StartupNorth

Category: Startups

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  • friendroll and toplinks – WordPress plugins from Thornley Fallis

    toplinks.gifI thought it was worth mentioning that Joseph Thornley, who blogs at ProPr and is based in Ottawa, has decided to eat some of his own Social Media dogfood and has released two wordpress plugins today along with 76Design.

    FriendsRoll reminds me a lot of, well, a traditional blogroll. The big difference however is that it has a form which friends can fill out and request to be added to your FriendsRoll. It is a cool and simple way to keep blogrolls a little more fresh over time. Right now they usually get stale with old blogs that aren’t maintained, or people who are not blogging about different, less relevant, subjects.

    The other widget, TopLinks, automatically keeps track of what sites you are linking to in your blog posts and it lists them in the widget, ordered by popularity.

    Both of these widgets help create mini little networks between blogs, but require little ongoing maintenance. I will be installing them on my personal blog as soon as I update my template.

  • Alertle – Simplified and Customizable RSS reading

    alertle.pngAlertle, a Toronto, Ontario startup is an RSS Reader that is focused on breaking out beyond the more technically inclined crowd that uses services like Google Reader and Bloglines.

    The company, which has been bootstrapped so far, has been making quick progress. I have used their reader a few times in the last month and there has been obvious progress on the UI and the general flow of the applications.

    When you first log in, the most noticible difference between Alertle and other RSS readers is their focus on “bundles” of feeds. While most readers come with a large set of default feeds, Alertle takes it a step further and provides almost 20 bundles, each with well over a dozen feeds. These include bundles like “Life”, “Autos”, “Videos”, “Nasdaq” and more.

    Alertle really goes beyond just being a feed reader and really offers an easy way for a novice user to change how the browse the web in general. Their interface is relatively easy, but does take some getting used to (at least if you approach it from a traditional feed-reading mindset like I did), but I have found that it grows on you. My one complaint is that the titles of the feeds, which appear below nice large icons, are often cut short and are hard to read. I would prefer to have the titles displayed clearly and in full somehow.

    I was able to easily import my existing subscriptions from Google Reader using OPML, and I think that with a little tweaking I could really get used to this interface. I really appreciate how uncluttered the display window is for the news item that is currently being read, and the list of unread posts is also clear and easy to navigate.

    Alertle plans to generate revenue through advertising and potentially by offering a premium product for enterprise customers. I can imagine that there will be other revenue opportunities for them as well if they manage to build up their user base, such as charging for inclusion as a default feed and generating revenue through Google search referral if they can convince users to make Alertle their default homepage.

    Contact Varun Mathur

  • LearnHub.com launches – Teach and Learn Online

    learnhub_logo_100×48.pngJonas and I dropped by the Savvica offices today for the launch of LearnHub.com. LearnHub is the first site from Savvica since their funding in the fall of 2007. We previously covered the return of Savvica’s founders, John and Malgosia, back to Toronto after a year in San Francisco. Savvica is based in Toronto and recently took significant investment from Indian e-learning company Educomp.

    LearnHub TeamLearnHub is in many ways the evolution of their first product, Nuvvo, which was a much more traditional learning management system. LearnHub on the other hand has a lot more social networking functionality and the “community” model feels a lot more engaging.

    Users can connect with other people, can join communities and can help build courses in those communities by bundling tools such as “Debates”, “Lessons”, “Tests” and “Discussions”. There is also an explicit “Authority Ranking” in LearnHub that rewards users who participate more regularly and in more ways.

    Once you have built a course, you then have the option of charging for it. LearnHub becomes a marketplace for online courses where experts in a subject area can quickly and easily build courses and then make money by charging for them. There is a lot of potential here if LearnHub can get enough exposure and adoption inside the right communities. They then also have to attract a mass audience who will pay for these courses.

    By running their own support site as a community on LearnHub, Savvica is eating its own dogfood. The support site gives the best demonstration of how a community can be structured and how the different components of the community can be used differently.

