StartupNorth

Tag: Waterloo

  • Hacker House in Waterloo

    HackerHouse.caLooks like Waterloo is about to get an addition to the already existing hacker houses and VeloCity residence that are happening around campus.

    Does anyone remember Plurk? Plurk was the site that MSN China copied over 80% of the user experience and code for Juku (see the official Microsoft statement).  Plurk is a place where people lurk. It has been compared to Twitter. It generates most of its traffic from Taiwan.

    And now it looks like they are opening a more “mercenary/hustler driven” approach to a student dorm. Hopefully, this is the compensation they received from a Microsoft settlement, maybe it is a recruiting tactic – hiring developer talent is a challenge and finding entrepreneurial hackers for the cost of a mortgage payment + utilities is actually a really cheap acquisition tactic. With none of the overhead of the coop program and you’ve already skirted any labour laws by making them work for their own companies. Nice.

    The program aims to bring in 3-5 students and run them through the gauntlet.  Here is one of the welcome letters:

    I’m Kan [looks like Kan Kan (LinkedIn)], and I’m one of the founders of Plurk. We’re a Twitter type service and the largest microblogging service in many parts of Asia and one of Canada’s most innovative startups (heck, even Microsoft copied us in China!).  Me and two other very successful under-30Southern Ontario area entrepreneurs just recently (earlier this month) announced the launch of our Hacker House (www.hackerhouse.ca) program, inspired by the very cool Grotto (www.sfgrotto.org) and Y Combinator programs in San Francisco.

    Basically, we plan to find 3-5 of the best and brightest entrepreneurially minded, technology focused students from the Universities of Laurier and Waterloo, bring them together in a collaborative environment, and then let the magic with the support of a team of guys (us) who have fostered and executed on some of the most successful startups on the web.

    While we’re not affiliated with the university in any way, we offer a couple of BIG benefits over Velocity:

    1. If you’re accepted, we provide your living accommodations  absolutely free in a sweet pad just steps from the university for the term/year.

    2. We take more of a cooperative mercenary/hustler driven approach, providing access to server space, mentorship, capital (in exchange for the option to buy equity into your venture) and other resources necessary to launch either (a) your own venture, (b) collaborate and percolate on ideas with other participants in the program during the term or (c) get hands on experience working on cutting edge projects (particularly in the social, mobile, geo-local, gaming, data mining & search spaces) in various stages of development.

    3. While we may not have the visibility of Velocity, I can unequivocally say that the upside and quality of the experience would be far superior for those who want to execute and iterate on ideas at breakneck speed in a constantly changing market and shoot for the moon.

    Our first cycle commences at the start of the Fall ’11 school term (September 2011) and we plan to take in 3-5 students and finalize our selection process by the middle of August.  If you haven’t already finalized your living accommodations for the Fall term and like what you hear so far, I’d encourage you to check us out on www.hackerhouse.ca for more details or get in touch with me directly.

    It is a very different approach to residence during the school year. Their focus seems to be very much competitive to UW VeloCity (full disclosure: I am the EiR at UW VeloCity and will be helping the students at UW get access, build products, etc.), but it is a very different approach. The UW VeloCity program houses 70 students, provides access to University and community resources, and for all intensive purposes is opt-in. Many students get into the residence looking for a place to live and learn about entrepreneurship and high tech startups as a career path. The goal is to provide a familiarization to hands-on entrepreneurship.

    Hacker House

    It is great to see others dedicated to continuing to build the community in Waterloo.

  • PostRank acquired by Google

    Ilya has confirmed today that PostRank has been acquired by Google.

    The launch of AideRSS, the precursor to PostRank, was one of the first things we covered here on Startupnorth, so we are happy to see such a great outcome for the team.

    Google acquires Postrank

    We are extremely excited to join Google. We believe there is simply no better company on the web today that both understands the value of the engagement data we have been focusing on, and has the platform and reach to bring its benefits to the untold millions of daily, active Internet users. Stay tuned, we’ll be sure to share details on our progress in the coming months!

    Of course, we wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for all the help, feedback, and support we’ve received from our community over the past four years—thank you all, you know who you are, and we truly couldn’t have done it without you!

    Ilya also notes that the team will be moving to Mountain View as part of this acquisition.

  • Riding the rails to Waterloo

    Go Train 614 - Photo by Danielle Scott
    CC BY-SA 2.0 Some rights reserved by Danielle Scott

    Why isn’t there a commuter train from Toronto to Waterloo? Ok, you might ask actually ask why Toronto doesn’t have a train from downtown to the airport but let’s leave that for a conversation with more educated politicians and policy wonks.

    I’ve spent this morning with startups in Waterloo, hanging out with people at the Communitech Hub, UW Velocity, and a crazy number of super awesome startups (TribeHR, vidyard, 17 muscles, Footloose Games, Willet, Cyborg Trading Systems, Will PWN 4 Food and others). I left Toronto at 6:15am to avoid traffic and be in Waterloo before 8am for my first meeting. The drive was approximately 116 km and took approximately 90 minutes (arrived at 7:52am). I couldn’t help think about why there isn’t a train. The distance is just a little more than SF to San Jose (~74km) and double SF to Palo Alto (~51.5km). I can get a Caltrain from San Francisco to Palo Alto or San Jose.

    Waterloo - Early Stage Companies

    If the assumption is that UWaterloo is a top ranking university (possibly my alumni delusions that cause me to overlook UWaterloo’s non-placement on Times Higher Education rankings). And with more startups like Kik raising money with powerhouses like OpenText, RIM, MKS and Christie Digital. There are less reason for students to have to leave the reason. It makes it more attractive to rent an apartment for the year and stay in Waterloo to manage your costs on your coop program.

    Maybe the argument is that the capital is better spent on more programs for entrepreneurs or road infrastructure. But it seems that one of the greatest assets to the Toronto startup community (UW Coop students and graduates) are disconnected by public transportation. I wonder what my UW alumni brethren like Farhan Thawar (@fnthawar), John Green (@johnphilipgreen), Amar Varma (@extremevp),  Brydon Gillis (@brydon), Ali Asaria (@aliasaria), Razor Suleman (@iloverewards), Kunal Gupta (@kunalfrompolar) think about the need for better connections between Waterloo (assuming a stop in Guelph) and Toronto.

  • RIM acquires Tungle

    Congratulations to Marc and the Tungle team. Tungle announced their acquisition by RIM. Tungle had previously raised $1.5M from JLA, Desjardin, and angels and $5M from Commonweatlth. This is a great addition for the RIM team to continue to build out an application suite for the mobile office. Mark MacLeod (@startupcfo) provides additional thoughts and comments on the acquisition:

    Clear Problem

    Tungle just made sense. Finding a time to meet is a huge pain. This may not be the sexiest, flashiest market, but it is huge. Every business person feels the pain.

    Pivots

    We didn’t have this term back in the early days, but Tungle sure went through some pivots. When I joined it was a peer to peer client a la Skype. And it was S-L-O-W.  The service today bears little resemblance to that early product.

    Data-driven

    All startups but especially SaaS startups should be data driven. Tungle was no exception to this. We even built our own custom system (known as Knudderforce) and tracked daily, weekly and monthly stats. Those stats triggered many actions, automated outreaches, etc.

    Luck

    All good outcomes have an element of luck. I am sure there are many examples in Tungle’s case, but the one that stands out for me is closing our Series A funding in September 2008 just as Lehman Brothers crashed and the markets started tanking. If we had been only a few weeks later we might have had a much tougher time closing the round.

    Focus, focus, focus

    I’ve seen many teams get distracted as they grow. The CEO is off attending conferences, the company moves from market to market, etc. Tungle was laser focused on solving its’ users’ scheduling needs. At one point we were doing usability sessions every day. We reached out to every new user. We just stayed focused.

    Platform

    When we first were getting started, investors wondered if this was a feature vs. a product. Fast forward a few years and it is on its way to being a full fledged scheduling platform with APIs for other companies to use.

    Strategic engagement

    An ideal startup for me is one that can develop conversations with potential strategic partners as a natural part of its goto market strategy. This presumes you are building something that is important to the big players and assumes that you have a CEO capable of establishing and building those relationships. This was definitely the case with Tungle and this announcement is just a logical outcome of this reality.

    The icing on the cake for me is that this is an all-Canadian deal. The Tungle team will be staying in Canada and continuing to make things happen.

    Shared calendaring continues to be a difficult problem as you move to the edge of an organization. Just think about how difficult it is to see availability and schedules of people who are not on your GApps domain or your Exchange Server. Tungle gives RIM a leg up in having tooling like BBM and email and now calendaring that blurs the edge of the organization.

  • Going over the falls together in barrel

    Editor’s Note: This post was written by Jesse Rodgers. Jesse is the  CEO of TribeHR, the Director of the VeloCity Residence at the University of Waterloo, organizer of StartupCamp in Waterloo and an allround great guy.

    Jesse stopped by my offices in Toronto to chat about sales, marketing and PR (convenient of @jevon to write about the same topic recently). Jessementioned that the TribeHR team had left Waterloo and were holed up in a hotel room in Niagara Falls. They were living together, working together, writing code and being more productive than they could with the distractions of family, friends and the strong community in Waterloo. I was amazed at the commitment of the team to step away from their personal lives and get the next version of TribeHR built before they head to SxSW for the Small Business Party. You can read the update or watch the caffeine and other stimulant-driven vacation summary. There’s lots startups can learn about improving productivity by going on vacation together.

