StartupNorth

Category: Startups

  • As the Web Turns: Spielo – Co-Founders for Sale?

    Just how bad ass of an entrepreneur are you? Will you kick your friends and co-founders to the curb when the time comes? When the money is about to roll in, will you put the rub on your original startup buddies? Should we all be watching our back now before things get too hot?

    According to Yves Doucet, former Vice President and partner in Spielo, a Moncton-based VLT producer, he was stabbed in the back by his partner, John Manship, when their company we on the brink of going from $5 a share to $100.

    Yves and another colleague are now launching a lawsuit for just over $5million that they say they are owed, and another $10 million is losses. The story has been covered a bit by the CBC and TimesTranscript.

    Spielo was, in 1991, just a small startup based in New Brunswick fighting for 60-machine contracts, run by a couple of guys who were dreaming of the big time. The Big Time came when the company was sold to GTech for $180million. In the end though, something went wrong.

    It is impossible to know what really happened, and the court hasn’t made a ruling yet, but the question for me is: How can something so good go so bad?

  • Reminder: StartupCamp Waterloo tomorrow (June 3rd)

    Just a quick reminder that StartupCamp Waterloo is taking place today, June 3rd 2008, at the Waterloo Accelerator Center at 6pm.

    I just got off the phone with Mic Berman, one of the organizers, and she says that instead of a speaker this time, there is going to be a panel to kick things off. The question for the panel is “Why start a startup?”

    Just over a year ago, I wrote something along the same line: No better time than now. It remains just as relevant today as it was then.

    All the details are here.

  • The Code Factory – Ottawa Co-Working Space

    The Code Factory is having its grand opening tonight in Ottawa. The Code Factory is a shared office space for startups and freelancers.

    Here in Toronto we had The Indoor Playground for a few years, but due to some problems with their landlord, they had to close up shop. Co-working spaces tend to be indicators of healthy entrepreneurial communities and it is nice to see Ottawa get such a great looking option.

    The grand opening takes place tonight, at 5:30pm at Suite 200 – 246 Queen Street (between Bank and Kent).

    David Crow recently covered co-working in Canada on our sister site CommunityNorth.ca where is also included a list of other known co-working spaces in Canada.

  • Pride and Prejudice – Why startups need community

    I was feeling extraordinarily proud of Idée last night when I saw that they received glowing coverage on TechCrunch. It is well deserved, and it seems like they are just getting started in terms of press coverage. They recently had a huge profile in the Financial Post, written by David George-Cosh (who has been getting more and more connected with the Toronto community as of late). We have been tracking Idée for a while now.

    Then as I kept flipping through my news feeds, I came across an embarrassing update about MediaScrape, which Heri and Mathew Ingram both covered well. When we first posted about MediaScrape, Tyler Cavell, the founder, responded in a much more succinct way than he did to TechCrunch’s latest post. Heri had even convinced me to lay off and see how things work out.

    I almost feel like I am doing Idée a disservice by mentioning them in the same post as MediaScrape. Where Idée has focused on perfecting their technology and winning customers, MediaScrape seems to be prone to distraction and tends to make simple matters much more confusing and difficult than necessary.

    Heri made the point in his post yesterday that when entrepreneurs are disconnected from their local community, they seem to be more likely to go off the rails. I think Heri is on to something that investors need to take in to consideration when investing.

    Again, Leila and the crew at Idée are a great contrast and example of how to do things right. While Idée is possibly the busiest startup in Canada, and one that is spending its own money (ie: they have no time to waste), they still manage to be tightly connected to the community here in Toronto. Leila is constantly organizing, co-organizing or speaking at events, and when she isn’t doing that, she spends a lot of time each week mentoring other startups.

    Capazoo and MediaScrape, according to Heri, have never made it out to a single Montreal event and have generally kept a distance from their local startup community.

    Perhaps one of the measures that investors, both Angels and VCs, take in to account when deciding whether they want to put money in to a startup or an entrepreneur should be whether or not that person has been able to take the time to connect with a community of startups. That way you know they have a social and professional circle that will keep them accountable, demand progress and that will criticize their execution, rather than patting them on the back and telling them they are going to be rich.

