Entries from the 'Start-up' category
DreamBank Funds Your Goals, With a Cut for Charity
DreamBank is a Vancouver start-up that launched just yesterday. Their tagline is “Give dreams, not gifts”, suggesting that contributing funds for peoples’ dreams is preferable to gift giving. DreamBank allows users to create a “dream” and they’ll handle accepting money for it. Dream progress is tracked on their site, with donors credited. The site uses PayPal for funds transfer, but have arranged their own fee structure. Cashing in your “dream” is subject to a 2.5% fee.
To prove they’re about more than just holding your money, DreamBank has a charitable element. When creating your dream, you choose one of their charitable partners, such as Doctors Without Borders or Save the Children. DreamBank pools all contributions into a single fund and uses the interest to support the charitable organizations and cover their own costs. DreamBank itself is a private company, despite their use of a .org domain name (not against the rules, and Slashdot does it too).
Users have already created a number of dreams. Miss604 Rebecca Bollwitt dreams of attending Blog World Expo, and Strutta’s Danny and Maura are using it to raise money for their honeymoon in lieu of wedding gifts. Radio host Buzz Bishop is raising money to sponsor a run around Easter Island for diabetes. On a different scale, there’s also the boy from Squamish who wants a Lego Mindstorms kit for his own educational and creative fun.
DreamBank is not the first of it’s concept, but with a clever name, sensible interface, and well-communicated message, it’s the best-executed implementation of it I’ve seen. Congrats to web development partner FCV Technologies on a smooth launch.
AideRSS Extends PostRank Beyond RSS. Now It Gets Interesting.
There is something really interesting going on out there in Waterloo, Ontario, where AideRSS today announced a major new service called PostRank.com, which enables users to see the most popular content based on various social engagement metrics. It is available as an API which website publishers can incorporate in their sites.
AideRSS’ product offering uptil now was focused on filtering the posts in a RSS feed based on popularity - how many comments, diggs, etc a post got. In the past, users could go on their site (www.aiderss.com) and filter their RSS feeds or install an extension for Google Reader and some other feed readers to sort the posts by their “PostRank”. That was quite interesting itself, but now they have opened up PostRank beyond RSS feeds, and for regular blog posts, news articles, bookmarks, etc. Any kind of online content!
This is where it gets really interesting and opens up a much bigger market opportunity for them. This is something which the likes of Google will eventually have to co-opt or compete against. The main challenge for AideRSS in the short term though is going to be driving the adoption of PostRank across the web and convincing the rank and file web publishers to adopt it. Besides this new PostRank service, AideRSS also announced the official launch of their Google Reader extension and updated APIs.
In my opinion, this is THE Canadian web startup to watch out for.
Vancouver’s NowPublic Buys Valley’s Truemors
It’s not every day that you hear of a Canadian startup buying a Silicon Valley startup, but today is that day. Via the AFP comes word that Vancouver citizen-journalism site NowPublic purchased rumor-mill Truemors for an undisclosed sum. In addition to acquiring another user-generated content site, NowPublic also gains Guy Kawasaki, former Apple evangelist (an actual job title) turned author and venture capitalist, who started Truemors and is a respected voiced among Valley VCs. Kawasaki will become the chair of NowPublic’s advisory board.
If you’re curious about what Truemors is about, you’re out of luck for the moment since the site appears to be down and redirecting to NowPublic. Update: I’ve been told that Truemors should be back up, pending DNS refresh.
NowPublic should find great value in this acquisition if they can smoothly integrate Truemors’ rumor reporting with their own crowd-powered media. Co-founder Len Brody claims that this acquisition makes them the “largest user-generated news website in the world”, with more than 100,000 contributors. I dug this last comment from Brody in the AFP article, defining his view of what NowPublic is:
Brody shuns the label “citizen journalist,” saying it is tantamount to branding someone a “citizen dentist.”
“The truth is journalism is an art form,” Brody said. “Calling someone a citizen journalist just doesn’t make sense. What we are is an army of eyes and ears to witness what is going on and work with journalists.”
ChickAdvisor Gets New Rogers Media Video Series
ChickAdvisor, a Toronto-based social media website where women can get advice and recommendations from other women on health, fashion and other trends, is about to get a glossy traditional media boost from Rogers Media.
