StartupNorth

Category: Startups

  • RubyFringe Conference in Toronto

    rubyfringe.pngA lot of startups seem to be building their web apps in Ruby On Rails and have been for a while, so I thought it was worth mentioning that Toronto is home to the least-boring Rails conference so far. RubyFringe. This conference seems to have come together due to sheer frustration with the current Rails developers conferences.

    I have never been to a rails conference, but it isn’t hard to tell from the outside that they are becoming increasingly commercial, boring and profitable all at the same time, and I would guess that serious rails developers aren’t very attracted to that.

    Congrats on getting this going, I hope it is a sellout and that I get invited to a super special VIP party!

  • Press for Startup Launches – 10 tips

    Here is a great post on getting press for your launch.

    I can’t tell you how much of a difference there is between startups who make it easy for you to write about them and startups who make it hard. Sometimes it is like pulling teeth to get information and other startups go as far as writing “sample blog posts” that really frame their key points properly.

    This is all stuff that I had no clue about until I got on the other side of things with StartupNorth. Now I realize how it is really up to the startup to make things go smoothly.

    There seem to be very few mainstream press outlets in Canada who are writing about startups much at all. I think that is why startups blogs in Canada play such a crucial role now, because you won’t be getting much love from the FP or Globe’s business section (even though if they did some analytics, I would guess their readers would be really interested). Instead, you are left with the likes of us.

    Read on for David’s 10 tips
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  • GigPark – share reviews with your friends

    logo170.pngGigPark, a Toronto, Ontario startup, has finally come out of private beta and is now live.

    GigPark is a site to review and recommend local service providers amongst your friends and contacts. That means that if you hire a plumber for example, you can review his/her work and it will be shared with other people who you have friended, just like Facebook or any other number of social applications.

    This is in contrast to most current review sites, which give you reviews about service providers that could be written by anyone. With GigPark you can get recommendations directly from your friends, either by viewing service providers that they have reviewed already, or by asking for a specific recommendation. Many review sites such as Amazon.com and Tripadvisor try to build the authority of the reviewer by showing you information about them (such as other reviews they have written, etc), but they remain ripe with fraudsters and hucksters and it is basically impossible to eliminate those people unless you take GigPark’s approach.

    gigpark2.pngGigPark has a very tight focus and it cuts through a lot of the mess of recommending new things to friends with a clean approach that reminds me of FaceBook before they launched FB apps. GigPark has also launched a Facebook app to compliment their service. The app is much more tightly integrated with FaceBook than most apps, which is nice.

    GigPark is taking a very fundamentalist approach to using the social network (or Social Graph as it now seems to be called) in their design of the service. Where it would be easy and lucrative for GigPark to find ways to publicly expose these recommendations, and it would also be profitable to resell the content, Noah and Pema assured me last week that they focus was on creating a safe and trusted space for users, and that might mean giving up some short term opportunities. That includes not selling off the reviews as “content”.
    If they get a significant amount of people signed up and engaged, then this approach is going to pay off by entrenching GigPark as the most effective review site. The use of a social network gets around the significant authority and spam problems that we mentioned in our review of HomeStars. The bet is however, can they build that audience?

    The hitch is that GigPark falls squarely in the YASNS category and getting people to sign up for a new site and then to have them re-create their social network is tough. The pitch is that GigPark has a very defined and obvious value, and the opportunity is huge.

    GigPark is self-funded and is run by Pema Hegan and Noah Godfrey.

    My profile is here, add me!

  • StartupCamp Waterloo 2 – Tuesday February 26th

    startupcamplogo.pngJust a reminder that next week on Tuesday February the 26th is StartupCamp Waterloo. We will announce the next StartupCamp Toronto there and hopefully a few other things as well.

    Austin Hill will be kicking things off and I expect that the pitches will be as much fun as last time. The thing I really liked about StartupCampWaterloo (and what we tried to achieve in Toronto) was how laid back things were and how “green” the pitches were.

    I can’t wait to hang out and meet some more aspiring Waterloo startups.

  • As The Web Turns – The tales of Capazoo

    250px-flag_of_montrealsvg.pngMontreal seems to be the hotbed for controversy in the Web 2.0 world in Canada. Where else could you find someone who will sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and someone else who will supposedly pay you for joining their social networking site? It is the latter, the multi level marketing site called Capazoo.com that is bringing us the latest dirty laundry.

