional product marketing. Sean Ellis added his model for Key Elements of Massively Scaleable Startups that presented a new idea of the marketing basics that need to be present for high potential startups.

    Key Elements of Massively Scalable Startups – A Marketing Framework based on April Dunford & Sean Ellis

    The breaking down of 4 elements coupled with traditional strategy and tactics make for a very effective marketing evaluation of most startups.

    Gratification Engine

    The Gratification Engine was a new piece of the marketing activities. What differentiates must have products and services? How do you reward your customers? How does your application turn “cold prospects into highly gratified customers”? This is a change in my thinking about the role of making your users feel like rockstars.  

    “you can’t force customers to want, need or like what you have created.  Building an effective gratification engine is an iterative process driven by a lot of prospective customer feedback.  Once you get the basics right, your process of gratifying users can be optimized with tools like Performable for landing pages and KISSmetrics for full funnel tracking/improvement (I’m an advisor to both).” – Sean Ellis

     It builds upon seminal work of Kathy Sierra about engaging users. The Gratification Engine pushes this out beyond the existing experience but treats the conversion and effectiveness of new users.

    Making a Bestseller
    Making a Bestseller by Kathy SierraHow fast and how far can you take your users? by Kathy Sierra

     Where this hit home for me was starting to think about the game mechanics used for upsell and cross sell offers for new customers. Dan Martell, Dave McClure, Marc Gingras and I had breakfast at StartupCampMontreal and discussed how to build effective offers for existing customers to invite their friends to an application. There was a great discussion about using game mechanics around the offer. You have existing users that if they invite new users, i.e., their friends, where if the friends sign up that both the friend and the user get new unique functionality. It changed my thinking about many times I’ve received an offer to sign up from a friend for a service, and how the effectiveness of this would change with some basic game mechanics:

    “Jevon has invited you to join X. Jevon is 1 sign up away from enabling the super awesome next level feature. Sign up now and enable the feature for both you and Jevon”

    This all has to be done in an open, honest and unintrusive manner. But it’s about how do you enhance the lives and experiences of customers and potential customers. There are great opportunities to use game design and mechanics to help improve the experience and conversion rates in web and mobile applications.

    Putting the Fun in Functional

    View more presentations from amyjokim.

    Power to the Players

    View more presentations from amyjokim.

  • Be the next Bumptop

    Too bad Bumptop wasn’t actually an ExtremeU company. However, the recent acquisition of Bumptop should help raise the profile of the 2010 Extreme University.

    If you’re a student, a founder or just thinking about starting something you should apply to Extreme University. This is a world-class program, from an up-and-coming venture capital firm in Canada. They have a track record of selling companies to big players (Bumptop to Google, J2Play to EA). The Extreme Ventures, XtremeLabs, and Extreme University programs are building into a fantastic training and breading ground for a new generation of mobile and Internet startups. It feels like something big is happening inside the walls of Extreme Ventures.

    Extreme University 2010

    Who?

    We are looking for four smart and fast moving teams to participate. Typically all members of the two-three person team will be deep technically, but at least one of the founders should have a technical background.

    What?

    • Get an initial $5000 + $5,000 (US) per founder in exchange for a 10% ownership stake in your company
    • Move your team to our shared ExtremeU office space at Yonge & King (downtown Toronto)
    • Have weekly mentoring sessions by industry experts in technology, funding, legal, PR, marketing and HR
    • Meet a who’s who of experts at our weekly socials and have an opportunity to practice your pitch and demo your in-progress prototype
    • Have access to local shared resources to accelerate product development (mentors, servers)

    When?

    Applications are due by June 4th, 2010. The program starts Monday June 14th, 2010 to Thursday September 10th, 2010 at the ExtremeU offices in Toronto at Yonge and King. The final demo day will be Tuesday September 16th, 2010 at DemoCamp

    How?

    It’s a great program located in downtown Toronto for early-stage entrepreneurs and founders. The Xtreme Labs has a great track record. If you’re interested, make sure you apply before the June 4, 2010 deadline.

    Alumni – The Class of 2009

    UkenUken Games
    Uken Games makes highly addictive games for social and mobile platforms.

    Uken Games was born in March of 2009 when two normal guys decided they wanted to have super powers. Given real world limitation, they turned to the virtual world to make their dreams a reality. They built Superheroes Alliance, their first game, which eventually grew to over 150,000 monthly active users. Since then, they’ve launched 2 other games: Villains and Twisted Treasure have amassed over 300,000 total users. Going forward, they are committed to building a strong community around each of their games, expanding across other both social (Facebook) and mobile (iPhone, Blackberry) platforms. Uken Games has received a follow on investment and are driving hard towards this goal.

    AssetizeAssetize
    Assetize is a Twitter ad network that enables publishers to monetize their social content. Publishers within the Assetize network range from large news and media organizations to individual users. The company has also partnered with a premiere sports agency to launch FanWaves – a Twitter monetization network exclusively for the sports world. The growing list of FanWaves publishers includes the NHL, NY Knicks, Phoenix Suns, Washington Capitals, as well as several professional athletes.

    Next, the company plans to extend their monetization solution to other social networks, as well as other links stemming from media websites and blogs. Given the nascency of this space and lack of history, one of the challenges Assetize has faced is partnering with advertisers willing to market through social channels – a difficulty that is expected to decrease as brands realize the immense potential of social networks. Following Extreme University, Assetize is generating revenue and has secured a seed round of financing. The company is also currently in the process of syndicating a larger round from local and US-based VCs.

    LocationaryLocationary
    Locationary is changing the way that data on local businesses and other places is collected and verified.

    This data is fundamental to the local search and local advertising markets which have revenues approaching $50 billion a year. Google and other local search engines currently buy the bulk of their local business data from aggregators that have employees copy the printed yellow page directories. The current process can’t scale and results in expensive, stale and outdated information typically 1 to 2 years old. Locationary has created a patent-pending, crowd-sourced solution to collect and verify this information across the globe.

    Locationary is growing quickly and now has users in over 70 countries. They’ve collected data on over 20 million places and are now updating over 100,000 places a day. In this business, the fresher the data, the more valuable it is; and that’s what makes them special. Locationary has raised a Series-A investment through the connections made at ExtremeU.

    Extreme Labs has a history of bringing great mentors and presenters to interact and engage with ExtremeU participants. In 2009, participants met some of the best lawyers, founders, VCs and others in Canada.

    Albert Lai Kontagent Startup Lifecycle
    Ali Asaria Well.ca How to get funding
    Colin Ground Cassels Brock & Blackwell Setting up a VC friendly structure
    Dan Debow Rypple Sales & Marketing
    Leila Boujnane Idee Business Development
    Mike McDerment Freshbooks Product Management
    Rick Segal JLA Why do a startup now?
    Rick Yazwinski Tucows Agile Development
    Sal Rocco Stonewood Group How to hire superstars

    The list of already confirmed speakers in 2010 is amazing:

  • Open Coffee Ottawa – May 26

    Next Wednesday (May 26) StartupNorth is organizing an Open Coffee in Ottawa. It is an opportunity for entrepreneurs, developers, and investors to connect at an informal meetup. We’ll be heading to Bridgehead Coffeehouse (109 Bank Street, Ottawa) from 10am to 1pm.

    Open Coffee Ottawa
    Bridgehead Coffeehouse
    109 Bank Street, Ottawa
     10am to 1pm