Rogers Media is sponsoring ChickAdvisor’s latest video series, “ChickChat TV” a video series that poses tough questions to strangers on the street about life, love and style. De Bold’s first series, “Where’d You Get That?” launched last summer, sponsored by Slice (formerly Alliance Atlantis).
The videos for “ChickChat TV” are based on the discussions on ChickAdvisor’s popular forums, ChickChat. Questions posed to unsuspecting strangers include: ‘Would you take back a cheater?’ ‘”Who should pay for the first date?’ ‘Can Dudes be Fashionistas too?’ (Answers: Inadvisable; the guy, unless he’s intending on it being the last date as well; Nooooooooooo).
According to the chickadvisor.com website, “the series will air in Fall 2008 on ChickAdvisor.com and Rogers Media properties including their Pizza Pizza network, which have a combined reach of over 685,000 viewers per week.” The series is also being sponsored by Zipcar. It includes 20 episodes at 90 seconds each and is planned to run for several seasons.
This development is a big deal for a website planned and produced in between the co-founders’ full time school and work gigs. The website has grown across North America to include 13 local city editions and over 4,000 reviews from women on their favorite products and places locally and online.
New York Times likes LoyaltyMatch
Waterloo-based LoyaltyMatch got a great mention in a New York Times article last week titled Playing Markets that Trade Miles. Some of our readers may remember that Varun Mathur - a Techvibes Toronto contributor - covered LoyaltyMatch’s presentation at StartUpCampToronto2 in April.
LoyaltyMatch offers an alternative to traditional travel reward programs by letting travelers convert unused points and miles into merchandise that they can then sell online for cash or swap for other items, services and activities. Here’s a bit of what the New York Times has to say:
Another site that is letting travelers set their own trading terms is LoyaltyMatch.com, which started in February. It’s the brainchild of Brad Ball, a technology executive who had accumulated piles of miles after several years of heavy business travel. Like so many other fliers in the same situation, Mr. Ball was having trouble using them for something he really wanted. Though he had enough miles for a number of award tickets, he said, “As you spend more time on planes, the last thing you want to do when you have some down time is get back on.”
Sellers register and enter their loyalty programs and account totals, which LoyaltyMatch uses to automatically list the items those miles and points can buy. For example, my test account (with a measly 16,309 American Airlines miles and 15,000 American Express points) immediately triggered four Exchange Alerts from other users willing to pay cash or trade miles or points for the merchandise that LoyaltyMatch said my miles and points could buy.
Buyers simply browse the site for items they want and submit a cash or trade offer. The site then matches you up with potential sellers, who can choose to accept your offer and use their points or miles to buy that popcorn maker for you and have it mailed to your door. You in turn, pay the seller through PayPal or order the item you agreed to trade from your loyalty program. For its services, LoyaltyMatch charges $1.99 a transaction.
Hat tip to Scott Lake of StartupOttawa for the link.
Mediascrape first Canadian Adsense for Video partner
Montreal-based Mediascrape recently announced that the company has become the first Canadian firm to partner with Google for their new Adsense for Video program. With Google’s new tech, the search giant will now be able to sell targeted and premium priced ads within live videos being shown on Mediascrape’s site.
This new initiative is a ray of light for often-embattled Mediascrape, which has faced its share of controversy over the last year. Though the company’s model of redistributing broadcast content and creating a new source of monetization for traditional broadcasters is filling a niche, the company recently ran afoul of Techcrunch kingpin Mike Arrington after Mediascrape CEO Tyler Cavell (or someone claiming to be him) threatened Techcrunch with legal action for a less than flattering post about the company. Another Techcrunch post resulted in Cavell commenting (somewhat incoherently) about his “delusional, former cocaine-addict cousin” regarding previous statements made to Techcrunch. Hopefully Mediascrape can concentrate less on blog wars and more on the bottom line as they introduce Google’s newest advertising gambit to Canadians and others.