    In talking to the John and Malgosia, it became obvious that this is just the beginning of their long-term strategy. Without giving away the secret sauce, I can say that I was happy to hear that their revenue model was much more mature than you might assume up front.

  • Ontogenix raises funding from GrowthWorks

    GrowthWorks LogoOntogenix, based in Toronto, has been developing its patent pending social media ad serving technology for the last 3 years. Things are looking up, earlier today we heard Ontogenix landed a substantial round from venture capital fund GrowthWorks and strategic investor Pareto Corp (TSE: PTO).

    The company was founded in 2005 by Amit Kanigsberg (former Pareto CTO), Josh Mozersky (Queen’s University Professor of Logic), and Daniel Veidlinger (California State University Professor of Linguistics). As part of the funding round, Ontogenix is bringing on serial tech entrepreneur Chetan Mathur as Chairman and industry expert Marc Ruxin (SVP Digital Strategy & Innovation for McCann Worldgroup in San Francisco) as a board member.

    Ontogenix is raising the round to go to market with their first product, an Interest Correlation Engine. The technology is designed to increase the relevance of ads presented on social media sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc.) by targeting users based on their individual interests. The company searches for information on the general public’s interests, attitudes, and opinions on hundreds of publicly available sources such as social networks, blogs, and forums. This information, collected in aggregate to preserve user privacy, is then combined with the company?s proprietary data model to form the basis for a predictive engine that can tell advertisers which ads will have high relevance to different types of users.

    A number of companies are gunning for this market including Lookery and Lotame. In pilot tests, Ontogenix was able to increase click through rates by 400%. With Google publicly expressing remorse for the $900M guaranteed ad deal with MySpace and Facebook being lambasted for their Beacon program, it is high time someone figured out a better way to serve ads on social networks; we’re hoping it’s a Canadian startup.

  • Always Be Audacious – Otherwise you are just boring

    You know the drill. You have a good idea, you are pretty excited about it. Sure, you would be lying if you said you had it all figured out, but you are smart enough to know you have something.

    Then it starts. All of those joe-shmoe monday morning quarterbacks start doling out advice. Time after time, you get the same advice: “It’ll never fly”.

    Let me tell you something, unless the best of the best are telling you that, then you should just turn away. Any successful startup has to start with an audacious idea. If your idea isn’t just crazy enough, it will never amount to anything special.

    Audacious

    1 a: intrepidly daring : adventurous

    2: marked by originality and verve

    My favorite startups have all started on the crazy side of nutty. You can look at the now-established former starts that began as simply out there ideas. Amazon.com was going to sell books, by mail order, via the internet, in 1994. I can promise you, more than a few people probably rolled their eyes when Jeff Bezos pitched them.

    At about the same time, eBay was planning to build a marketplace for what ended up being millions of people and Google reinvented something we thought was a well served market.

    The dream is audacious, not the product

    Your vision is what must be audacious. If you can’t make me step outside my comfort zone, help me dream in to the future and to see a world that needs what you are building, then I just won’t get excited.

    The flip side of that is that your product, the thing you are building, must be pragmatic. You have to understand your immediate market and why they are going to buy from (or use) you now.

    Keep marching

    The reality is, if you believe you have a great idea, then you are the only one who can prove yourself right or wrong. Everyone else is just watching from the sidelines and helping out where they can. The burden to perform is on your shoulders.

    The difference between your bright idea and a the ideas of a dozen other people is that you will get down to it and deliver. Build the product, test the market, sell. GOTO 10

  • IOUCentral – P2P Banking isn't always so simple?

    iou_logo.jpgWell, that didn’t take long. IOUCentral appears to have been essentially shut down by regulators here in Canada and they have disabled their loan and application functionality and are now repaying any fulfilled loans. The startup, which we covered, launched just a few weeks ago.