    If your friends tell you that you will be rich and famous, then you have the wrong friends.

  • CVCA – "The Face of Change" – Montreal

    I am heading to Montreal next week for the Canadian Venture Capital Association’s annual conference. The theme this year is “The Face of Change”, and the idea is to look at what causes change in the VC and Private Equity worlds.

    I am excited to be going for a few reasons. The biggest one is the fact that I have been making a lot of noise recently saying that Canadian VCs need to spend more time connecting to the startup community, and Suzie Dingwell Williams recently said the same thing, so turning down an invitation to the only national VC conference in Canada would have been a little backwards.

    The other reason I want to go is to spread the word about some of the great startups that are popping up these days. We have been lagging behind on writing profiles (I know I know I know), but we are always telling people about some of the cooler ones we are seeing.

    I promise to make a few posts during and after the conference with some notes on what goes on when VCs get together. (besides Scotch tastings that is!)

    Will any of you be there, or in Montreal during those days/nights? (May 28th-30th). I would love to meet up.

  • MeshU: One day developer mini conference that rocked

    This is a guest post by Chris Long, the lead developer of Well.ca and a partner in the launch of the StartupIndex.

    MeshU, which took place on the day before the Mesh Conference here in Toronto, was a developer focused mini-conference with 3 streams of sessions. Each stream had a distinct focus such as: development, design and management. While the Mesh Conference is in its third year, this was the first ever MeshU, so I was curious to see how well things would go.

    There was a lot of variety in attendees, with people from management, sales, and development and from varying sizes of companies in attendance. One of the biggest reasons people had for coming to MeshU was the unique lineup of speakers, especially for a Canadian conference.

    After much deliberation and coin flipping, I settled on attending: Avi Bryant’s “Turning the Tables: Moving Beyond Relational Storage”, Daniel Burka’s “Iterative Design Strategies”, Alistair Croll?s ?Watch It ? How to Monitor Web Applications?, and Ryan Carson’s “How to Start Your Own Start?up”.

    Avi Bryant really did change my view on relational databases. For most web applications, storing data is done with databases such as MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL. Avi challenged this and described how large web companies (Yahoo, Google, Amazon) approach this, and then described what smaller companies can possibly learn from the large companies.

    The “Iterative Design Strategy” session was packed, and I ended up joining more then half the audience on the floor. Daniel Burka did not disappoint his audience, as he explored what iterative design meant to him. The example he used was the iterations of Digg’s comment system.

    Alistair Croll’s powerpoint on monitoring web applications numbered 135 slides, he just had that much information. The slides covered the types of tools available for monitoring web sites and the kind of information they give. He weighed the pros and cons of every type of monitoring tool, and left everyone with an understanding of why and how they should monitor their websites.

    I finished off my day with Ryan Carson?s presentation on starting/running a startup. At the end of it, I think a lot of people had the urge to apply for a job at Carsonified (they give iPhones, 30″ screens and Aeron Chair to all their employees). His ideas and comments, while not revolutionary, were still of use to a lot of people. I can summarize it in two words: “Be Friendly”.

    The MeshU organizers did a good job of getting an awesome lineup of speakers, and promoting a relaxed more workshop feel to the day. I will certainly be there next year.

  • Will you bet on VenCorps?

    The VenCorps machine has been ramping up lately and it got a further injection of excitement with some posts in the last week.

    The premise of VenCorps is this: You record a video of your “pitch” and upload it. The “crowd”, that is the Vencorps community, then votes and chooses some winners. Those winners then go on to be vetted in a traditional investment process involving angels and other sources of funding. Chosen startups then get some amount of funding.

    VenCorps isn’t the only new Canadian video-pitches-for-financing site to launch, fundfinder.com, which also connects your pitch to a “crowd” of would-be investors. The difference being that VenCorps uses the Cambrian House software to help manage the selection/voting process. The end result however (videos of startups pitching) looks quite similar.

    We first covered Vencorps in January and at that time we were told that they would be making more announcements at the end of the month, but it seems to have taken almost 5 more months to see any sort of public activity. This is no doubt the result of some of the problems Cambrian House has been having.