Identi.ca Open Sources Microblogging
It was only two years ago that microblogging services like Twitter and Jaiku came on the scene, and in the last year, use of them has accelerated and become a cornerstone of communication for many. The popularity of this emerging model has spawned many derivative services. Most of them aren’t interesting enough to warrant a post, but identi.ca is, and not just because it comes out of Montreal from Contrôlez-Vous, Inc. (Control Yourself, Inc.).
On the surface, identi.ca differs little from Twitter, retaining a simple layout and 140 character messages. The difference is under the hood. With Twitter’s rapid growth leading to frequent problems and downtime, it seems clear that a decentralization is needed to reliably scale microblogging. The world doesn’t depend on one email service, why should Twitter be expected to carry the weight of the world’s micro-communication? Identi.ca solves this by being the first service to implement the OpenMicroBlogging standard for publishing notices between services.
Further, Control Yourself has open sourced identi.ca in the form of Laconica, a PHP app. Montreal Tech Watch theorizes that Laconica could become “the WordPress of microblogging platforms”, as anyone could use Laconica to set up their own public or private site capable of exchanging notices with identi.ca and other OpenMicroBlogging sites.
These are early days for open microblogging. The standard is only at version 0.1, and it hasn’t been adopted by any of the big players yet. With this launch, Control Yourself has put forth some good answers for how to solve microblog scaling problems, and to bring our micro-communication out of walled gardens.
Final thought: There has to be a better term for this communication model than “microblogging”. “Micro” makes sense, but my observation is that people tend to use it more like an IRC channel than a blog. If you have a better suggestion for an alternate term, please post in the comments to claim the attribution as your own.
MakeFive: Vote For Change! OK, Just For Fun, Then
MakeFive is a fun site for picking your fave five of anything and provoking ferocious debate, such as why you thought Teen Wolf even made the list of best movies EVER.
The Vancouverites behind the startup seem awfully modest in their goals for this social media application, nothing that “we do sell some ads on the site, and that covers our expenses and even promises to leave us with enough to grab the occasional beer on a Friday night.”
So how has the voting turned out? Here are a few samples:
The top five things George could do on leaving office are take an English class, go on the show “smarter than a fifth grader” and learn something, go on a mis-speaking tour, poke his own eyes out with a sharp stick and pee on the lawn.
Best 80s TV Shows: Knight Rider, MacGyver, Miami Vice, A-Team and V.
Greatest Canadian Band: The Tragically Hip, Barenaked Ladies, Blue Rodeo, Neil Young and the Band.
Disagree? Well, vote for your own faves.
Online Witnessing and Archiving by Datawitness
The New Ventures BC (NVBC) competition is highlighting some of their past competitors on their blog while this year’s Final 30 feverishly work on their business plans and pitches. Today the NVBC blog revisits Datawitness, a Round 4 Finalist from 2004 that went on to win the ‘Investor’s Choice’ award at the 20th Annual Angel Forum in 2006.
Richmond’s Datawitness provides a proprietary web-based service that witnesses electronic communications, as they occur, to produce an accurate and immutable record by automatically imaging the electronic content onto a tangible format. In addition to archiving documents in their secure data center, Datawitness also transfers those documents to microfilm, creating an analog copy suitable for long-term storage. On top of this platform, they provide a Mailwitness service that tracks delivery and receipt of sensitive email, along with archiving.
Datawitness’ innovative technology, competitive pricing, and attention to legal requirements has resulted pleased customers and stable growth. As more of the world’s data is converted to digital form, and data retention standards become more strict, demand for Datawitness’ services will continue to grow.
TeamPages bound for Mainland
Victorian born TeamPages.com is making the move from it’s Vancouver Island roots to the mainland and I’m excited to announce that they’ll be sharing Techvibes’ new office space starting July 1st.
We made a move two floors up earlier this month to the 5th Floor of 1122 Mainland Street in Yaletown and the view is great. Electronic Arts is finishing up their two floor heritage building addition directly across the street, finally giving them a Yaletown address to call home and the new Earl’s looks to open kitty-corner by the end of the summer.
If you’re a regular reader of the Techvibes blog, you know that TeamPages and Techvibes are distant cousins. Boris Wertz and his W Media Ventures is invested in both start-ups and we look forward to his weekly tutelage when he’s not in Edmonton guiding Nexopia though the social networking waters.
Welcome to Vancouver TeamPages!
