StartupNorth

Tag: Toronto

  • Mesh 2012 – Last day for Early Bird tickets

    Mesh 2012 is set for May 23 & 24 at the Allstream Centre in Toronto. This year brings a special focus on big data, and the lineup is chock full of interesting speakers including:

    If you’ve attended previously you know Mesh is an incredible opportunity to connect (even wandering the lobby during sessions). Stay tuned for details about the startup scholarship program as well.

    Mesh explores how the Internet is changing how we live, work and play. The mesh team gather together leading thinkers and talented innovators who have earned their stripes doing great digital work. Mesh creates a platform for us to connect with others who are interested what’s next, share ideas, and be inspired.

    Early bird sales end tomorrow (April 20) and student tickets are still available, get yours here: http://mesh12.eventbrite.com

  • Toronto Startup Heatmap

    Joe Greenwood is directing a new project that pulls together data to track Ontario’s startups. One of the first data sources to be tapped was the StartupNorth Index, which in conjunction with MaRS client data has been crunched into a heatmap of 670 startups across Toronto. Not surprisingly, the ideal office is inexpensive, accessible by transit, and close to good coffee. How can you help fill in this map? Build an amazing startup of course.

  • Founders & Funders An Update

    I think Jevon and Jonas and Karthik are getting sick of running events with me. Before StartupEmpire back in 2008, I ended up in the Emergency Room at Toronto General for another look at my ticker. This week I ended up in the Emergency Room at Toronto General as we are planning Founders & Funders. I’m ok, I was both times but it does complicate the event planning and invitation process.

    “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better…stronger…faster.” Wikipedia

    So if you feel like you only got your invitation very recently, i.e., today. It’s my fault, I am sorry, I have been out of commission. It’s a reminder that you should do a startup before you need a body replacement.

    Founders & Funders

    Here is the update on Founders & Funders. It has been almost 2 years since we ran the last Founders & Funders (thanks for noticing William ;-). We are 7 days from the event and we have 35 remaining spots. Unlike past events, we are over inviting and over selling the event, i.e., first come first served. So if you got an invite but were waiting that might be a bad plan…

    How to get an invitation?

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

    We’re looking for “interesting” founders. Often this means people that we’ve met at other events, as Founders & Funders are relatively small social gatherings. That doesn’t mean it is just our friends, as I’ve been often accused. But it is entrepreneurs that we’ve met, that are building interesting companies, that have interesting traction. Get someone that we think is awesome to refer you. It’s a social hack (just like me).

    Connect with other founders

    Daniel Debow

    We have also decided to include a brief fireside chat with Daniel Debow at this dinner. We rarely do this sort of thing at a Founders and Funders but 2011 was such a great year we thought it would be fun to look back on the ups and downs of Rypple through the years and how they got to their eventual exit, some of which was written about in Forbes this week.

    What’s the point?

    Jonas, Jevon and I are founders. We are not an event company. We are not a media company. We have been trying to write content on StartupNorth that is relevant to us as founders. Whether we are raising money, connecting with other where we live, finding talent, or growing a business. We generally charge very close to the cost of the ticket, i.e., there are some slight over head costs but we are not collecting salaries or generating revenues. This is an unfortunate hobby. But I know there are world-class founders and companies across Canada and while there are government supported organizations and purported lobby groups, we are just a bunch of founders trying to do the things that we find useful in building our companies.

    Founders & Funders is a social event. It is designed to connect with the people writing cheques and making investments on a social level. To talk about startups and technologies and business models without the constraints of a pitch. Will there be pitches, definitely (How do you know when an entrepreneur is dead? They stop pitching). The goal is to have a highly edited dinner party with “interesting founders” and get them out of their usual pitch oriented conversation with VCs.

    Whether this works or not is questionable, but it does bring together founders and funders in a social context.

  • Toronto: Why Are We Here?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Zak Homuth (LinkedIn, @zakhomuth, Github). Follow him on Twitter @zakhomuth. This post was originally published on February 1, 2012. And like many startups, Upverter is hiring.

