StartupNorth

  • Under the Hood: The Technical Setup of Upverter

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from the Upverter blog written by Zak Homuth (LinkedIn, @zakhomuth, Github). Follow him on Twitter @zakhomuth. This post was originally published on August 1, 2011, I was just negligent in posting it.

    Who doesn’t love tech porn? And what’s better than an inside look at the architecture and tools that power a startup? That’s right, nothing. So we thought, why not put up our own little behind the scenes, and try and share a little bit about how we do what we do?

    At Upverter, we’ve built the first ever web-based, the first ever collaborative, and the first ever community and reuse focused EDA tools. This meant re-thinking a lot of assumptions that went into building the existing tools. For example, clients and servers weren’t an afterthought, but instead a core part of our architecture. Collaboration was baked in from the start which also meant a whole new stack – borrowed heavily from guys like Google Wave, and Etherpad.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wave
    http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/
    http://techblog.gomockingbird.com/archive/5/2010

     

    Apache-wave

    On the front-end, our pride and joy is what we call the sketch tool. Its more or less where we have spent the bulk of our development time over the last year – a large compiled javascript application that uses long polling to communicate with the API and Design Servers. When we started out to move these tools to the web, we knew that we would be building a big Javascript app. But we didn’t quite know what the app itself would look like and our choice of tech for the app itself has changed quite a bit over time… more on this later!

    On the back-end, we run a slew of servers. When it comes to our servers, there was a bit of a grand plan when we started, but in reality they all came about very organically. As we needed to solve new problems and fill voids, we built new servers into the architecture. As it stands right now, we have the following:

    • Front-end web servers, which serve most of our pages and community content;
    • API & Design servers, which do most of the heavy lifting and allow for collaboration;
    • DB servers, which hold the datums; and
    • Background workers, which handle our background processing and batch jobs.

     

     

    So let’s talk tech…

    • We use a lot of Linux (ub) (arch), both on our development workstations and all over our servers.
    • We use Python on the server side; but when we started out we did take a serious look at using Node.js () and Javascript. But at the time both Node and javascript just wern’t ready yet… But things have come a tremendously long way, and we might have made a different choice if we were beginning today.
    • We use nginx (http://nginx.org/) for our reverse proxy, load balancing and SSL termination.
    • We use Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org/) (which is a like Sinatra) for our Community and Front-end web servers. We started with Django, but it was just too full blown and we found ourselves rewriting it enough that it made sense to step a rung lower.
    • We use Tornado () for our API and design servers. We chose Tornado because it is amazingly good at serving these type of requests at break neck speed.
    • We built our background workers on Node.js so that we can run copies of the javascript client in the cloud saving us a ton of code duplication.
    • We do our internal communication through ZMQ (www.zeromq.org) on top of Google Protocol Buffers
    • Our external communication is also done through our custom RPC javascript again mapped onto Protocol Buffers. http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html/
    • We used MySQL () for both relational and KV data through a set of abstracted custom datastore procedures until very recently, when we switched our KV data over to Kyoto Tycoon ().
    • Our primary client the sketch tool is built in Javascript with the Google Closure Library () and Compiler ().
    • The client communicates with the servers via long polling through custom built RPC functions and server-side protocol buffers.
    • We draw the user interface with HTML5 and canvas (), through a custom drawing library which handles collisions and does damage based redrawing.
    • And we use soy templates for all of our DOM UI dialogs, prompts, pop-ups, etc.
    • We host on EC2 and handle our deployment through puppet master ().
    • Monitoring is done through a collection of OpsView/nagios, PingDom and Collectd.

    Our development environment is very much a point of pride for us. We have a spent a lot of time making it possible for us to do some of the things we are trying to do from both the client and server sides and putting together a dev environment that allows our team to work efficiently within our architecture. We value testing, and we are fascists about clean and maintainable code.