    I decided to poke around and, as you might have guessed, I managed to find some differing opinions. Overwhelmingly, from community members to current and former employees, the sense is that this is truly a last stand for Cambrian House, and had Sean Wise not come along with money from Spencer Trask, that things would look a lot different right now.

    One of the overwhelming reactions I did get was that Cambrian House CEO Michael Sikorsky is a brilliant guy who took this thing as far as anyone could have. I think we need to applaud Michael and the entire team for doing something worth doing here in Canada. I have no doubt Michael will be back with something great again.

    So the question I have is: Will you bet on VenCorps? Will the best startups in the Canada, and the world, flock to VenCorps to pitch themselves? Will there be enough investors and money to make it attractive?

    I think it is possible for this to work. It takes guts to attempt something like this.

    However, the model has failed a few times already, Cambrian House has proven that it has serious flaws, so VenCorps is going to have to do more than just re-apply that model with a more direct financing spin on it. In a video that Cambrian House recently posted (included below), they say that VenCorps will focus more on teams than on ideas, and that the lack of focus on teams was one of the downfalls of Cambrian House.

    The thought that lingers in the back of my mind is whether or not VenCorps should have attached themselves to Cambrian House or not? My gut reaction was a big No, but you have to weigh that against the fact that the Cambrian House crew have probably learned a few things about community building in the last couple of years.

    Will you pitch on VenCorps?

  • StartupIndex: Canadian Startup Map

    We just launched a neat new mapping feature on StartupIndex.

    As more data gets entered by the community, a lot of the entries contain address information. We weren’t really using this in any special ways until Ali really started thinking about a map.

    The map is dynamic and thanks to some slick programming, it will auto-cluster elements in order to make things more intuitive as you zoom in and out.

    Is it useful? We don’t know yet. We will constantly be trying things on StartupIndex and we will be testing them to see if they are valuable or not. So please, let us know what you think.

  • New $150 million Blackberry Fund, based in Canada

    VentureBeat decided to jump the gun this weekend and post some news that has been floating around lately about a new Blackberry fund. They deleted the post from their blog, but it was still available in Google Reader and in other places and TechCrunch got to it late on Saturday.

    The new fund is being managed by RBC Ventures, who just last week closed an investment in Toronto-Based Blackberry application Viigo, and JLA Ventures. RIM, maker of the Blackberry, is a limited partner in this fund, but is not involved in the day-to-day investment decisions.

    The rumor mill has been churning away on this one for months here in Toronto. Originally the numbers we were hearing were $100 million, but as the weeks went by, people started to hint that things had heated up and there were partners involved up to $150 million. That number, $150M, turned out to be true.

    Companies funded by the Blackberry Partners Fund do not have to be producing Blackberry applications yet. The press release says that the fund is “Agnostic to both stage and balance sheet, the BlackBerry Partners Fund will not restrict the development of mobile applications and services to any single mobile platform or any specific industry segment.”, which is all true, but only companies who have a Blackberry Application in their roadmap will be funded.

    The fund will be will be announced at WES in Orlando tomorrow morning.

    It is interesting to note that RBC Ventures recently funded another Balsillie company, Igloo Software with $4M. Jim Balsillie, the CEO of RIM, is on the Board of Directors of Igloo Software, who closed their financing last week.

    In talking to Rick Segal, one of the partners at JLA Ventures, about this new fund he put it very plainly: The test will be in 6 months when we look at how many deals have actually gotten done.

    Will this be another Java Fund? I certainly hope not, espcially for Canadian companies who have a chance to connect with some known VCs and tap in to a strong fund with great connections to the maker of the most popular Web, Email and Voice device out there.

  • $4,000,000 for IGLOO

    IGLOO Software, an enterprise social software company based in Waterloo, has raised $4M from RBC Venture Partners. Kevin Talbot, Managing Director of RBC Venture Partners, has joined IGLOO’s board, which is chaired by Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research In Motion.

    The Kitchener, On based company has spring out of development of IGLOO.org.

    “Founded in 2003, IGLOO’s social networking platform helps hundreds of organizations globally reduce email burden, remove distances across branch
    offices and inspire teams with new productivity and collaboration tools. The platform was initially developed to support an online international network of researchers, practitioners and educators working on global issues.”

    Igloo Software on StartupIndex