Congratulations to the team at Vanilla Forums. In the past year they’ve attended TechStars in Boulder, moved to Montreal, and released version 2 of Vanilla Forums. What is Vanilla?
“Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable community forum.
Over 350,000 sites use Vanilla Forums to manage feedback, spark discussion, and make customers smile.”
There are competitors ranging from bbPress, phpBB, and punBB (like others we’re torn between bbPress and Vanilla – the proxyConnect plugin allows us to integrate Vanilla with WordPress). But Vanilla is a leading solution offering a great user experience, simple customization and hosting with a large user community. Plus they’re funded by our friends at Montreal Startup which makes them an easy choice.
Congratulations to Scott Annan and the Network Hippo team for their great demo at Demo Spring 2010. Scott Lake wrote about the performance on StartupOttawa, and I’d agree it’s worth taking the 5 minutes and 24 seconds to watch a great demo.
Funding Details
Self-funded
Competitors
No direct competitors. Secondary competitors include Gist, Plaxo, Xobni, Highrise, and Batchbook.
Product Description
Network Hippo is the smartest way to manage your network. We help individuals and businesses manage and stay connected to people across social, professional, and business networks. Network Hippo aggregates and organizes contact information intelligently from email and social networking sites and has proactive, addictive tools to engage your network. Close more deals, crowdsource your next product design, or change the world: Network Hippo and your network make it possible.
Market Opportunity
Jack Myer’s Media Business report forecasts spending in social marketing to grow from $800 million to $3.2 billion by 2012. AMR projects CRM revenue of $22 billion in 2012 (up from $14 billion in 2007) and Gartner predicts 80% of the immediate growth to come from “social application vendors.”
Toronto based StickerYou launched today. They are a provider of customized stickers. The interesting part is the ability to create customized stickers that are not limited to traditional diecuts of square or round. There are other providers that offer similar services but not in a self-service capacity and at a much higher fee than the StickerYou offering.
StickerYou (www.stickeryou.com), is excited to announce the public launch today of an innovative and flexible online service for designing and creating high-quality stickers. StickerYou’s platform offers the ultimate in customization, letting users create their own 8.5” x 10.5” sheets of removable, vinyl stickers, combining uploaded personal images and art from StickerYou’s library of thousands of images.
The first-of-its-kind technology used for StickerYou’s die-cut Sticker Maker means stickers are cut along the outline of the image, and are not limited to a standard square, circle or a particular size. StickerYou believes its breakthrough technology will disrupt the $1 billion sticker industry.
StickerYou launches with several brand partnerships, including PEANUTS®, Mr. Men and Little Miss™ and Star Trek, with the LEGO® brand, Showtime’s Dexter and additional brands to follow. By partnering with StickerYou, these brands can extend their uniquely shaped iconic images to audiences both online and offline. StickerYou will continue to partner with more brands and artists in the coming months, to expand the library of art available to StickerYou customers.
Through its unique Sticker Maker widget, StickerYou is also giving brand and affiliate partners the opportunity to embed the StickerYou Sticker Maker on their own Web sites.
“We are excited to be partnering with StickerYou to provide fans with the power to create online customized die-cut stickers of their favorite PEANUTS characters with ease,” said Helen Bransfield, Executive Director at United Media, the licensing and syndication company for PEANUTS.
Andrew Witkin, StickerYou’s president and chief executive said, “StickerYou saw a huge opportunity to revolutionize people’s ability to create personalized stickers. We give consumers the right to pick the size, shape and images that they want. The end result is the perfect sticker.”
“StickerYou is addressing a market that features an insatiable desire for stickers—from decorating laptops to styling skateboards; from creating bumper stickers to personalizing scrapbooks; or just stickering your logo,” Witkin said. “For consumers, marketers, artists, brands and teams, StickerYou’s ability to create and order as little as one to a few hundred customized stickers is a powerful proposition.”
The great news is that there are fantastic opportunities for entrepreneurs in Toronto (and across Canada, but we’ll come back to that). There are a number of small focused events. MeshU and Mesh are firecode limited at MaRS to 450 attendees. They are excellent opportunities to connect with entrepreneurs, designers, developers, marketers and funders. The event is tight and there are multiple tracks, however, the core keeps getting stronger every year. The core speakers are fantastic.
MeshU is a one day event. Perfect. My attention span can’t handle 5 days (never mind the 5 nights). It is happening Monday, May 17, 2010 which is right before Mesh Conference and OCE Discovery. MeshU is the supporting event to these 2 larger events. The supporting role has allowed it to focus on delivering great value.
Education-based aka the strong core
MeshU, Toronto, ON May 17, 2010
The mesh team has always put on a great set of events, however in 2010 they have added one speaker that will justify the entire price of the ticket for me. Sean Ellis runs Startup-Marketing.com and 12in6 Inc.
12in6 specializes in helping startups unlock their full growth potential. Our metrics, survey and experiment driven approach has evolved over 15 years of taking startups to market as VP marketing, interim VP marketing and as an outside advisor/consultant. The first five startups our principal (Sean Ellis) helped take to market were:
Uproar (IPO)
LogMeIn (IPO)
Xobni (Khosla Ventures – rapid user and revenue growth)
Eventbrite (Sequoia Ventures – rapid user and revenue growth)
Dropbox (Sequoia Ventures – rapid user and revenue growth)
5 projects that include 2 IPOs, and fuding from Khosla and Sequoia Ventures. Startups that have opportunity to learn about the Customer Development methodology from one of the best executors. This session will justify the price of the MeshU ticket for most startups.
There are other fantastic speakers including Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs, Joe Stump from Digg, and Meredith Noble from Usability Matters.