    We are not aware of the specific “regulatory matter” that seems to have shut down IOUCentral, and I won’t pretend to know enough about the banking industry to comment, but we did ask them about regulatory issues when we first interviewed them earlier this month. At the time they indicated that their legal agreements should have provided sufficient operating cover. It now appears that wasn’t the case.

    In a recent Toronto Star article, IOUCentral competitor CommunityLend indicated that they were focusing on making sure that regulators were satisfied before their launch.

    ” . . .CommunityLend executives hint they will have an edge because of the time devoted to satisfying a host of regulators across Canada.

    Marleau of IOU Central, however, is under the impression “there is no watchdog watching this business.” . . ”

    This now puts IOUCentral back in the race with CommunityLend and PeerMint among others to become Canada’s first peer-to-peer lending operation.

    We have asked IOUCentral for comment and will update this post with anything they have to say.

  • Your Facebook app is a disaster, and I was right.

    In the middle of the Facebook App frenzy (was that a whole 4 months ago?!) I wrote “Delusions of Facebook” to try to dissuade as many startups as possible from going down that path. I hate to say it, but man — I was right.

    The fact is, Facebook Applications simply have not become great businesses. The few who have made any revenue are also taking almost all of the available revenue, and it is the startups who focused on things like cross-application advertising that made the most.

    Facebook Applications are an unmitigated disaster from any perspective

    tdtrust1.pngThe most glaring example of this comes straight out of Toronto, the TD Canada Trust “Split the bill” application, which I have to admit seemed like a decent idea to me when I first heard about it. I mean, it seems like the perfect app for the Facebook demographic right? Apparently not. The application, which sports 6 Daily Active Users is a failure. If this were Uncov, I would be saying much meaner things.

    “$plit It” is, in case you are wondering, beaten squarly by the the “Which millionaire should you sleep with?” application, which has 32 times the number of users and presumably has significantly less grand goals. There are examples of underperforming Facebook applications everywhere however, it isn’t just TD Bank that has struggled with the concept.

    The last stand, unstood(tm)

    One argument could be that Facebook Applications might attract fewer active users than a valuable Web Application, but they are more valuable users because Facebook let’s you leverage the “Social Graph” and the network effects of Facebook exposure. While I thought I debunked that idea in my last post, I still hear the argument sometimes.

    Sadly, the numbers don’t seem to add up there either. The best example out there is the Causes Application.

    Cause Users Donations
    Cancer Research 3,005,750 $58,520
    Stop Global Warming 1,681,907 $20,908
    Animal Rights 1,232,162 $19,423
    Against Child Abuse 927,120 $7,685
    Save Darfur 800,674 $12,528

    Read/Write Web recently broke down the numbers for the top-5 Causes applications (Causes lets anyone create and application to support a particular charity). As you can see, even with over 3million users (more than you will ever get signing up for your application by the way), the Causes application still only managed to raise $58,520. If I remember correctly, my elementary school was regularly raising similar amounts of money by selling things like chocolate bars and pens.

    Junk Food for your Business Plan

    Building Facebook Applications is not a business plan, unless you are a web developer who does freelance Facebook application development (now, there is a place you can make money on Facebook Applications). It is the McDonalds equivalent of a business plan. Quick, cheap, greasy and ultimately unfulfilling.

    I am glad that the hype is dying down, but even as FacebookCamp Toronto continues to draw a crowd of easily over 400 (and was a lot of fun, I admit), I worry that there are some bright startup-ready developers out there who still have Delusions of Facebook. Snap out of it, and get on with business.

    Moving On

    It is time for you to take your bright ideas and to put your energy in to things that can give you a return on your investment. I think even Omar saw the light, as he and his team never did venture in to the Facebook Application line of business.

    The web is the most powerful platform we have, and just because someone comes along and says “hey, we made it as easy as a Big Mac” doesn’t mean you need to give them all the upside. Focus on the value you are creating, find a market that wants your product and then start building.