    • We use git (obviously).
    • We have a headless Javascript unit test infrastructure built on top of QUnit () and Node.js
    • We have python unit tests built on top of nose ().
    • We run closure linting () and compiling set to the “CODE FACIEST” mode
    • We run a full suite of checks within buildbot () on every push to master
    • We also do code reviews on every push using Rietveld ().
    • We are 4-3-1 VIM vs. Text Edit vs. Text Mate.
    • We are 4-2-2 Linux vs. OSX vs. Windows 7.
    • We are 5-2-1 Android vs. iPhone vs. dumb phone.

    If any of this sounds like we are on the right path, you should drop us a line. We are in Toronto, we’re solving very real-world, wicked problems, and we’re always hiring smart developers.

    Reference

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from the Upverter blog written by Zak Homuth (LinkedIn, @zakhomuth, Github). Follow him on Twitter @zakhomuth. This post was originally published on August 1, 2011, I was just negligent in posting it.

  • Who Will Be Canada’s Hot Startups in 2012?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in January 3, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

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    The flurry of high-tech deals last year saw a bunch of promising startups snapped up – Zite, Rypple, PostRank, PushLife, Tungle and Five Mobile to name a few.

    The encouraging part of the Canadian landscape is the growing number of high-quality startups being created and, thankfully, funded. It means that rather than having M&A activity “hollow” things out, there are more startups ready to step into the spotlight.

    So, who are the Canadian startups that warrant our attention in 2012?

    Who’s going to grow in a major way, attract a significant number of users and customers, launch exciting initiatives, or be acquired. Granted, it’s a subjective list but it is an interesting way to speculate on companies that will capture the spotlight this year. If you leave a comment, I’ll update the list.

    To get the ball rolling, here are some of my choices for the “Hot Startup” list:

    • ScribbleLive, the world’s leading real-time content creation and publishing company whose clients include Reuters, AP and FA.
    • WineAlign, which cracked the 100,000 unique visitor mark for the first time in December
    • 500px, one of the leading places to display and share beautiful photography
    • Pressly, whose technology is helping publishers create mobile Web sites that embrace the “swipe and read” functionality of apps
    • QuickMobile, one of the leading event and conference mobile application developers
    • Atomic Reach, which makes it easier for brand to discover, publish and market content
    • Wave Accounting, which recently raised $5-million to drive growth of its free online accounting service
    • Keek, which offers a video-based social network
    • Fixmo, a mobile security company that recently raised $23-million
    • TribeHR, which develops human resources service for small and medium businesses
    • GoInstant, which is creating technology that lets people co-browse a Web site at the same time.

    Note: ScribbleLive and Atomic Reach are digital marketing clients of my company, ME Consulting.
    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in January 3, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

  • Shit, that was a big year. Now we make our move…

    2011 was an important year for Canadian Startups.

    We had some exits. Over $1bn worth. We needed that. The more important thing is that a lot of those exits were by entrepreneurs who “get it” and who are going to be re-investing in startups here in Canada.

    Now we have a handful of funds who have money to deploy. Many of you probably don’t remember the good old days when there was no money to go around. I once saw a startup panhandling on Queen St West to raise money for some Dell servers. No joke.

    This was also a big year because it was one of the first in which we saw deals getting done in Canada by US based investors. That’s good because it keeps us all on our toes and it forces local investors to compete on market-driven terms.

    The biggest problem now, as far as I can tell, is that we are out of excuses. There is money, talent, and the need to build more quality startups.

    So get to work.

    In the early days of Democamp there was an obsession with quality. I think it probably stemmed from our (Toronto’s) own insecurity with itself. There was no identity or real history to draw from, so we had to be careful to make sure that everything that came from the community was world class. It wasn’t always but we tried. We need to get really obsessed with the quality of stuff we turn out in Canada in the next year. No more being cheerleaders for mediocre shit. We need to be OBSESSED with setting the bar high.

    We need to go a step further now. We need to set the bar for world class. Now is not the time to slow down.