    CC-BY-NC Some rights reserved by wvs
    AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by wvs

    Its winter right now, and that means for those of us in the north east its cold. We try to pretend its a good thing; that it keeps us focused. But the reality is we dont live and work here because of the snow, we live and work here because smart people love, more than anything else in the world [pg], to work with other smart people. And, make as many snow jokes as you want, but…

    Pay attention to Toronto

    Canada is the best country in the world to do business in [forbes], Toronto is the most multi-cultural city in the world [wikipedia] (suck-it NYC ;)), we get tax incentives for R&D [gov], and its the only city within an hour of one of the worlds foremost engineering schools [uwaterloo,coop program].

    So, I say again, you should be paying attention. And if you’ve got your shit together you should be trying to figure out how to get a footprint here. Because believe it or not, we dont all want/have to be in the valley [fred].

    All that being said, I still get this question a lot

    There is a (very reasonable) expectation that YC companies make every effort to relocate to silicon valley as part of the program. And the fact that we have most of our operations in Toronto raises some eyebrows. My answer is really simple: The talent is here and it wants to be here. Sometimes I even go as far as talking about how much further our investment takes us when we spend it here instead of in the US, but at its root its a talent thing.

    Toronto isn’t the only place in the world

    Its true. I still spend a tremendous amount of time in the valley. And we have customers all over the world. Simply put there is no perfect place for everything. But if youre building a product business, or looking for talent, you could do much, much worse! Toronto is great for talent, and its a great place to live. Oh… and Im sure its not supposed to matter but like my good friend dave [blog] would say, “look at the scenery”.

    But, its also a terrible place to raise money. Like I said, nowhere is perfect.

    About Me

    Upverter is my 3rd startup. I dropped out of highschool, and then university, both times to run startups. I’ve worked in Ottawa, Waterloo, Stuttgart, Bangalore, and Mountain View. I have never lived in Toronto before, so its a first for me, but we’re here because its where our team wanted to be. We are currently 7/7 kick-ass, and 6/7 Uwaterloo engineers who would just rather be here at home in Canada, than down in the valley. Oh, and if you’re smart, we’re hiring.

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Zak Homuth (LinkedIn, @zakhomuth, Github). Follow him on Twitter @zakhomuth. This post was originally published on February 1, 2012. And like many startups, Upverter is hiring.

  • GrowLab on tour

    GrowLab DemoDay 2011 - Some rights reserved by miketippett
    AttributionShare Alike Some rights reserved by miketippett

    Ok, it makes me laugh every time I read GrowLab. The only way it could be better is when someone describes the GrowLab companies as “GrowOps”. They really did a great job in creating a corporate name that has a set of nuanced meanings (well maybe it’s not so nuanced).

    Our friends from GrowLab are heading out on tour to find their next cohort. They are coming to:

    • Toronto – February 13, 2012 Register
    • Waterloo – February 14, 2012 Register
    • Montreal – February 15, 2012 Register
    • Edmonton – February 22, 2012 Register
    • Calgary – February 23, 2012 Register

    Sounds like an interesting night with Daniel Debow (LinkedIn, @ddebow), Debbie Landa (LinkedIn, @deblanda) and Jason Bailey (LinkedIn, @YVRJason) talking about startups, entrepreneurship, building companies in Canada, getting connected in the Valley, GrowConf, incubators and other fun things. The panel conversation is:

    Are you an Entrepreneur or a Wantrepreneur?

    What makes you different from other entrepreneurs trying to build start-ups? You are competing with thousands of entrepreneurs for the same resources, talent, and capital. How are you going to make sure that you attract the best people and funding? Is it about who you know or is it about how great your product is or the reach you have in the community?

    In Toronto that I get to host the above conversation, it means that I’m going to have to represent for the “Wantrepreneur” side. Because there is too much awesomeness with Daniel, Jason and Debbie representing the “Entrepreneur” side. It should be a fun event and a great time for entrepreneurs to get or stay connected with each other. This is a great group to provide deep insight into the experience of building companies in Canada and selling them to Silicon Valley powerhouses.

    Given the tour includes stops in Bucharest and Budapest, I can guarantee that someone will mention Summify (congrats guys).Also excited that Debbie and Jason will be joining us on Feb 16 for Founders & Funders.

