StartupNorth

Category: Startups

  • Mobivox takes $11 Million

    mobivoxlogo.jpgMobivox, a Montreal based startup has just raised $11 Million from IDG Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, and Skypoint Capital Corp.

    Mobivox is a value-added VOIP services provider focused on cell phones. They can let you connect to your own Skype account via your mobile, and can also handle your long distance calling. They also offer free calling to a huge number of countries.

    In some ways, their service is a sort of glorified calling card, having you dial an access number and then patching you through, but addons like Skype access, free calling to some countries, voice recognition, SMS Call Back, Conference Calling, Mobile-to-landline transfer and Group Calling all put Mobivox way ahead.

    It would be amazing if Mobivox started incorporating some GrandCentral like features, but my guess is that they will focus on building out their existing business first.

    Mark Evans had some kind words in his review of their service back when they first launched in May 2007.

  • Garage invests $2.5 Million in Lure Media, now a software startup

    MontrealTechWatch got to it first, Lure Media, a Montreal based company had a busy week last week. While the rest of us were filling up on Turkey, they closed a deal to purchase IMPACT, IS, the makers of two products: Impact Designer and Impact Showroom. Before that was done however, they signed off on $2.5 Million in funding from Garage Canada.

    Impact has been around for over 20 years, and is a well-established leader, Lure Media now seems set to position themselves primarily as a software provider with ancillary support services. They will also launch an entirely new piece of Business-to-Business software they are describing as: ” Business-to-Business Exchange supporting the global commercial and residential interior design industry. ETERIORS will link manufacturers of luxury lifestyle products to their respective dealers, interior design professionals and high-spend customers on a transactional, digital backbone that evolves into the standard network for electronic commerce and rich media in the global luxury lifestyle market.

    It is interesting to see Garage Canada play a role you might expect more traditional private equity group to handle. While this deal is probably the size Garage Canada is more comfortable with, the deal may have just been too small for the larger equity players, leaving a nice gap for Garage to fill with what is probably a safe bet in comparison to typical VC deals. The fact that they are launching a new product out of the merger also puts the deal closer to Garage’s territory.

  • b5Media Launching Spekked – The big part of the Long Tail

    picture-1.pngWhat happens when you’ve made a business out of publishing hundreds and hundreds of niche blogs? b5Media, a Toronto based startup that has taken funding in the range of US$2-million co-lead by Brightspark Ventures and J. L. Albright Venture Partners, is the owner of a vast amount of posts and articles on a few dozen subjects and finding new ways to capitalize on that asset can get tough.

    Today, b5 is taking a leap and is launching Spekked. The project is labeled “Beta”, which either means that the technology is young (it’s an aggregator of other b5media blogs, all based on one common subject), or it means the entire business idea is being tested. My guess is that it is a combination of both.

    As any startup begins to accumulate assets, it is critical to put them to good use. Like the guys at AideRSS, who previewed a set of tools at Democamp which uses their existing data, b5 is starting to zero in on larger segments of their market by combining many products (in this case, content) in to one re-focused stream which will have a much broader appeal. Spekked will also act as a funnel in to b5’s deeper offerings in that particular category.

    The challenge for this project will be to avoid losing readers who may stop reading 5 regular b5media blogs and instead just tune in to the one aggregated blog.

    If this works, you can bet there will be a lot of other branded combination blogs from b5 to come.

    We are working on a profile of b5media, which we hope to post soon.

  • BarCamp Canada!

    BarCamp Canada LogoMark your calendars, BarCamp Canada is coming to town! Montreal is hosting Canada’s first-ever nationwide BarCamp, to be held next month, Saturday, November 3. For those of you not yet familiar with BarCamp, it is an unconference par excellence. While I can’t tell you exactly what will be presented (the schedule is set that day), I can guarantee it will be one of the most engaging experiences of the year.

    Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited. The only cost is participation. So plan a car pool, jump on a train, or find a cheap flight. This event you don’t want to miss.

    What: BarCamp Canada
    Where: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
    When: Saturday, November 3, 2007
    Cost: Participation (Free!)