    Capazoo is a social networking site, in this case it is a lot like MySpace, which charges anywhere from $25 to $35 a year for a membership. The big idea is that the more people I get to sign up, the more referral kickbacks I get. We’ve all seen this before in other disguises, in the case of Capazoo, they have attracted their share of B and C-list celebrities.

    I won’t even try to recount the whole story, but it seems to involve some brothers, at least one of which has been convicted of fraud before, a bunch of ex-NHL hockey players, some online porn kings and a bunch of investors who still don’t seem to know what is going on.

    capazoo.pngLa Presse, a French-Daily in Montreal has been digging in to the story (google translate) and it isn’t pretty. The two founders, who are also brothers, are now in court fighting over who has control of the company and they are also sorting out the small matter of who embezzled how much off the top from the investors money (one side is claiming it was a “10% commission on funds raised”).

    There was also the small matter that one of the two guys who were managing the company had decided that pornography should become a big part of the sites content (who knows — they may have made a fortune doing that), then add on the death threats that were going around and it seems you have something worth writing about.

    Heri has been covering this at Montreal Tech Watch and his last post on the subject stirred up quite a cat fight in the comments. You just can’t make this stuff up folks.

    I am not sure what to make of the whole thing. The worst part is that these guys have sucked a lot of investable money out of Montreal and have left a long trail of investors who probably now have a bad taste for web startups. I haven’t written much about Capazoo up until now because I always felt they were a very poor reflection of the entrepreneurs I know in Montreal. It remains one of the most exciting startup cities in Canada and judging by some of the great projects and startups I have been hearing about, it is going to stay that way for a long while.

  • IOU Central – Canada gets its first Peer to Peer Lending Company

    iou_logo.jpgIOU Central, a Montreal based startup, is launching today. They have staked their claim as Canada’s first Peer to Peer lending company. We covered the funding announcement of Toronto based CommunityLend back in December.

    Peer-To-Peer lending has been maturing quickly as a concept on the heels of successful sites like Zopa and Prosper, but Canada has so far had no such providers. Peer to Peer lending is a concept that takes a large group of lenders who are willing to lend out smaller amounts of cash and connects them with borrowers who need access to cash at a rate that is below the standard credit card rates, but they are generally willing to pay a higher rate than if they had to go to a bank. A lender can be anyone with a bit of extra cash that they would like to get decent returns on.

    iouscreen.pngFrom a borrower’s perspective, IOU Central operates much like any other lender, in that a borrower’s initial “rating” is based primarily on their credit score. You can however supplement that score by uploading a number of other documents to do things like prove your income, itemize your monthly expenditures and other things that can bump up your overall score.

    IOU Central groups borrowers into 5 tiers: A, B, C, R, and HR. Borrowers in each tier pay IOU Central a service fee on top of the loan of 1%, 1.5%, 2%, 2.5%, and 3% respectively. Service fees varies because IOU Central expects to have to spend more to recruit lenders interested in higher risk borrowers and expect to face higher operating costs servicing loans to higher risk borrowers.

    IOU Central charges Lenders a Lending Fee, which works out to about 0.5% annualized, calculated based on the amount of outstanding loans you have remaining each month.

    The company was conceived over a year ago and their site has been in development for just under a year. There are currently 7 full time employees and they have raised a round of funding which includes Angels and VCs, but they did not disclose the amount of funding.

    I asked Sam Bendavid, VP of Business Development for IOU Central, what sort of regulatory or legal issues they encountered running up to launch and he indicated that things were quite smooth. IOU Central is registered in Quebec as a lender and they worked closely with their law firm in developing their set of Legal Agreements.

    IOU Central will be focusing most of their initial marketing on potential lenders. This is a smart move as lenders will be far more scarce than borrowers. Perhaps the days of getting a loan from Uncle Vinnie are over, and Canada now has a safe, regulated, and legal place to secure peer to peer loans.

    Update: The Star provided some further coverage a few days later.

