Entries from the 'Uncategorized' category
Toronto Social Media Group Grows
Toronto’s Social Media Group (SMG) has signed a letter of intent to purchase Washington, DC-based Livingston Communications, a highly respected social PR firm. Former CEO Geoff Livingston, author of Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs, will continue to head the DC office and join SMG’s global team as Executive Vice President, Americas. The acquisition will bring SMG’s collective staff to 20, making them the world’s largest independent social media marketing and communications firm.
SMG’s collective client list is impressive - Ford, SAP, Network Solutions, Yamaha, Harlequin Publishing - and Founder Maggie Fox is ready to go toe-to-toe with any traditional agency’s social media practice.
In the process, SMG will acquire the popular Buzz Bin blog (if you’re wondering why Livingston sold out, of course he’s blogged his Top 10 Reasons Why I Sold Out) and Blog Potomac conference. Add this all to Fox’s blog (named one of the Top 10 technology bloggers in Canada) and we’ve got a serious Canadian powerhouse in our midst.
MySpace Calls Canada a Priority
Matt Hartley of the Globe and Mail was first in line to sit down with the new General Manager of MySpace Canada and had a chance to chat about it’s ongoing battle with Facebook for members and ad dollars.
Fresh from a stint at CanWest, Dave Stevens joins a social network in flux. Although MySpace still lays claim to the crown as the world’s largest online social network (with nearly 120 million users) it is ceding ground to rival Facebook and losing the battle for new members in key international markets - including Canada.
Even more alarming for MySpace was the revelation that in April, Facebook’s unique monthly visitors equalled MySpace’s totals for the first time, with each site drawing about 115 million uniques.
MySpace is the sixth most visited website in the world, according to data compiled by Web tracker Alexa Internet Inc., and the bulk of its users reside in the U.S. - still the biggest market for online advertising dollars - where it has twice the footprint of Facebook. However, it has trailed Facebook in signing up new members in international markets and is ramping up efforts to draw in users in Korea, India and China.
In Canada, MySpace doesn’t crack the Top 10 most visited websites. With so many Canadians embracing social networking - Facebook has more than 13 million Canadian users, compared with about four million for MySpace - Canada represents a potential gold mine of advertising dollars if Mr. Stevens and his team can get them to ditch the F-word and come to MySpace. Online advertising spending in Canada surged past $1.2-billion in 2007, according to a recent Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada report.
It sounds like the plan for MySpace is to move to more of a portal-based model which will allow them to attract new advertising dollars. One of the ways MySpace is expanding its ad offerings is through the use of takeovers - which allow marketers to create a themed main page for MySpace, complete with video ads and games. Likely a path that Facebook won’t ever take as they continue to move in the opposite direction and clean up their overall design.
Stevens called Canada a priority for MySpace International - ”The surge of Facebook has taken over some of the buzz from social networking, but I don’t see that lasting long. … Canadians just need to be further educated about MySpace, and we’re in the process of doing that.“
The Mesh 08 wrap-up
Mesh ‘08 , Canada’s largest web conference, wrapped up in Toronto yesterday.
Highlight of the final day was the keynote by Garrett Camp (a founder of StumbleUpon ) and couple of presentations on angel/VC funding in Canada (covered here previously ). We covered the opening day’s events previously over here .
Garrett and 3 of his friends founded StumbleUpon in Calgary, when he was still a university student. StumbleUpon lets users discover interesting new websites and typically works with a firefox extension. Their first year wasn’t up to the mark. They received initial angel funding from one of their users, but things starting picking up once they moved to Silicon Valley and setup their ad network. They explored getting VC funding but eventually ended up getting acquired by eBay for $75 million instead, which was a 15x ROI for their investors. They get 10-15 million stumbles a day and earn revenue through advertising. Garrett was glad that he moved to the Valley from Calgary and thought his biggest mistake was not being aggressive enough in the first year, when they took it as more of a ‘project’.