  • ConceptShare – Online Collaboration

    images1.jpgSudbury, Ontario based ConceptShare is one of the best examples of a fast growing, healthy and original startup in Canada. They have gone from idea, to execution and now to business development in a short period of time. They have done it all from Sudbury.

    The idea was simple enough. You have any sort of artwork or video, and you need to bring in other people to help edit and refine your work. The old way of doing things was to email your files around and have people open them locally on their PC. With Conceptshare, your co-workers, partners and others can simply log in and see what you are working on, and they can offer their own suggestions right there on the spot. Collaborators can draw right on the screen, they can make notes and leave messages for eachother.

    I won’t go any further in to just what Conceptshare does, because their name is descriptive enough and their website is even more helpful. They also have one of the best demo movies of any startup out there.

    Differentiating in a muddled market
    “Collaboration” is not a new idea. The market for collaboration tools is endless and highly competitive. Instead of jumping in to that big, endless fight, ConceptShare worked hard to focus on a basic set of needs for what was initially a very defined market (graphic designers). By doing things right and in a smaller puddle, ConceptShare turned in to the perfect tool for a lot of things. They now have customers doing almost every sort of collaboration you can imagine, and they are just getting started at going after these new markets.

    ConceptShare also made one critical smart move up front. They didn’t try to do real-time collaboration. That would have included real-time audio chat, video chat and all sorts of extras that most customers don’t really want. Instead, they built their tool around how people really work: asynchronously. If you want me to review a document, or new graphic design, I don’t want to have to meet you online at a certain time to discuss it: I would rather just pop in and make notes when I have the time.

    A critical mistake that competing companies have made, in my view, is that they focused on real-time. Real-time requires a change in the user’s behavior, and trying to change behavior rather than compliment it is almost always a road to failure.

    Staying Focused
    Bernie, Scott and Chris have spent the last year and a half working on ConceptShare with incredible focus. Right from the beginning, when they were running around the first Mesh conference with their laptops, doing demos for potential investors, they have been role models of how to just do it when it comes to starting your own company. While a lot of would-be entrepenurs will wonder “should I do this”, etc.

    An Angel Round, and on to VC
    To really get off the ground, Conceptshare raised an undisclosed amount of Angel funding. The fact that they were able to get their funding in place so early is a testament not just to their great idea, but the hard work these guys continue to put in.

    The guys are now hitting the road to raise a round of Venture Capital. The decision to go down this road was not an easy choice for them to make. They tell me that they are more concerned with finding the right kind of VC than they are with just taking money from anyone. They are looking for a partner to help them grow the business.

    Overall, I think it is a smart move for a company in their position. They are arguably the market leaders in a space that is only just starting to come in to itself. I would be surprised if Scott, Bernie and Chris didn’t have their pick of VCs, as well as some pretty favorable terms. Let’s cross our fingers that they don’t end up having to go south like StumbleUpon, iUpload (now Awarness), or flickr.

    And now…
    This week ConceptShare has doubled it’s workforce and has brought on Will Pate to help drive the company ahead. Will is an experienced community builder and will be doing that, and I suspect other work, with ConceptShare. Hiring smart is critical and Scott, Bernie and Chris have been careful about who they bring on.

    So what else is next? A search shows that they own the domain conceptnation.com, which looks like a preview of some sort of new crowd-based marketplace or network. So, I am guessing that it won’t be long before the guys have big announcements coming out left and right.

    Contact: Scott Brooks

  • All Eyes on Idee – Visual Search: Part 1

    idee.pngIdee is a Toronto, Ontario based company that has been one of the biggest stars in the Canadian Startup community for years.

    Idee is a profitable and extremely original company. Their ultra-cool office on Queen St in Toronto is home to 22 employees.

    Now, I have to warn you. I am a bit of an Idee fan, so if I gush too much,. well,. gush along.

    Leila Boujnane and Paul Bloore are the two founders and brains behind the company. Paul currently runs the technical side of things and Leila is the CEO and runs the business operation. That said, it’s obvious that they are a tightly knit team. Both of them put in long days as they turn out new products and bring on new customers.

    What’s so great to see is how well this team works together. As far as I know, they have never strangled each other in public before. Considering that you can walk by Idee at midnight many days of the week and see the lights all on tells you enough about how hard these two, and their team, all work.

    What does Idee do? They are the developers of visual search and image/video monitoring technologies. On the visual search front: their visual search software can find similar images in very large image collections. Give their engine an image and it will find all the similar images in an image collection. You can try their visual search technology in the Idee lab.

    As to image and video monitoring: Idee monitors and actively tracks millions of clients images and can identify where their clients images have been used in both print publications and the internet. They are the only company in the world to do this. Their image recognition system analyzes each client’s images and creates a digital fingerprint for each image and compares it to images scanned from publications and crawled from the Internet. The image matches found for their clients can be partial image matches as well. This means that a person appearing in one image, and then reappearing in another image but with a different background, will be found by Idee.

    Their clients receive timely image monitoring reports that basically provide them with a snapshot of where any of their images have appeared. These reports can be used for automating editorial photo sales, competitive analysis, copyright monitoring. As you can imagine if you are an professional photographer this would make sense for you too 🙂

    First Cluser - IdeeThis video provides the best overview of their services. Their first compute cluster was put together in less than a day (see photo to the left). Today their compute cluster includes over 300 processors and more than 40 terabytes of storage and it is continuing to grow (see glamour shot of Paul below).

    Idee has had to deal with all of the classic startup issues and in our next installment we will get them to tell us about some of their adventures. Scaling such a computationally complex business means maintaining (and paying for) a huge technical infrastructure while building an enterprise sales operation. It takes stamina and brains to get that kind of job done. Leila, Paul and their team have done it.

    Paul Bloore - IdeeThey may not have entierly conquered all media searching yet, but they are on their way. I would place a bet any day that they will get there pretty soon. Once you get to know Idee you realize that the sky is the limit.

    Take a look at their client list and you will know what I mean.

    The question for me is: what’s next for Idee? Leila won’t say exactly what’s coming, but we can look forward to something huge soon. I know it.

  • Angel Investing – New Series

    I’d like to welcome Craig Hayashi, of Maple Leaf Angels, to StartupNorth. The following post is the first article of a new StartupNorth series on angel financing Craig will be writing. We’re excited to have Craig on board and look forward to learning from his experiences as a Canadian angel investor. — Jonas

    Angel InvestorAngel financing is an important part of a startup’s lifecycle, I’d like to help as much as I can to demystify the process. I am one of the founders of the Maple Leaf Angels one of the main organized angel groups in the Toronto area. As such, most of my articles will be written from the viewpoint of securing funding through an angel group.

    So what is an angel group? Basically it is an organization that has angel investors as members and provides the infrastructure to intake companies looking for funding, screen them, and provide them a forum to pitch to the members of the group. The benefit to companies looking for funding is that it provides a defined place & process by which to submit a funding application that can reach many angel investors. The benefit to angel investors is that it provides a forum to see quality deals and pool together investor’s capital for deals. From a funding standpoint, the important thing to remember is that the group only exists to support the investment. At the end of the day, each individual angel investor is deciding if they want to invest and they individually write a cheque for how much they want to invest.

    To help frame the overview with some actual figures, here are some statistics from the Angel Capital Association. The Angel Capital Association is an alliance of angel groups in North America and periodically surveys the groups to understand investment trends.

    Average # of members in an angel group: 44

    Average # of investments per year: 7

    Average size of each investment: $241,000 USD

    Average investment size per angel: $30,000 USD

    The statistics above are fairly representative of the angel groups I have been involved with in Toronto. Which basically means that for a given financing deal, you can expect to be able to raise a few hundred thousand dollars spread across a dozen or so investors.