  • Lift08 Venture Night: 5 Panelists and one MC and 8 pitches

    I am here at Lift08 in Geneva, Switzerland. Tonight is “Venture Night”, a startup launch-pad that had 50 submissions, which were narrowed to 8 startups who all demoed and presented their business case tonight. The format is a good one, and it is similar to Under the Radar: 5 minute demo and business model, 5 minute questions from panelists and 5 from the audience. This is a posh event, wine and Swiss breadsticks no less and the turn out is substantial for this “pre-lift” event (I’d estimate 400+). And the inimitable Guido Van Nispen as MC.

    A venerable panel featuring techcrunch europe, VCs and Angels, a top euro blogger and long time LIFTer Robert Scoble.

      1) Viewdle.tv
      A video search company. Find people in video, images, using contextual and voice cues. More than just tags. Very slick and ajaxy. Searches for clinton, then narrows by Iran, shows in search results streamable clip of Hillary speaking of Iran. Options: sort by tag, by content channel, and by timeframe and, oh god, they have video tag clouds (what is this 2006?). But the seach works in the demo, and it’s cool.

      Have widgets for blogs. Business model is video search sold to content producers (reuters) or video aggregators. Processing is computationally intensive, not trying to crawl or index web on their own (smart).

      2) holistis
      Converting online store visitors to buyers – 98% of online shoppers don’t make purchases. Uses past behaviors, intention and behavioral targeting to convert viewers to buyers. Turn known visitors into loyal customers through targeted content. Theory is to grow the 2% end of the funnel as more profitable than the 98% end.

      3) wuala
      Free and simple online hard drive. This has been done before. The twist, using distributed storage and bandwidth. You have to share your own HD and bandwidth to us it. Their catch phrase is to be the “skype of online storage” (great catch phrase). Judges are throwing softballs until vc asks about copyright infringement: do they have the same issues as youtube or ftp servers. Revenue streams, ads, photo prints, or sell premium services. They make sure data is available even if large part of network is down, they also back up on their own servers and their system works on bittorrent principles: fast downloads through fragmented storage

      4) Mixin
      What are other people doing?, I want to plan my Friday evening. Like a dopplr for activities with your friends. Nice looking screens. looks like a jaiku/twitter calendar mashup. This begs the question: why not bundle, or at least mash this up with existing social networks instead of creating a new one. I asked this question. They want to, and will support integration.

      5) IO
      Digital is more present in the physical world like table top computing, surface computing and like bumptop but real. For public spaces, skinnable walls and tables gorgeous interactive surfaces, rippling water and blooming flowers, more art than tech. VC panelist says there are a few funded competitors – which also means this is a validated market with some action in it. I’d like one of these for my living room. But they have no interest in making it cheap, it is not a consumer technology.

      6) cocommentwas launched way back at Lift 2006 syndicates and collects and aggregates blog comments tries to solve the problem of bog comment viability trouble is blog comments are less interesting than blog posts. Cocommenters comment more and are stickier. Rev model is ads, and conversation tracking. A lot of “former” users on the panel asking ome questions about performance, usability.

      7) clipperz
      Do you trust online services, do you trust them with your data? You should have control of your data. Keep it to yourself. Data is stored on cards that aggregates all your secure data and logins. talk about a vulnerability, get hacked once and they get everything. Admit that I don’t really understand this play or how it’s differentiated. Authentication and security is important, but in reality, mostly people say they do, but, in practice, don’t care. Many many startups before them have leapt onto this sword of federated online security management.

      8 ) Pixelux entertainment
      Digital molecular models. animate materials like materials instead of scripted animations. Metals bend like metal, trees bend like trees, great for realtime video game animations. It reduces the costs of video game production through procedural physics rendering. DMM physics engine, realtime animation libraries, based on glass, metal, wood, etc. the algorithms know how it will break, bend or shatter. For movie market or for games and animation. Flat fees, and licencing business models on titles sold by the millions. nice.

    Whew, a solid deck of demos. Now this is a larger scale of event (and these are later stage companies) than our typical democamp or startupcamp, but I’m left feeling that we in the Canadian community need to step up our game. A lot of good Tech here (with a capital T). Good polish of apps, good polish of demos and some impressive technology that could actually work (mostly). Bravo.

  • BlitzWeekend – ad-hoc startup launchpad

    blitz1.pngWhen Heri first announced BlitzWeekend, I thought it was a slightly better take on the various StartupWeekends which had been painfully going on. That would have been the easy thing to do, but Heri and the guys have taken it a few steps further. Blitzweekend will take place on March 1st and 2nd 2008.

    The result is less of a throwaway StartupWeekend and more like a miniature version of Y-Combinator or TechStars. Instead of building one big project, and then leaving the day-to-day operations up to a few unwitting volunteers, BlitzWeekend is a chance to kickstart your own startup that you will be moving ahead with.

    Because of that, BlitzWeekend will have a much more well rounded crowd than the normal hack-fests that we are used to. The sponsors, who include BDO Dunwoody, Embrase, Globalex and iNovia Capital, will all be at BlitzWeekend to provide early support and guidance to the startups.

    To accompany the weekend, BlitzMaker has also been released. It is a tool to help teams form, share their ideas and to organize before BlitzWeekend.

    BlitzWeekend is also reaching out to teams from beyond just Montreal. I would love to see a team from Toronto or Waterloo make the trip over to Montreal. The crew in Montreal has offered to help with expenses by organizing some couches and possibly contributing to travel costs.

    Heri described the event like this

    – we have partners and sponsors like iNovia Capital (VC fund specializing in early stage funding), BDO, Globalex, Embrase. Actually, it will be an opportunity for any new entrepreneur because the most promising projects will have access to advice from business consultants and key networks. You can view it as a launchpad for startups, à la TechStars

    – we will have experts for the event, in the case a team get “stuck” in major problems. each team is going to have “joker cards”, allowing them to call an expert in one specifi domain (technology, design, business plan, marketing etc.)

    – we will have a “make” track for developers or designers who just want to create a cool technology and are not sure yet about how to do a business plan. However, we will have a “startup” track, and we will have a panel of “judges” who will be giving them valuable feeedback about their product and business plan.

  • Canadian DEMOgods

    demogods You are all DEMOgods to us! As promised here are the DEMO videos from our very own: Standout Jobs (Montreal, QC), Cozimo (Montreal, QC), HealthPricer Interactive (Vancouver, BC), Rove Mobile (Ottawa, ON), SceneCaster (Richmond Hill, ON), and Xtranormal (Montreal, QC). Congrats guys!

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  • StandoutJobs raises $2m from iNovia Capital

    The news is finally public that StandoutJobs, a Montreal, Quebec company who we mentioned in our earlier post about DEMO08, has raised $2million from iNovia Capital.

    standout.pngWith this announcement and their launch at DEMO, StandoutJobs is taking back the veil on their business model. When we first saw them almost a year ago, StandoutJobs looked like a recruiting company that did videos, and we didn’t find it very compelling. I got to hear more a few months ago however over supper with Ben Yoskovitz, and it started to make a lot more sense. StandoutJobs will be providing a SaaS solution to companies that essentially lets them build a complete hiring page that is much more rich and user-focused than the normal “email [email protected]”. The pages are fully customizable and seem to be focused on helping the company display much more current and directly useful information to the potential hires. For a more detailed overview, check out this post on Mashable.

    inovia.pngiNovia Capital bills itself as a “seed and early-stage venture capital fund” with offices in Alberta (Edmonton and Calgary) as well as Montreal. They seem to be increasingly active with their investments and I am impressed that they took the entire $2million round to themselves, which likely speaks to the solid team that StandoutJobs has in place as well as iNovia’s willingness to get out there and shoulder some risk.

    In case you think you are being hit with a case of Deja Vu, you are right: StandoutJobs did previously announce that they had raised funding from Garage Ventures Canada, but this seems to have fallen apart. On the StandoutJobs blog:

    “As well, it?s time to announce a bit of news with respect to our financing. Although we announced some time ago that we raised money with Garage Technology Ventures Canada, that did not in fact come to pass. As we got deeper into the process with Garage, it was clear that it was not the best fit for us. We wish Garage the best of luck.”

    It seems that whatever came to pass with Garage did not take away from the credibility of StandoutJobs or the team there, as iNovia seems to have quickly seen the opportunity.

    Congratulations to everyone at iNovia and StandoutJobs.