Various other founders shared some tidbits from their experiences as well, and it included Paul Kedrosky (blogger and VC), Leah Culver (Pownce), Ryan Carson (Carson Systems, DropSend) and Julia Johnston (mEgo), among others.
The following startups got their ‘15 minutes of fame’ at Mesh on Day 2:
- Well.ca : Canada’s largest online drugstore.
- Overlay.tv : Enables users to edit online videos and add various informative overlays on them.
- Enomaly : Delivers cloud computing for businesses.
Mesh was buzzing with a lot of excitement and activity. Some whiteboards were setup where employers advertised their startup-related job opportunities. MaRS Centre in downtown Toronto was a great venue (though The Carlu, which hosted ICE and CIX earlier this year seems to be better suited for such events). Wifi was a disappointment though and most folks struggled to get online, which was surprising for Canada’s ‘largest web event’. Regardless, it was still a very useful event and thanks to the organizers, volunteers, sponsors and the attendees for making it all happen. Just one more year to go for the next Mesh!
AERS Gets Thrifty
Victoria-based E-commerce research and analytics leader Advanced Economic Research Systems Inc. (AERS), announced last week the appointment of Alex A. Campbell to the company’s board of directors. Campbell is the founder and former chair of Vancouver Island success story Thrifty Foods.
Campbell is widely respected and will bring to the company experience in adapting business processes to facilitate continued growth and success. Campbell sold Thrifty Foods to Sobeys Inc. in 2007 and continues to be involved in an advisory capacity. This appointment sheds some light on their $1 Million private equity funding a couple weeks ago.
CIX: HomeZilla & Octopz
HomeZilla is a one-stop shop for home buyers to research neighborhoods and homes before they make a purchase. HomeZilla helps home buyers drill down into their target neighborhood and get the information they need to make an educated decision. Where are the elementary and secondary schools? Where can they pick up milk & bread late night?
Octopz Inc. develops online collaboration tools for creative professionals. Octopz’s fully integrated support for text messaging, VoIP and webcams allow users to work together securely in real-time or individually at their own convenience. Collaborators can archive their work for subsequent retrieval, review and feedback. The result is accelerated decision making and speed-to-market. The company has built a secure and extensible collaboration platform with an initial primary focus on the Marketing/Advertising, Media/Entertainment, and Product Design verticals. CEO & Presenter Ron McKenzie’s pitch was slick and impressive. Not a surprise that Octopz has received some interest to date - Webware 100 Finalist, Deloitte Fast 50, Branham Top 25 Up and Comers, etc.
Day One at CIX in 4 minutes
Varun Mathur did a great job of wrapping up Day One of the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) last night and the event organizers have done the same with a video summary of the day’s events. Check out both to get an idea of what Day One was all about.
Indochino Tailors gets Crunched
With 917,000 RSS subscribers, Techcrunch yields plenty of influence of in the tech start-up space worldwide. Techcrunch coverage often results in unexpected traffic spikes that many start-ups can’t handle. Luckily Victoria BC’s Indochino was prepared (and are even running a time-sensitive promo to convert the traffic) to take advantage of getting ’blogged‘ by Techcrunch’s Duncan Riley yesterday. Looks like their robust e-commerce site has handled the additional traffic and now it’s up to their army of tailors to fire up the sewing machines and outfit the Techcrunch faithful. Congrats to Kyle and the guys at Indochino.
Disclosure: Techvibes Media Inc. Director Boris Wertz is an investor in Indochino.
Day 1 of the CIX wraps up
The first day of the CIX in Toronto, which concluded just a few hours ago, was jam-packed with various discussions on venture capital funding. Some special highlights of the day included:
The opening panel discussion on “What do VCs and Angels want” touched topics like what drives VCs and angels in their investment decisions. It was noted that VCs primarily look for businesses that can go to the next level and are “in it to make money”, since they have a responsibility to their investing funds, while angels might have other additional motivations like giving back to the community and mentoring. Couple of new seed / angel funds were mentioned (Maple Leaf Angels in Toronto and a new Montreal Startup fund). David Rose, a partner of a New York-based angel group mentioned that most entrepreneurs don’t pitch their ideas properly, and as a result sometimes good ideas get overlooked.
Later on in the day, Rick Segal of JLA Ventures and Suzie Dingwall Williams of Venture Law Associates went over some basics of terms sheets. A term sheet is basically a commitment between an entrepreneur and a VC to continue negotiations in good faith. They typically have a “no shop” period of around 45 days. Clarity on price and who pays the costs if the deal does not close are quite important things and something entrepreneurs should be careful about.
The keynote speaker of the day was Gary Lynn, a principal at a New York-based venture capital firm called Spencer Trask. He was selected by Business 2.0 magazine as one of the nine leading management gurus in the US. Gary talked about creating blockbuster products and companies. He said that it is essential for companies to have a clear and stable vision and a having a concise tagline helps in that. And as part of their process, companies who are interested in creating blockbuster products need to continuously improvise. He gave the example of Microsoft, a very fast learning company, which failed with Windows 1, 2 and 3 but finally persisted with Windows 3.1.
Another panel discussion focused on some Canadian innovation success stories and featured Leila Boujnane (Idee), Jeremy Wright (b5media), Justin Belobaba (Healthscreen Solutions) and Ron Neumann. The key advice which the panelists had for entrepreneurs was to not fall in love with your first idea and to continuously improvise and not be afraid of failure. Failing quickly is infact ok. Leila mentioned that software startups should ‘release early and often’. Her self-funded startup, Idee, is now 9 years old and recently launched its image search engine in private beta (which enables users to search for related images by providing an image as the input instead of text). This is something which even Google has not been able to do as yet.
The final discussion of the day was on the opportunities and challenges in raising venture capital funding in 2008. It featured various US-based VCs, including Andreas Stavropoulos, a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), one of the largest VC firms in the world with under $2 billion in management. He urged entrepreneurs to “Think Big” - on a massive global scale, and not constrain their thinking to small, incremental/local ideas. Really big ideas and opportunities is what VCs are interested in. Most VCs at the event said that a good way of getting them to hear about your idea is to just contact them directly or get introduced to them by people who know them (most often lawyers, etc). The moderator, Stephen Hurwitz, a partner at a law firm, noted that there is a severe shortage of VC investment in Canada, which contrasted somewhat with what Rick Segal said at the beginning that Canada is a good place for business and funding is available.
Overall, a great day of info sessions and networking between entrepreneurs, investors and various service providers. Highlights of tomorrow include pitches by the selected 20 startups and we will be bringing that to you as it happens.
What do VCs and Angels Want?
The first panel of the CIX featured Austin Hill, David S. Rose, and Rick Segal discussing the differences between VCs and Angels and what they’re looking for.
Investment in a growth company is a two-way street. This session will focus on what type of investor you should look at for your business, and what investors are looking for. Does it make sense to search out an Angel Investor or go to a Venture Capital firm? What is the current landscape for startups in Canada and what options are available to emerging companies? What are the rules to never break? What spaces are hot and which are not?
JLA Ventures’ Rick Segal spoke on behalf of the Venture Capital industry and summed up VCs underlying goal - “to make the most amount of money in the least amount of time”. In response, Angel David Rose stressed that Angels are more interested in lending expertise and inspiration in a mentor role. Angels tend to value the social aspects of investing and intangibles that come along with it.
Akoha’s Austin Hill emphasized the importance of the VC/Angel ecosystem. He used the analogy of a hockey farm team. Friendly angel money is the farm system for the big leagues - without it you can’t ice a Stanley Cup contender that VCs will invest in.
The entire panel agreed that entrepreneurs should bootstrap their idea as long as possible while hitting risk-reducing milestones. And most importantly - learn how to pitch your business idea!
Tech Events in Vancouver - Apr. 28-May 4th
Tuesday, April 29th
Wednesday, April 30th
If you’re hosting a Tech event in Vancouver and want us to include it in a summary post like this one, be sure to add it to the Techvibes Events Calendar.