    Part of the problem is that we don’t have a single voice to tell our story. Techvibes is doing an amazing job covering EVERYTHING, but it doesn’t have personality. Startupnorth is editorial and a lot of preaching (like this post). That doesn’t help much either. I hope a voice emerges in the next year that has the time and economic model to really tell the story in Canada. It would be good if Mark MacQueen quit his job as a banker and just blogged fulltime. That guy has it right.

    If you are still reading, you should put your name in for the founders and funders dinner in toronto in February. I promise it will be good.

  • How a Canadian startup took investment from a european incubator

    This is a guest post by Patrick Hankinson, the CEO/Founder of Compilr.com a Halifax based startup building an online IDE which has almost 100,000 users. Patrick is also a co-founder of Tether.com.

    In early 2011, I met an entrepreneur and angel investor from London, at a Starbucks in my small province. He literally just took the red-eye from London, I could tell by his blood shot eyes. He wanted to know what I was working on and I explained what I was working on an “online IDE for programmers”. I could tell immediately he didn’t know what an IDE was…

    Talk about a pivotal experience. I was a programmer turned marketer, yet I still used very technical terms to describe what I was working on. The angel investor looked at me with a blank stare; he didn’t understand exactly what I was working on.

    After another couple of minutes of questions, I explained and tweaked my value proposition. He finally understood what I was working, but exclaimed that I definitely need to work on my non-technical elevator pitch. Naively, I responded I’ll never need to pitch to non-technical people.

    Now, I know that a non-technical pitch is critical. You may end up with non-technical investors like doctors, who will want to brag to their friends what they are investing in. You don’t want to put your doctor in a situation where they can’t explain exactly what you’re product does, killing viral potential. This is sometimes the case, because the investor is more in love with the team than the product.

    After this, he explained an incubator from London was putting a session together in New York. The incubator was called Seedcamp. I’ve never heard of them before, I looked at them online, saw they had invested in a several companies and were considered a European Incubator. They definitely didn’t have any credentials like Y-Combinator or Techstars. In fact, the only acquisition that I saw, to date had beenMobclix.

    I decided to apply to Seedcamp anyway since it New York was literally a 2 hour flight away (I had never visited New York, gave me an excuse). Plus it was at Google’s office in New York. Our product, Compilr, was definitely potentially a product to someday be acquired by a company like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook, and the list goes on. Any visibility I could get at this stage was definitely worth it.

    Compilr was accepted to present in New York to the Seedcamp list of mentors. We presented at Google’s office in front of 100 mentors or so. Presenting in front of 100 people was definitely not on my bucket list, but I got through it. It actually has helped in a lot ways. I’m definitely not worried presenting in front of 100s of people as much as I thought.

    The day after, Compilr was invited to pitch to some of Seedcamp’s core investors. The room had maybe 15 people but I was more nervous than the day before. In all honesty, I thought I blew it because I was being asked a ton of questions. I answered them all, but Carlos, one of the main guys from Seedcamp had asked a question and I got sidetracked with an answer, when someone basically said “Well, ok thanks for your time, we’ll be in touch.” I still feel like a total d-bag because I didn’t answer his question…

    At this stage I became defensive in my mind, even though I hadn’t received a yes or no to their investment. In reality, I didn’t care if I received Seedcamp’s investment or not. Personally, I was funding the company out of my own pocket, almost $150,000 a year, their small investment would only really marginally accelerate my company. I was hoping to get visibility in front of the right potential acquirers.

    A few weeks later, I was in total shock when Seedcamp told me they were willing toinvest in Compilr. Even though, I personally felt like I blew the follow up meeting in New York. When I told several of my advisors, most of them were eager for me to take the funds. While some opposed to the idea, stating the same facts I alluded to earlier, onlyone successful exit, etc…

    Our team decided to go ahead and take small investment from Seedcamp to use towards accelerating our business. Our end goal was that Seedcamp would present our company to potential acquirers like Facebook, Google to hopefully stimulate an exit, producing a positive ROI for them.

  • Should We Drink the Local Kool-Aid?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in December 15, 2011 on MarkEvansTech.com.