  • Extreme Startups

    Extreme Startups

    Rob Lewis and TechVibes is reporting that ExtremeU (you can read our past coverage 2009, 2010, 2011) has launched a new Toronto based incubator that leverages their experience over the past 3 years. Mark Evans provides additional details that includes “$7-million in funding from Extreme Venture Partners, OMERS Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures, BlackBerry Partners Fund and BDC.”

    Extreme Startups includes a who’s who of  the Toronto startup scene as mentors:

    • David Ossip
    • Daniel Debow
    • Anand Agarwala
    • Michael McDermentt
    • Ameet Shah
    • Albert Lai
    • Leila Boujnane
    • Ali Asaria
    • Noah Godfrey
    • Ray Reddy
    • Rick Segal
    • Salim Teja
    • Derek Seto
    • Nick Koudas

    Congrats to Andy Yang, Sunil Sharma and Amar Varma in getting this thing launched. Plus how can this not be awesome with Andy Yang as Harold and Sunil Sharma as Kumar in Extreme Startupping.

    Andy Yang and Sunil Sharma go EXTREME STARTUPPING

     

  • 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.

  • 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.

    CC BY-NC-SA Some rights reserved by smack416
    AttributionNoncommercialShare Alike Some rights reserved by smack416 (check out the Flickr Pool for #hohoto)

    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.

     

     

  • Everyday be hustlin’

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    AttributionNoncommercialNo Derivative Works Some rights reserved by concheven

    AdParlorCongratulations to Hussein, Kristaps and their team at adParlor.

    In case you missed it, Toronto-based adParlor has been acquired by AdKnowledge. adParlor is the second Canadian acquisition for AdKnowledge, who acquired Vancouver’s Super Rewards in July of 2009 for a reported $50 Million.

    They managed to build one of “the largest [Facebook] Ads API vendor” and do it here in Toronto.

    “We’ve established an office over here where we now have 11 employees, and we’re all based and comfortable in Toronto. We do have our business development manager in San Francisco way more than he’s here in Toronto.” – Hussein Fazal (LinkedIn, @hussein_fazal) on Mixergy

    Even more impressive is that they built a site, that manages over one billion impressions a day, without raising outside capital. This is freaking impressive. I’m sure there was likely a combination of SR&ED credits, IRAP money, and others. Every entrepreneur should take note: A billion daily impressions without venture funding. Go read or watch Hussein’s interview on Mixergy, he talks about the 2 pivots for the company, the hard decisions, staying in Toronto. He doesn’t talk about all of the successes like the MaRS AlwaysOn trip, the CIX Top 20, but their relentless hustle and drive built a great business with massive traction.

    “no one has hustled harder, stayed humbler, and executed better than him.” – Anonymous VC Comment about Hussein & adParlor

    Thanks for building a fantastic example for Canadian entrepreneurs.

  • Oct 12, 2011 – DemoCamp feat. Elmer Sotto

    #DCT30 Details

    Date: October 12th, 2011

    Time: 6:30 – 9:00 PM EST

    Location: Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University: 55 Dundas St. W, Toronto, ON

    Register to Attend:

    Keynote Speaker – Elmer Sotto

    Elmer Sotto (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) is the Head of Growth for Facebook Canada, where he is responsible for setting strategy to further grow and engage the Canadian user base. He also helps key strategic partners understand and leverage the Facebook platform.

    Prior to this, he was the Vice President of Product and Operations for JumpTV. Mr. Sotto also spent more than five years at eBay Canada as Director of Marketplace Development.

    We are very excited to be hosting Elmer as the keynote speaker for DemoCamp 30 and looking forward to another exciting event! Please make sure to register before tickets are sold out.

    Amazing entrepreneurs & demos

    The goal at DemoCamp is to provide a platform for local companies to launch, get product or pitch feedback, establish a presence for recruiting as well as help with PR and social media awareness. We aim to gather highly connected and talented entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, investors and others to watch and critique entrepreneurs in a safe environment.

    We have a list of amazing demos, companies and founders presenting. These are some of the best in the world, and guess what they are all located in the GTA. We have 2 companies that have participated in YCombinator, the first startup out of IAC’s Hatch Labs, a leading e-book platform and a hot social hardware application. It’s a great list of local entrepreneurs.

    Sponsored by our friends at: