StartupNorth

Category: Startups

  • Conceptshare Announces Major Partnership and New Version

    Conceptshare, who we have previously profiled, has two major new announcements today. We have a lot to cover, so lets dive right in:

    Partnership with Corel, Inc.
    corelcs.jpgCorel, Inc. has partnered with Conceptshare to provide a Corel branded version of ConceptShare that will be promoted directly to Corel’s 10million+ customers. The site, coreldrawconceptshare.com maintains significant ConceptShare branding and maintains the same pricing as the main ConceptShare.com website.

    screen-1.jpgThis launch is for the branded website only, but it is the beginning of a 5 year partnership between the two companies. If this venture goes well, I am sure that we will see more tightly integrated offerings coming from these two companies. This move also positions ConceptShare well ahead of its competitors, none of whom can boast such a significant long-term deal.

    ConceptShare Version 2.0

    screen3.jpgOn the heels of this new partnership comes the announcement of ConceptShare Version 2.0. We managed to get a sneak peek at version 2.0 some time ago and were really impressed. Instead of lumping in dozens of new features, ConceptShare Version 2 feels like a maturation of the previous version. It now has a significantly more professional look and also provides more refined workflows for major tasks.

    Version 2.0 also sees video support coming out of beta status and is also built on a upgraded framwork which will allow much more rapid software releases in the future.

    ConceptShare already counts Avenue A | Razorfish, QUALCOMM, AOL, Monster.com, the National Football League, the New York Knicks and Harvard University as their major clients on top of hundreds of independent designers who all rely on ConceptShare on a daily basis.

    These two announcements take ConceptShare from the rank of fledgling startup to the status of being one of the most polished and reliable players in the online collaboration space.

    Read more about the partnership and the new version on the ConceptShare Website.

  • Digg.com, a client of Canadian web development firm silverorange, is now partnering with another Canadian company: Idée. Idée, who we previously profiled here, will be providing software to detect multiple submissions of the same image to Digg.com’s new dedicated images section.

    Fans of Digg know that a dedicated images section has been in demand for some time now and by avoiding the noise of having multiples of the same image uploaded, Digg can provide a much better service than their competitors.

    From the Digg.com Blog:

    Sorting and Duplicate Image Detection
    digglogo.png We?ve added a new sort to the images section called ?mosaic? view ? it?s great for browsing image thumbnails. To help prevent people from submitting duplicate images, we?ve added image recognition technology from Idée Inc.

    Congratulations to everyone at Idée on this deal and on the new website, it looks great.

    Idée has a follow-up post with a lot of information here.

  • How to botch a launch: Razzle.ca

    We were excited to cover the launch of Razzle.ca here last week. Things were looking up: Razzle.ca was cloning Woot.com, an American 1-deal per-day site which has been very successful, and while there were a few technical glitches that needed to be worked out, Razzle seemed to have the business problems all worked out. Negotiating 365 deals in the space of a year can’t be easy.

    rs110_a_pro1.jpgIt turns out it’s not easy. The first deal to hit the front page of Razzle was for a pair of brand new Sennheiser RS110 headphones for around 50$. By all means, a great deal even with shipping costs factored in.

    The surprise was not just the great price however, as soon as the Sennheisers started arriving at the doorsteps of anxious purchasers, there was a new surprise: The headphones appeared to have been used, some even had hair still clinging to them and some were heavily scratched and had boxes which were ragged and torn.

    Razzle.ca has tried to respond to some degree, posting this notice on their site:

    Coming after several emails asking about the condition of certain Sennheiser RS116s we went and investigated more thoroughly. It looks like CERTAIN products included in our batch of Sennheisers were actually refurbished that we sold as new. We immediately contacted our supplier to ensure that if anything like this happens again there will be immediate repercussions.

    The biggest problem for Razzle isn’t that they sent out some bad headphones, it is that they have now alienated their core audience: early adopters. It is not easy to find the type of purchaser who jumps in with reckless abandon and starts giving their credit card number to a ragtag internet startup. Dozens and dozens of people did, most notable is the RedFlagDeals.com community who could have been a huge Razzle sales channel for years to come.

    To add fuel to the fire, it appears that someone from Razzle has been signing up for multiple accounts on RedFlagDeals and has been contacting members, one moderator on the forum noted that a pro-razzle post made by a brand-new user had the same IP-address (a sort of fingerprint for the internet) as another user who had previously identified himself as a Razzle employee.

    Strong buyer communities are critical for sites like Razzle.ca and Woot.com. Having customers encouraging each-other, providing reviews and ratings, and just generally promoting your site is the only affordable way to generate growth. Instead, Razzle now has product pages that look like this.

    So, here is your chance to learn from a botched launch, and here are a few quick tips avoiding a screw up like this one, which could very well be fatal. These apply to new web apps as much as they do to gadgets.

    • Seed your launch with great products, case studies and/or testimonials. Razzle would have been smart to offer a deal that was actually a great deal. Even if they did so at a loss, the goodwill they could have built would have been critical.
    • If you are working with a new supplier, test the product yourself. Don’t work with fly-by-night importers and refurbishers.
    • If problems do arise, respond passionately. Refund everyone completely, including shipping costs. Step up and take the punches.
    • Do not try to infiltrate established communities. Forums like the one at RedFlagDeals are very cohesive and it is easy for member there to spot fakes in their midst. You have to earn your way into these communities, which Razzle would have been better advised to do by offering great deals.

    Is Razzle dead? No way. If they are serious, there is still an opportunity to make this right. They should contact all of their affected customers to make sure they are happy with their purchase (pick up the phone guys) and for anyone not happy, they should send a replacement or pay for return shipping and offer a complete refund.

    The opportunity is to then return with good, honest, deals on a regular basis and to keep growing the community. If Razzle leaves even a single disgruntled customer out there however, they are dead in the water. The comments are open, did you buy from Razzle? What was your experience? Do you think they can ever recover?

    And good luck to Razzle, you are going to need it.

  • onaswarm – Lifestreaming in groups

    In the world of RSS, and with users creating more of the actual content that popular sites are reselling to other users, we all start to create little islands of stuff out there on different sites, and rarely do we get the chance to pull it all together.

    I create a lot of my own stuff. I twitter, create seesmic videos, have a facebook profile, have a blog, this blog, and post on another blog, I use last.fm, and so on. It gets hard, or impossible, to serve all of this content up to someone else in a meaningful way. On their own, each tidbit I leave on a site can often lack context, but aggregated together, the lifestream starts to tell a story.

    onaswarm.pngOnaswarm is a new release from David Janes, based in Toronto, Ontario, that is one of the first movers in the personal aggregation space. There are others, such as friendfeed, but everyone in the market so far is early to the game.

    RSS is a real market, and you have to think of it that way.

    To some people RSS is at best just a file format, the vast majority of people don’t even have a clue what it is, but to a few, RSS is a market that is in a lot of pain right now. A market can be defined as “The opportunity to buy or sell; extent of demand for merchandise” and we are seeing that there is increasing demand for products and services which make RSS more useful and consumable to end users and businesses. In the same way that AideRSS and Feedburner have provided specific and useful tools to their target markets, there are subsets of the RSS market that remain open to a lifestreaming player.

    The Consumer Market

    Whoever gets the consumer side of the RSS market right is going to do pretty well. You only have to look at any set of internet usage estimates to get an idea of just how much consuming people are doing. An aggregator that can help people pull in all the content they are leaving all over the place will have a lot of opportunities. As each individual gets more accustomed to creating, and then reading content created by other amateurs, the need to have an adequate aggregation toolset will become more and more real.

    The Enterprise Market

    Standards like RSS are becoming prevalent in enterprise software and as more enterprise software platforms start to produce RSS feeds, there is going to be significant demand for aggregators which bring together feeds in unique and productive ways. There is a need to centralize feeds from tools like Sharepoint, Lotus Notes, and Wikis. Perhaps even email.

    Innovative, Still not Pretty

    Onaswarm has by far the best model for combining all manner of feeds in a reasonable and intuitive way. By reducing redundant information and filtering regularly recurring types of information Onaswarm becomes useful beyond a plain vanilla aggregator. Even better, Onaswarm allows groups of people to loosely combine all of their feeds and then slowly acts as a defacto social network. This is the Toronto Swarm, which gives you a reading of what is happening in Toronto’s tech scene.

    The one downside to Onaswarm is that it really needs a decent UI overhaul. Things feel a little disjointed and a bit ugly. I am not the only one who feels that way, and I am pretty sure the guys at Onaswarm know it is something they are going to have to tackle.

    Until their business model becomes more apparent (I am sure they have one, but are choosing to more generally test and prove the product before they really go to market), it will be hard to know if Onaswarm will be a winner or follower in the Lifestreaming space and RSS aggregator market. I think they are currently the best out there, in spite of the aforementioned need to fix up the UI. While it is not yet clear how quickly the market will or will not mature, the space should ultimately prove lucrative.

    Contact David Janes from Blogmatrix.

  • StartupCamp Toronto – More Details

    We are VERY excited to announce the line up for StartupCamp Toronto. But first, a big thank you to our sponsors. And not just because we couldn’t have put together this event without them.

    Sponsors
    These folks are in the business of making startups successful, without them a startup’s chances drop significantly… and then we’d have nothing to write about! So get to know these guys and gals at StartupCamp.

    Presenting Companies
    The five presenting companies have been chosen, thanks for all your votes! Drum roll…

    Keynote
    Albert Lai, who has started more companies than you have fingers, will be kicking things off with some thoughts on the state of the Canadian startup scene. If we get a few beers in him, Albert might even give us the inside track on his latest venture.

    Venue
    StartupCampToronto1 will be held at No Regrets, which is located at 42 Mowat Ave in the West end of the city. Parking is free in their lot starting at 6pm, and the King and Queen Street streetcars will get you there from downtown as well.

    More Tickets!
    Now that the details are worked out, we have put the last set of tickets up for grabs. This batch is for Startups and Gurus only. Service Provider sponsorships are also still available.

    There’s an After Party… AND EVERYONE IS INVITED!
    We really hated having to turn people away… so we decided to throw an after party at No Regrets! Everyone is invited. Doors open at 8:30pm. The after party is about more than free flowing beer (there will be plenty)… over a dozen startups will be giving demos all night!

    An incredible, but secret, announcement…
    Woah, have to keep a lid on this one. We have a huge new announcement to make at StartupCampToronto, you won’t want to miss this. Whether you just have an idea, or have been slaving away at your startup for years, something is about to happen in Canada that you want to know about.

  • Back to Reality – Vancouver Enterprise Forum

    index_r1_c3.jpgWhile the rest of us are sitting around moaning about the state of canadian venture capital, it appears that Vancouver is so over it, the Vancouver Enterprise Forum is at least.

    This Tuesday, November 27th, they are hosting “Beyond B.C. VCs – tips for Sourcing Tech Funding from American Venture Capitalists”

    In the November VEF event, we?ll hear from experienced American venture capitalists as they explain the fundamentals they look for when investing in B.C. and Canadian companies. How do you approach American VCs? What kind of information and potential do they want to see? What approach is best? These questions and more will be answered by Geoff Entress from Madrona of Seattle, which made an investment in Victoria based PixPo in 2006, and by Alex Gove of Walden Venture Capital of San Francisco.

    This is not a small matter for Vancouver, which has seen its share of startups heading south for funding.

    The catch? How long will startups stick around beautiful Vancouver, or anywhere in Canada, when their Venture Capitalist investors are beckoning them to come south. It starts with “let’s move the sales office”, and soon enough everyone but the developers are gone.

    This is a subject that we will be diving in to more here. Would you rather take funding outside of Canada, or would you consider it a secondary option? Considering how tightly connected Canada and the US are, does it even matter? Do we need to be doing more to make it easier for american funds to invest here?

  • Razzle Clones Woot

    Update: Caveat Emptor
    Razzle made a serious misstep selling refurbished headphones as new. The first batch of customers felt burned and started discussing their experiences on Red Flag Deals. Razzle made another poor choice by posting a fake testimonial on Red Flag Deals (under the name lohervine); a site administrator outed them by comparing IP addresses. Razzle is offering refunds, but has not yet committed to covering shipping.

    Woot sells refurbished items all the time, but they clearly state the item’s condition. While I doubt Razzle was set up to scam users, they really fumbled the ball losing the trust of their very first customers.

    On the lighter side and as predicted, a customer ended up at Razzle.com by mistake.

    Original Post
    Razzle LogoRazzle.ca, Canada’s first deal a day site, launched today. The first deal: wireless headphones for $51.90. Too rich for your blood? Well join the site anyways, because they plan to giveaway a few items every so often.

    The Montreal based site was founded by Ryan Closs, 26, who faithfully cloned Woot. Emulating a successful concept is a legitimate business strategy, so I am not going to criticize Ryan for that.