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    In the post I wrote earlier this week about the demise of Thoora, there was a comment suggesting that “Toronto failed Thoora” due to a lack of community support to make it a “winning formula”.

    It was a puzzling comment because it suggests a community has an obligation to support a startup so it can thrive. This strikes me as an absurd idea because startups should succeed or fail on their own merits, and the ability to attract an audience near and close.

    Sure, it’s good to drink the local flavour of “Kool-Aid” but only if a startup is offering a product or service that meets a need or interest. There are lots of local startups, including some that pitch me directly, that don’t resonate because nothing something interests me or the product/service doesn’t resonate enough to warrant further exploration.

    It doesn’t mean I’m not supporting the local community; it just means a startup has a service that didn’t pass the sniff test.

    At the same time, I do think Toronto’s startup community is extremely supportive. There’s no lack of enthusiasm, energy and a willingness to share ideas, feedback, resources, real estate and time to provide startups with a boost.

    This has been a fact of life for the past five years, even before we started to see a flurry of startups appear on the scene. There has always been a strong, support community that has pulled together in different ways. A great example is tonight’s HoHoTo party, which has become a major fund-raising machine due to tremendous support from the community.

    The bottom line is if a startup needs to rely on the community to make it, it also suggests what it’s offering can’t survive  without artificial support.

    For startups, the market has to be bigger than its own backyard. It needs people to support it or not based on what’s being sold as opposed to a sense of duty or obligation.

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in December 15, 2011 on MarkEvansTech.com.

  • Location, location, location

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Lymbix founder and CTO Josh Merchant (LinkedIn, @joshmerchant). Josh was born and raised in Brampton, before relocating to New Brunswick to attend the University of New Brunswick. Josh and the team at Lymbix are based in Moncton, NB but spend time on planes between Toronto, San Francisco and New York. Disclosure: David Crow sits on the Board of Directors for Lymbix Corporation. 

    Idea – check. Cofounder – check. Home base – che-… hmm?

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    At a company’s inception, what factors do entrepreneurs consider before deciding on a location to set up shop?

    Scenario A:
    Some may automatically choose their hometown, whether it is Halifax, Brampton, or even Hazelton, as a default location. With this option, entrepreneurs have the potential advantages of already knowing the city’s particular market quirks and tapping into a network of home-grown connections.
    Scenario B:
    Conversely, others flock to a major city such as Toronto, New York, San Francisco or Palo Alto, which have a thriving tech communities. This is a great option, as we see many acquisitions and exits coming from these startup hubs.

    Is there any benefit to laying a company’s foundations in an “out of market”[1] (non-traditional) city, like Moncton? Definitely. Here are some reasons for why you might choose to set up your next startup in a location other than a major city.

    Keep Costs Low

    The average office rent and employee salary are noticeably lower in a city such as Moncton, especially compared to Toronto. The ability to limit the rate at which a young company burns through cash can be a major advantage right out of the gate. An “out of market” city injects new meaning into the phrase “cost of living.” In these locations, emphasis is shifted to the “living” part, and entrepreneurs don’t have to uniformly dread the “cost” part.

    “One of the big advantages I see, and have been privy to is the political support. In a “smaller pond” with a limited amount of startups and successful IT companies, it is easier to get quickly noticed….We have been extremely fortunate to have the local and provincial government assist in opening doors for us, providing us with early incentives to stay in NB and shine the spotlight on us, which in turn helps raise capital and grow our business.” — Matt Eldridge, CEO & Founder Lymbix

    Low Competition for Early Sources of Funding

    Getting started is cheap, but eventually everyone needs money to keep that ball rolling. Hopefully by this point, you’ve already got traction and your idea is gaining momentum. Without some form of traction, it doesn’t really matter where you are. If you do have it, however, it is easier to secure government and angel funding in a province like New Brunswick. Why? You will encounter significantly less competition – if any – for what money is available.