    Barrel to go over the Falls

    Over the month of February the TribeHR team has been taking advantage of low hotel prices in Niagara Falls and turned a suite at the Hilton into our office (we were at the Marriott, but the Hilton is $20 less a night and has king size beds). The goal for this little retreat to the romantic city of Niagara Falls: get TribeHR polished off, implement our new user interface, get our go to market strategy figured out, and start executing on all cylinders.

    If it works, we will be a stronger team (who can put up with each others snoring) and will have made some awesome progress. If it fails, then we know our team isn’t as good as we thought.

    Other cities we thought about were Montreal and Toronto. Toronto would have far too many distractions for us so we had settled on Montreal (we would have loved to work out of the Knotman house). The problem there was that those of us with young kids would be too far away to head home if we had to. So here we are in Niagara Falls, in a tiny hotel suite, working our asses off.

    Room with a view in Niagara Falls by TribeHRIn terms of work hours put in, when you do this, it’s pretty crazy. While in a hotel room, assuming you ignore the casino across the road, you work from around 8am to 12am, take out eating time, it is around 14 hrs or so of ‘work’ per person. It is a crazy amount of focus and the results are great, at first. Once all the easy stuff is taken on, we then have to address the bigger problems and we start to slow down. But we can work through it and it’s a heck of a lot easier when you have completely removed yourself from your routine.

    At the end of week 2 we have learned the following:

    • It takes 5 min to turn a hotel room into an office but the wifi sucks, the tv can’t use a PS3, and anything but pizza is way overpriced.
    • Not having kids wake you up at 6am doesn’t mean you won’t be awake at 6am.
    • The US side of the falls gets a rainbow in the afternoon.
    • The Starbucks coffee is never hot, Tim Horton’s wins
    • As a team we can take each others grumpy moods and swear it out until everyone is laughing again.
    • Hotel chairs spin really well, and provide a great distraction near the end of the day

    Why have we done this? Because we are still a very much a bootstrapped startup with plenty of distractions (wives, kids, other commitments) in Waterloo, and if we are going to get anything done while things are still so early, we have to immerse ourselves and get to work. It’s uncomfortable and exhausting, but it’s productive, energizing and we love it.

  • VeloCity Start-up Day – Dec 1, 2009

    velocity

    We’ve written about the awesomesauce that is VeloCity in the past, and about the Project Exhibition. They have renamed the event Start-up Day. Huge improvement. I’m hoping that the quality of the projects and demos continues to grow. Velocity offers students at Waterloo an opportunity to really see entrepreneurship as a potential career path. Like the cooperative education program, VeloCity is leading here. This is a great opportunity to see the progress of the current crop.

    Velocity Start-up Day is a great opportunity to:

    • Connect with VeloCity students displaying current business projects
    • Interact with other UW entrepreneurial students representing their projects at our exhibition
    • Inform students about your company/services
    • Talk to students who may be interested in working for your organization

    Startups should be heading for the day to find talent. Funders should be heading to see if there are any opportunities. I’ll be heading there to continue to support my alma mater and this program. 

    Details

    What: VeloCity Start-up Day
    When:Tuesday, December 1, 2009 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM
    Where:Student Life Centre
    200 University Ave West
    Waterloo, ON   Canada

  • The Communitech Hub

    Communitech is getting $26.4m from the Ontario Government towards the creation of The Communitech Hub: Digital Media & Mobile Accelerator.

    “Located in Waterloo Region and serving technology companies provincewide, The Hub will help hardware and software entrepreneurs bring new tools, technologies and applications to market. The Hub will focus on commercialization, business development, access to financing and connecting clients with other digital media hubs across Ontario and Canada.”

    It looks like it is a physical space with resources to help entrepreneurs.

    “The Hub [is] a new centre that will help emerging digital media companies grow and succeed in the global market. In particular, The Hub will look beyond the entertainment sector to focus on companies creating hardware and software for industries, including advanced manufacturing, healthcare and finance.”

    It’s great news for Waterloo Region. Further support of a great organization with Communitech as a leader. Additional attention and awareness to a growing tech sector with companies like OpenText and RIM. And additional real estate development and construction jobs.

    What I am curious about is the relationship of the Accelerator Centre to The Hub? And what is the relationship to nGen? to MaRS? to RIC Centre? to OCRI? to Innovation Synergy Centre? Ontario Centres for Excellence? Is there a plan for where each of these pieces fit together? How about where these programs fit relative to local Economic Development Corporations? Is this really about creating an innovation and entrepreneurship based economy? Or is it about investing in third-party, arms length, pseudo-government agencies without looking like big government?

