StartupNorth

  • 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.

  • Tonight is the night – Dragon's Den Season 2 – Episode #1

    drag_rh.gifIf you have been wondering what it is like to be breathed on by a hot, fiery, and scaly creature, you can tune in tonight to see the ulta-hyped Dragon’s Den Season 2 on CBC.

    This season, like the last, will see Sean Wise manning the blogosphere with all sorts of interesting extras. Without a doubt, I think they need to make Sean the TV host. I suspect that the reason he isn’t the host is a silly one, but I won’t speculate here.

    We have made our opinions about the Dragon’s Den known before, so we don’t need to rehash those.

    Tune in and feel free to comment back here on what you think. I’d love to hear some opinions.

  • 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!”

  • Amazon Web Services – Learn to Scale

    What are you going to do to scale when the time comes? Are you planning for it now? Does it involve Amazon EC2, S3, flexible payment or another Amazon service?

    If you are curious and in Toronto, try to get out to the upcoming AmazonCamp (date, time and place all TBD — bit it will be soon) that Ryan Coleman is organizing.

    Services like Amazon’s Web Services are going to be critical for startups who need to grow. It is just too expensive to manage all of your own hardware and if you are the flavor of the day, or if your customers have short bursts of demand, you are going to need to scale up as quickly as you will then need to scale back down. Every startup should at least asses the savings they might get from using on-demand storage and computing.

    Check out bootstrapping with AWS to avoid VC over on slideshare.

  • 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

  • Go East! Another Startup Competition – New Brunswick

    The New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, another quasi-governmental agency in Atlantic Canada, is running it’s own startup competition for New Brunswick startups.

    There aren’t quite as many prizes as in the Innovacorp competition mentioned earlier, but it is still a pretty serious prize package, including a 100,000$ equity investment by NBIF in the winning company along with a mishmash of services that are provided to the various winners.

    Submissions are due September 28th, 2007. You can get the submission form here and there is a Participant Handbook you need to read.

    These competitions are worth your time whether you are established, just getting started, or even just thinking about getting a startup off the ground. The pressure of developing your business, pitching it and then, hopefully, being rewarded handsomely for your work, is all worthwhile.

    Hey, I won one a few years ago and really enjoyed it. That startup, Blogtrack.com, probably wouldn’t have been launched in the end if I hadn’t received the funding that came in due to that competition. It also meant that angel investors came knocking anew. The rest, they say, is history.

    Hat tip to Harold Jarche for pointing us towards this.

  • indochino.com – Look good and spend a little less

    The beta tag has come to retailing. Online retailing that is.

    Indochino is a Victoria, BC startup that is trying to bring made-to-measure suits to customers who want to look good, but don’t want to spend a fortune on Hugo Boss, or whatever the must-have designer suit is this season.

    An entire suit, which looks pretty good in the pictures on their site, will cost between 250$ and 350$ Canadian. Their pricing is no-nonsense, duties are taken care of and if you need to have further alterations done, Indochino will pay your tailer up to 25$ for the work. Delivery time is 2 weeks from your order, and that includes being hand-tailored in Shanghai, China.

    Shirts are a little more expensive. 100$ to 150$ for a shirt, which I am sure is nice, but Indochino has the problem that their brand is not strongly differentiated — which means it is hard to convince someone to spend that much on a shirt they haven’t seen in person.

    The market for a service like this is huge. Every large city is full of middle aged and younger men who want to look good, but really don’t feel like shopping all the time. If Indochino can find a way to open up this market, then their business will grow dramatically.

    Kyle from Indochino tells me they plan to keep up to date on new trends and styles, in a similar strategy as Zara and H&M. I think this is smart, as it lets you keep selling a lot of new clothing to a young to middle-aged demographic, but I keep thinking that the name “Indochino” isn’t sustainable long-term. It pigeon-holes the offering and limited their horizontal mobility later on. I’d like to hear from them on this.

    These guys don’t sit still however, they are already experimenting in BC with an option that involves having a tailor come right to your house to measure you for your suit. If you aren’t in BC, you can have a sample of cloth sent to you along with a tape-measure, so you can measure yourself. Indochino already has a few hundred customers, and I am sure that will grow to thousands soon.

    Their operation is lean — no inventory or exposure season to season — but they are going to have to do something significant to stand out from the crowd. A strategy focused on driving sales through social networks could, in my opinion, really set these guys apart. I have shared some of those ideas with them directly, so won’t post them here.

    Indochino is a real business with a solid international infrastructure in place, they have the backing of a strong group of angels and their product is good and stylish (I will hopefully upgrade that to great when I have a chance to order my own jacket this week). Now it’s time to break away from the pack and stand out.

    Indochino is tentatively looking at raising a new round of financing based on their early success. Contact Kyle Vucko.
    (more…)

  • Nova Scotia Startup Competition

    Innovacorp, a Halifax based quasi-governmental funding, assistance and mentoring organization for startups is running a startup competition for companies, or soon-to-be companies, based in Nova Scotia.

    Each first place zone winner will receive a $100,000 prize package of a combination of cash and in-kind contributions and each second place zone winner will receive a $40,000 prize package of a combination of cash and in-kind contributions to be used towards the establishment or further development of their start-up ventures. Prize packages will include support and resources in the form of expertise (i.e. legal, accounting, marketing, human resource services), funding and seed investment to be used by winners to develop their start-up businesses.

    At the end of the competition, one provincial winner will be selected from among the five first place zone winners, and will be awarded a $100,000 seed investment from InNOVAcorp?s HPiTM Microfund.”

    In places with less private-sector startup activity than cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, these competitions play a significant role in getting potential startups to come out of their shell. The bonus for this competition is that, unlike most competitions of this nature, the prize is significant enough to truly launch a new startup.

    They have divided Nova Scotia in to 5 ‘zones’, with significant prizes for the winner and runner up companies in each zone, with one final competition to determine the provincial winner, who gets a 100,000$ cash investment.

    Are you in Nova Scotia? Get off your butt and start building that startup! We will be following this very closely and will try to profile as many of the competing companies as possible.