    Low Competition for Talent

    “If you build it, they will come.” Well, it isn’t quite that easy in a small tech community. However, there is a greater chance that there aren’t as many companies drawing the interest of the local, tech-minded talent. Your company could be one of only five fishing in the talent pool in a particular city. Let’s face it, there are smart people living all across this country – not just in Toronto.

    I can’t say for sure, but I would venture a guess that there is less employee turnover in a city like Moncton as well. This translates to less time wasted worrying about knowledge transfer, and more time invested in building a strong, diverse team that you can count on.

    “Building a company out in a growing tech community is great – it’s like a talent magnet! The more news that’s pushed out of prospering areas like San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto, the more talented developers want to jump on an opportunity locally without having the resources to relocate.”

    If you could do it all over again?

    If you were starting out or had to do it all over again, what city in Canada would you call home for your startup? Why? 

    Acquisitions across Canada

    I wonder where Anand Agarawala (@anandx), Nick Koudas (@koudas), Ray Ready (LinkedIn), Albert Lai (@albertupdates) will set up shop for their next venture?

    Footnotes

    FN1. An “out of market” city seems to be a great ecosystem in which to nurture a startup.

    However, deciding on such a location does have its drawbacks:

    • In the early days, working closely with new clients and prospects can be a challenge in a small market. It is more difficult to have those valuable face-to-face feedback sessions away from large urban centres.
    • If and when an opportunity arises for rapid growth and expansion, you may be hard-pressed to find the quantity of talent your company suddenly requires. After all, startup life isn’t for everyone.
    • Ideas are contagious. It is easy to observe the community-created inspiration in the valley or in Toronto. A twenty-minute coffee break with an intelligent peer can spur an eight-hour hackation thanks to a flood of ideas. Motivation automation.

    Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Lymbix founder and CTO Josh Merchant (LinkedIn, @joshmerchant). Josh was born and raised in Brampton, before relocating to New Brunswick to attend the University of New Brunswick. Josh and the team at Lymbix are based in Moncton, NB but spend time on planes between Toronto, San Francisco and New York. Disclosure: David Crow sits on the Board of Directors for Lymbix Corporation. 

  • When a Massive Opportunity Knocks!

    Editors Note: This is a guest post by Chris Arsenault (LinkedIn, @chrisarsenault) a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Chris is the Co-Chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), a board member at the Canadian Venture Capital Association (CVCA), a Supporter of the C100, among other things. Follow Chris at chrisarsenault.wordpress.com or on Twitter @chrisarsenault.

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    The last few weeks have certainly proven to be extremely promising for Canadian Tech Entrepreneurs. Almost $80M of equity financing has recently been secured from some of the top investors in the world to help build our next generation of massive tech companies. It’s even more exciting when you realize that these funds are going to three especially young, dynamic and opportunistic companies, all of which are in our backyard!

    Beyond the Rack

    Beyond the RackYona Shtern, Robert Gold and the team over at Montreal-based Beyond the Rack (“BTR”) lead the way with a whooping $37M financing round that should propel the company to new heights yet unseen on the Canadian eCommerce front. BTR has quickly established itself as an eCommerce leader by showing the market that Canadian companies really do know what a “hockey stick” revenue growth chart looks like. The teams’ ability to build such a big company in such a short time frame has earned them our utmost respect. We initially met the team and reviewed their business plan in late 2008; by 2011, they were already ranked as one of the fastest-growing online retailers in the entire world. Yona was also wise in choosing his investors, be it industry specific angels or great VCs such as Panorama Capital, iNovia Capital, Rho Canada, Tandem Expansion, BDC Venture Capital, Highland Capital Partners, EDC and Montreal Start Up. If you aren’t a Beyond the Rack member, don’t wait – register now, and you’ll be impressed!