    Think Bill Gates came up with the Windows GUI? Heck even Wal-Mart’s Greeter was an idea Sam Walton copied from K-Mart. And let’s not forget to mention the multi-million dollar exits Facebook clones are making (Germany, China). That said, I would have probably paraphrased Woot’s FAQ a little less closely.

    Today’s launch had some to be expected hiccups. Fortunately, the admins were on the ball and put out the small fires in the comments. A longer term issue might be the Razzle.ca domain name. It is pretty catchy, but direct navigation traffic will occasionally end up at Razzle.com by mistake. Those users are in for a surprise… not safe for work! There is a lesson here for other entrepreneurs, pay attention to abutting domain names!

    Congrats on the launch!

    Contact: Ryan Closs

  • Startup M&A – Raincity Studios acquires Bryght

    filesrc.png
    logobryght.png

    Bryght, a Drupal managed hosting startup based in Vancouver, BC has been acquired by long time partner RainCity Studios, who have developed sites such as Ozzy.com and Ask a Ninja.

    While the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, and I am not sure the number would be huge, this feels primarily like a smart consolidation of two very complimentary businesses. Servicing the same niche doesn’t necessarily mean two businesses should merge, but in this case the two organizations have been working together on so many projects, for so long, I have a feeling that this will be a chance to consolidate their efforts and cut some of the fat by re-directing effort.

    Many of the Bryght and RainCity Studios employees and partners are also responsible for the Northern Voice conference, which has been a huge hit for years.

    The new company is underway opening a new office in Shanghai, China, and my bet is that the renewed energy from this merger will result in a lot of cool projects in the near future. Kris Krug will be the President of the new organization with Robert Scales as CEO and running the European and Asian side of the company.

    I should also disclose: I have been a happy client of both of these companies in the past.

    Update: More straight from the source here.
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  • mesheast.com – East Coast Startup Blog

    picture-2.pngMeshEast is the latest entrant on to the Canadian Startup blog scene. I was excited to get an email from Lisa Rousseau, who is also working on her own startup, to see that the east coast would finally have a local startup blog. Lisa is going to have some work to do in finding and profiling those elusive east-coast startups, but my guess is that she will find more than enough to get started in her home province of New Brunswick.

    So please, head over to MeshEast and subscribe. We have been covering some of the bigger happenings on the east coast, but there are always a lot of things we just can’t cover. We are working on our own profile of what is going on in Atlantic Canada, and so far I have been excited about what I have seen.

    We have been trying to do as much as we can to encourage local blogs that will cover smaller regions in more detail. Montreal is the luckiest with MontrealTechWatch, which is run by Heri (who might be the hardest working blogger in Canada these days), and Ottawa has StartupOttawa, which is really starting to pick up steam. There are some gaps to fill, so if you are passionate about startups then it is time to get off your butt and step up to the place. I can think of dozens of local blogs I would love to see: Waterloo, Calgary, Vancouver, Victoria, and the Prairies all come to mind as the biggest gaps out there.

    So get started, and get in touch. We want to help!

  • groovle.com – Customized Google Search Pages

    picture-2-21-01-42.pngYou may have heard before: Google pays big money to people who send searchers their way. In the case of Mozilla, the search bar in the top right-hand corner of their webbrowser makes them something on the order of $40million a year. That’s a lot of money for searches. I don’t even want to know how much Apple makes off the Google search they have embedded in Safari.

    Goovle, a Oakville, Ontario startup, is trying to take advantage of Google’s generous kickbacks with their custom search tool.

    Groovle allows you to create a customized search page of your own, which most users would typically set as their homepage. Groovle’s unique feature is the huge library of images you can access to create your own page. You can also upload your own images.

    trans.pngThe comments on their September review on Techcrunch predicted that Groovle would be shut down quickly. It is now the middle of November and they are still around. While I share some of the concerns of those commentors – it is not clear whether groovle actually has any rights to use these images – that doesn’t seem to be stopping them.

    As of October 2007 they were clocking 250,000 visitors a month, but it is unclear how they have been doing since (compete.com is suggesting a 70%+ drop in traffic but I don’t trust compete all that much).

    Groovle is a great example of a simple service with a potentially large audience that just takes a little elbow grease. All the components are there, Google is providing search and a kickback to sites who send searches their way, and there is (apparently) a wealth of art and images out there that you can make available to users.

    Groovle is self funded by its founders, Ryan Fitzgibbon, Jacob Fuller and Nico Angka, and they are not currently seeking investment, but are perusing partnerships.

    Contact Jacob Fuller
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