    In future articles, I plan to cover various aspects of the angel financing process such as what makes a good investor presentation, what angel investors look for in making a financing decision, term sheets, valuation, etc. I welcome suggestions of topics you would like to hear about and if you have any questions in general about angel financing, feel free to contact me: craig <at> mapleleafangels.com

  • PlanetEye Launch Imminent

    Update #2: 2startup has a review of the beta of Planeteye, confirming that they did launch in to a wider beta. We have no confirm/deny on the specific numbers we posted before, so we will leave the three paragraphs removed and will post the facts as we have them later if they are of any interest at all.

    Check out the review, and please post any more links to reviews in the comments if you have them. Also check out 2Startup, which is a startup blog that seems to be just getting off the ground.

    site_title.gifPlanetEye, possibly the stealthiest startup in Canada in the last 2 years, is finally ready for launch.

    If you aren’t in Toronto, you probably haven’t heard of Planeteye. If you are in Toronto, you may only know of them because they employ some of the coolest developers in town – Slava Sakhnenko and Alan Hietala, along with the newly reshuffled Mark Evans, who used to be at, b5Media.

    What is PlanetEye? Well, you have to do some digging to find out, so that’s what I did. Mum is the word for PlanetEye employees — who couldn’t be convinced to show as much as a screenshot pre-launch.

    “Users upload images on to Planeteye?s servers and geo-tag them or any existing online photos. Visitors can then enter a location or landmark, and see far-off places through a previous traveller?s photo lens.” – blog

    PlanetEye is a site that lets you store Images and allows you to organize them according to their GPS location. I am going to guess that reviews and other annotations are mixed in there. From my understanding, Planeteye has taken investment from Microsoft Research and makes extensive use of the World Wide Media Exchange platform. If you check out that demo, my guess is you get to see the bulk of PlanetEye’s value proposition. Perhaps it is a sort of fancy version of the EarthAlbum.

    Planeteye first came to life out of a course at UofT called Business of Software. Rick Segal, a Venture Capitalist in Toronto, was a judge for the end-of-term business plan competition. Slava Sakhnenko, Elliott Tzaneteas, and Jennifer McCarthy (who has since gone to another of Rick’s portfolio companies, MusicIP) were presenting their business plan and it seems Rick liked it. He liked it so much in fact that he decided to put together a company based on their work, as well as the Microsoft Research patents we mentioned before. (Slava has the best account of it all here).

    So, go grab your camera, and perhaps your GPS, and perhaps your laptop too, and get ready to geotag the hell out of your town. But first, you will have to sit tight. “Coming soooooon!”

  • BC Startup Competition – Dec. 17 Deadline

    bplanlogo.gifFear not, the east coast is not the only part of the country with a startup competition. Small Business BC is hosting their own business plan competition.

    There are separate categories for startups and for more mature growth businesses. Each category is up for a $40,000 prize (we think, it’s not clear).

    This contest seems pretty well run, and is much more open in terms of the types of businesses that can apply, but it also seems to have a much less attractive prize package. There may be ancillary prizes we just aren’t aware of yet however.

    They are also very prescriptive of how your business plan should look which doesn’t nessecarily mean that they will find the best startups, or the best entrepreneurs, instead they may just find the best darn bunch of business plan writers in BC.

    Business Plans aren’t always where you should be spending your time, instead I think that a competition like this should leave the criteria much more open and should simply judge each entrepreneur and business based on how well the idea is presented.

    Only a few tech startups have won in the past.

  • ThoughtFarmer – Facebook for the Enterprise

    Thought Farmer LogoThoughtFarmer, based in Vancouver, BC, is a startup in the hot enterprise 2.0 space. Why is the sector so exciting? Because it is changing enterprise work flow, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. Try imagining university before Facebook.

    ThoughtFarmer’s journey began with a consulting project in 2004; a client wanted an engaging intranet and knowledge repository, all without staff dedicated to the project. The solution… a wiki. The product developed from there, inspired by JotSpot and the growing importance of social networks.

    ThoughtFarmer sold its first license in 2006. Yep, this is behind-the-firewall software. With companies large and small racing toward the era of software as a service, this is an almost contrarian bet. It will be interesting to follow this company and see how it all plays out. One last thing… ThoughtFarmer is profitable and not seeking funding.

    Contact: Chris McGrath