    Shopify

    Shopify - LogoJust down the road from Montreal is another world class eCommerce team. Ottawa-based Shopify recently closed a $15M second round of financing. Tobias Lutke, Cody Fauser, Daniel Weinand & Harley Finkelstein have developed an industry leading eCommerce platform that is already being used by thousands of leading online retailers around the world. The team, their vision and commitment to execution all combine to make Shopify one of Canada’s tech leaders in an extremely high growth global market. Unfortunately, we missed the boat on the opportunity to work with them, but our friends over at Bessemer Ventures, Firstmark Capital, Felicis Ventures and Georgian Partners were more than happy to come aboard. I’m expecting to see Shopify rise above the tide over the coming years and establish itself as a global leader in its space.

    Fixmo

    FixmoThe most recent team to announce a substantial equity-financing round is Toronto-based Fixmo. Led by its founders Rick Segal, Shyam Sheth and Joyce Janczyn, Fixmo just announced a $23M round. This investment round included both existing investors (iNovia Capital, Panorama Capital, Rho Canada and Extreme Venture Partners) and an impressive syndicate of new lead investors: Silicon Valley-based Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Washington-based Paladin Capital Group and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures. While the company’s core vision has not changed over the last two years, the product development road map has evolved at a rapid pace. Within an extremely short time frame, Fixmo launched a series of Government and Enterprise products, acquired two companies (Conceivium Business Solutions and Chocolate Chunk Apps), established a series of key partnerships and practically jumped ahead of every other Mobile Risk Management solution provider in the market. Obviously, the founders didn’t do it alone, but the sheer fact that Rick was successful in attracting some of the best talent out there (Bruce Gilley, Jonas Gyllensvaan, Tyler Lessard, Lee Cocking, John Yuen and others) speaks to the long term execution ability and potential of Fixmo.

    Ambition coupled with Execution

    The average tech financing round in Canada is under $4M. Therefore, the aforementioned three companies basically raised as much cash as 20 average Canadian tech startups combined. Obviously, I get nervous when I see a company (portfolio or not) raise such a large chunk of cash. Why? It’s not because I like the small size of the average Canadian financing rounds. Rather, it’s because I think that too much money for a young business can be as bad as or worse than not having enough. $15M-$40M rounds for Canadian tech companies are amongst the largest we have seen this side of the border in over 10 years. That being said, I do also think that Canadian Tech Entrepreneurs are now entering a phase of Ambition coupled with Execution. We have lived through too many years of “lack of ambition”, quickly followed by “lack of execution”, not to mention the much lamented “lack of capital”. However, we are now seeing deals done where massive amounts of ambition and execution converge, and capital is becoming available to build large tech companies right here in our own backyard. With more companies able to raise the amount of funding they truly need to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue, not only we will stop selling our companies short, they won’t need to move down south. Hopefully other investors will note the phenomenon, and future startups won’t have as much trouble raising the capital both from Canada and into Canada. And that’s good for all of us.

    At iNovia, when a massive opportunity knocks, we answer! I’m expecting to be sharing a lot more stories about successful Canadian entrepreneurs, and how they’ve built hugely successful companies here as they compete globally for resources, capital and market share. There isn’t much stopping the entrepreneurs driving Canada’s next generation of large tech companies, and for the likes of Beyond the Rack, Shopify, Fixmo and many others, this is just the beginning.

    Congratulations to all the teams mentioned in taking important steps on their paths to success!

    Below some article worth reading with regards the above companies:

    Editors Note: This is a guest post by Chris Arsenault (LinkedIn, @chrisarsenault) a tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. Chris is the Co-Chair of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX), a board member at the Canadian Venture Capital Association (CVCA), a Supporter of the C100, among other things. Follow Chris at chrisarsenault.wordpress.com or on Twitter @chrisarsenault.

  • High Tech Holidays and HoHoTO

    I can’t believe it was back in 2008 that #HoHoTO started. For the past 3 years instead of a Holiday DemoCamp or Festive Founders & Funders, we’ve sponsored and attended HoHoTO. (We’ve even helped document the shenanigans). So why the fuss about a holiday party?