    Eat your vegetables, you will be rewarded greatly.

  • Novell acquires PlateSpin for $205M

    Novel PlateSpin LogoPlateSpin, based in Toronto, has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Novell for $205M. The company, which makes a suite of solutions for the server virtualization market, was founded (for the second time) in 2003. You see, PlateSpin is a restart.

    PlateSpin1 was founded in 2000, raised $1.9M in 2002, and closed up shop in 2003. PlateSpin2 was restarted with new management in 2003, raised $3.5M from Toronto venture funds Covington Capital, Castle Hill Ventures, Skylon Capital, and Four Quarters, and another $7M in 2005 from Insight Venture Partners of New York.

    Word is that PlateSpin2 had trailing revenue of $20M, and that Citrix, Microsoft, and Unisys were all vying for the prize. Congrats to PlateSpin and its backers on the Novell acquisition. We’re chalking this up as a win. While it doesn’t put PlateSpin on the road to VMware glory ($22B, P/S 16.84) it is a solid exit for all involved… especially the funds. I am guessing they cut a nice slice of pie as part of the restart.

  • VeloCity – Incubator 2.0 or something completely new?

    velocity.pngWe have a bit of a thesis here at StartupNorth, and part of that thesis is that the biggest problem with the startup environment here in Canada isn’t that VC’s aren’t investing as much as we might like these days, or that American VCs are scooping up all the good deals (sure, those are all problems too), but we think that the biggest issue is that there is no push that gets an early stage idea from the notepad to the web.

    18-30 year olds just aren’t starting and following through (to failure even) with those great ideas. This in turn kills the number of startups created later on once that group grows up, and with no mass of startups to move things forward, we end up with many of the problems we have today.

    This has nothing to do with not having a Silicon Valley equivalent, and there is no simple solution like “start a Y-Combinator Canada”, instead we are going to need to do a lot of trial-and-error experiments before we start to get an idea of how to really get to the heart of the issue. So, any time I see someone stepping up to try their hand at it, I get excited.

    This coming fall The University of Waterloo will be The Minota Hagey residence in to a “Mobile + Media” incubator that will house 70 UW students who are “UW?s most ambitious, entrepreneurial and tech-savvy” and “will not only live together, but they?ll also work in teams to develop ideas with commercial potential, either as part of their regular coursework or as an extra-curricular initiative.”

    125548590_1c9b44d817_m.jpgThe common areas of the residence will be renovated over the summer to create a large common/presentation space, a boardroom/meeting room and a project room/mobile device lab. The residence will receive technological upgrades to support the work of the students and to enhance the living environment (ie wifi, increased bandwidth, large project screen, audioconferencing, plasma/LCD screens, workstations, high-end programmable lighting…foosball!)

    While I am pretty sure that Plasma TVs and programmable lighting (prime prank-hacking territory!) aren’t exactly critical to getting startups off the ground, this is all starting to sound pretty cool. It is definitely new and cutting edge for Canada.

    So, the idea is to pile 70 keen and smart students in a dorm and to see what sort of partnerships and startups might spring up. Sounds awesome so far. VeloCity is a great concept, and I can’t wait to start hearing about some of the startups that come out of it.

    For every bit of excitement, I do feel an equal amount of trepidation. This is the kind of thing that is easy to get wrong. All you need is for the culture of the place to go off the rails just a little bit and all of a sudden you just have an expensive dorm with a fancy coat of paint. While I am sure that there are a slate of mentors lined up and a full calendar of events, you need people there almost every day to influence the direction of the students.

    This pretty much makes Waterloo the go-to university for students serious about doing a startup (excepting those who just don’t go do university at all). In an ideal world this would available to everyone, but it is only for Waterloo students. If you are a Waterloo student, you can apply here.

    Someone call PizzaPizza and negotiate a special deal, it’s going to be a big year for late night delivery at Minota Hagey.