    So it’s a mixed bag. This announcement continues to show technology entrepreneurship is a focus of the Ontario Government’s plan to help seed a new economy by bring new companies to market. But there seems to be a focus on real estate as the first step in enablement. Any thoughts?

  • StartupDrinks – September 30, 2009

    startupdrinks[1]It’s happening again. It’s great to have a monthly social event for high tech entrepreneurs in Toronto.

    Bryan Watson of NACO and Robin Gittens of CEOFusion have stepped up to help coordinate the next installment of StartupDrinks in Toronto. Heri of Montreal Tech Watch and Robin Ahn & Raymond Luk of Flow Ventures are hosting the Montreal event. Scott Lake of StartupOttawa is hosting the Ottawa event. And Dan Silvestru from Covarity is stepping up to host an Waterloo event (the Waterloo event will be on October 6 to avoid a conflict with DemoCampGuelph).

    The Toronto Startup Drinks followed hot on the heels of DemoCamp with Yossi Vardi, which was a great event.  We are keeping the startup community alive, one pint at a time on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at local fave Fionn MacCool’s on the Esplanade! Waterloo is happening on Tuesday, October 6, 2009.

    It’s a simple concept: a grassroots effort to make sure startup folks get in touch and stay in touch.

    Toronto

    Montreal

    • Wednesday, September 30, 2009 starts at 5:30pm
    • Brutopia, 1215 Crescent St

    Ottawa

    • Wednesday, September 30, 2009 starts at 6pm
    • Cornerstone Grill at 92 Clarence Street (in the Market)
    • Register

    Waterloo

  • ParkVu launch iTunes to Blackberry app

    i2b - iTunes Library on your BlackBerry Jeff Fedor and Terry Goertz of ParkVu launched i2b service today. The service allows BlackBerry Bold, Curve and Storm users to remotely retrieve their music their iTunes libraries.

    i2b makes some assumptions about user behaviour that allows the application to automatically sync users music to their BlackBerry. The i2b service is limited to 1Gb or 100 files. This requires users (and the applications’ designers) to make a decision about which music to sync by default. The i2b application makes some initial assumptions that Favorite Playlists, 25 most played tracks, and most recent iTunes library additions are the files that should be sync’d out of the box. It’s a great starting point for users and can be configured by users after the fact.

    The service creates a sync’d intermediate store of up to 1Gb or 100 songs in the cloud allowing users to access the sync’d files on their BlackBerry devices.

    Songs on their home computer can be retrieved even when it’s off. Up to 100 tracks (1GB maximum) from the i2b user’s iTunes library will be replicated to the Internet cloud, making them available from their BlackBerry even when their desktop or laptop is turned off. When their computer is on and connected to the Internet, all of their iTunes playlists are available on demand to their BlackBerry. Users can easily set i2b not to receive updates in areas where extra roaming charges would apply. i2b combines a BlackBerry application with a small application for the user’s home computer that works in the background with iTunes to allow users to replicate their playlists on their BlackBerry. i2b maintains any DRM restrictions and preserves the integrity of the user’s iTunes library.

    Hopefully the ParkVu team is able to quickly get i2b into the BlackBerry App World to enable broader distribution for their $2.99/month service. It would be fantastic to see them get similar exposure and distribution as Viigo in the BlackBerry App World’s Featured section.

  • Shutterborg launches

    shutterborg Earlier this week ReadWriteWeb covered the launch of Waterloo based Shutterborg. Shutterborg is the work of Jason Miller at developIT who specializes in design and development of web applications and RIAs. Shutterborg is built using JMDWiki and ameobaOS in PHP, Javascript against a MySQL database.

    Shutterborg is a basic online word processor. It lacks many of the features of it’s online competitors Google Docs, Zoho, and Buzzword. ReadWriteWeb hits the button about the key feature and its’ best uses.

    However, Shutterborg, a new online word processor does one thing really well which makes it a unique tool in this space: it lets you open any URL on the internet and edit it like an Office document.

    …the "Open from Web" option that is presented to you upon launch is a pretty clever invention. Here, you can enter in any URL on the internet to open an exact replica of that web page, with the CSS and images intact. You can then edit it as you desire which could obviously lead to some humorous creations.

    Shutterborg look  like an interesting self-promotion tool for developIT. It is an interesting execution and implementation of an AJaX application. It shows the strength and flexibility of the development frameworks used by developIT. Shutterborg also looks like a great proof-of-concept rich editing application for small businesses and non-technical users that need the familiarity of a word processor for editing web content. Great work by a small design firm to garner some online press and traffic of tools that will be useful in attracting and retaining clients.