    Toronto’s High Tech Holiday Party – #HoHoTO

    “Fortune favors the connected entrepreneur.” @jcal7 #trueuniversity via @hnshah

    We talk a lot about what is going on in Silicon Valley and how to make Toronto better. We can look to Helsinki, Israel, New York, Boston, Austin, and other places. But we have a strong emerging high tech culture in Toronto (and across Canada, just check out the efforts in Montreal and Vancouver). There is a strong vibrant community in Toronto that actively seeks each other out. Maybe because it’s cold and we like to snuggle, maybe because in dark of winter it’s best not to drink alone. But there are entrepreneurs that are trying to do it in Toronto and they like to get together.

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    We have a great community that knows how to have a great time. And with HoHoTO the great time also supports a great cause.

    What is HoHoTO?

    Daily Bread Food BankWe often joke about startups being “ramen profitable”, but for many this is not a choice. We are working with HoHoTO and the Daily Bread Food Bank we hope to improve Toronto. HoHoTO is a Holiday party to raise sorely-needed funds for Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank. It brings together the hyper-connected tech, marketing, PR, social media and startup communities  to raise attention and support around a core idea:

    “People in our town are hungry – damnit – and we can make a difference.”

    Here is the call to all Toronto startups, you should attend HoHoTO and support the Daily Bread Food Bank. It’s a great way to initial meet and connect with other readers of StartupNorth and give back to those less fortunate in Toronto.

    It’s easy to sponsor, it’s easy to attend, it’s easy to donate.

    Get Tickets Now!

    PS this is a call out of our friends to match or beat our sponsorship/donation:

    We’re hoping to see everyone on December 15.

     

     

  • Incubators, Accelerators, and Cyclotrons

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    They are lining up like storm troopers.

    It looks like a new crop of accelerators, incubators or, as I prefer, cyclotrons have started opening in Toronto. We’ve been talking on and off about Incubators, Accelerators and Ignition since early in 2009.

    Here is my list of incubators/accelerators/cyclotrons:

    And this is on top of the existing coworking, shared real estate, available to entrepreneurs in Toronto.
    There are lots of opportunity for entrepreneurs to find a mix of real estate, services, and cash for equity in their businesses. My advice is make sure you aren getting more than real estate with benefits. Maybe next we need to provide entrepreneurs a framework for making critical decisions about startup things including incubators 😉
    Who did I miss?

  • OMERS Ventures ramps up with Howard Gwin & Derek Smyth

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    It’s has been a long time since Canadians have seen the creation of a new 200MM+ venture capital fund. It was back in June 2010 that OMERS announced the creation of the INKEF fund. OMERS and ABP have since gone their separate ways with ABP running INKEF Capital focusing on high tech startups in the Netherlands. And OMERS creating OMERS Ventures focused on “investments in the Technology, Media, Telecommunications, Clean Technology and Life Sciences sectors in Canada and the US”.

    A little more than a week ago, OMERS announced that they had hired Howard Gwin (LinkedIn, @howardgwin). Who I’ve been quoted as saying “he really is the best VC in Canada”, mind you Howard was buying the drinks at the time…

    And it looks like they have added fellow Edgestone alumni Derek Smyth (LinkedIn, @derekjsmyth). I’ve heard the announcement is due later today, but OMERS Ventures announced Derek Smyth as part of the team today, Derek’s profile is already part fo the team at OMERS Ventures. Derek is another rockstar going to OMERS. Prior to joining OMERS Ventures, Derek co-managed two VC funds at Edgestone Capital Partners. He also has operational experience that includes his former roles as President and CEO of solutions provider Bridgewater Systems, and as COO of California-based Ironside Technologies Inc.

    Derek and Howard were instrumental at Bridgescale in running the Digital Puck and Mentor Monday events that helped connect Canadian entrepreneurs. I’m hoping that these guys continue to invest in connecting, engaging and supporting all entrepreneurs (along with their portfolio). The ongoing support of the C100 and AccelerateTO already show that OMERS has a larger operational budget that allows them to support and sponsor community activities.

    The future looks bright for OMERS Ventures.