MaRS Centre (in Toronto) hosts a weekly evening lecture on a wide range of topics related to entrepreneurship, running from Oct '08 to April '09, in a program called Entrepreneurship 101. The program is FREE to attend and, while primarily targeted towards those with a more academic / scientific research background, is open to all. It also features various successful entrepreneurs sharing their stories, apart from teaching the building blocks of creating a startup such as:
They also offer freely available webcasts covering the above topics, incase you can't attend it in person. The next lecture of the program is today evening on Building a business model, which will be given by Ajay Agrawal (Peter Munk Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management). From the event description:
Thinking carefully about economics and business strategy can make the difference between having great technology versus having a great company. While MBAs can be famously dim-witted, scientists and engineers can be famously stubborn and insensitive to market forces.
We’ll discuss the most common commercialization traps that befall otherwise “way smart” inventors.
The event will be held at the MaRS Centre, from 5:30pm to 6:30pm today (November 12th). Registration is free, but required and takes only a couple of minutes.
The Ivey Alumni Association and Institute for Entrepreneurship (at Ivey) are organizing the Ivey Entrepreneurship Forum on Thursday, November 13th at the Toronto Board of Trade. The primary objective of the forum is to "facilitate financing and staffing of Ivey-led entrepreneurial ventures", and features Ivey alumni who have successfully raised financing as well as investors with an Ivey background. There would be some company presentations as well.
The forum is open to everyone though, not just Ivey alumni, and seems like a good opportunity to learn more about the process of raising venture capital financing. Presentations run from 1pm to 7pm, followed by a networking reception. Ticket price is only $30 and you can register at this link.
More from the event description:
Six companies will have the opportunity to make their pitch for funds to a panel of venture capitalists, angels and private equity investors. Guest speakers include Bas Van Berkel, MBA '06, who will talk about how his company, StormFisher Biogas, completed a $350M financing partnership and Andrew Wilkes, EMBA '98, from the National Angel Organization who will participate in a panel discussion on what money looks for.
ByteClub is a new web-based show which profiles Toronto's local tech culture. Their episode 5 is up and it showcases Devlin ebusiness Architects in their Toronto office. Check it out:
Devlin eBusiness helps you reach customers more easily, enhance your brand, improve productivity and streamline your business processes. Since 1994... [more]
Juan Gonzalez, Vice President - Technology of PlanetEye, and Mark Evans (organizer of the Mesh Conference) are putting together the first GeoSocial meetup in Toronto this Thursday, November 6th at the Charlotte Room (near Spadina / King) at 6:30pm. From the event description:
GeoSocial wants to provide an open forum for all people developing ideas, technology and products that leverage the GeoWeb to create advanced social applications that can deliver personalized, geographically relevant content. We also want to invite people from other areas (bloggers?) to participate and discover how these technologies can fundamentally impact their own products.
This is building on the Where 2.0 conference which is held in San Francisco. Its great to see folks right here in Toronto starting to think along similar lines as surely geographically-relevant content and applications have the potential to have a significant impact on our online lives. The question is how and in what form.
PlanetEye.com is a one-stop destination for all your travel planning needs. Featuring a powerful and easy-to-use planning tool; compelling,... [more]
Microsoft has launched a program called BizSpark to encourage the use of their products by upcoming startups. As part of the program, they are giving away 3 yr subscriptions for MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network), which will enable startups to obtain free access to tools like Visual Studio, Windows Server, SQL Server and even the recently launched Windows Azure. This is a worldwide program and the eligibility criteria for startups is as follows:
This is great news for startups, as the main reason to not choose these impressive Microsoft tools uptil now has been the cost involved in acquiring them. For two guys in a garage with the next killer idea, it is an easy decision to just go on eclipse.org and get that free IDE and start coding rightaway instead of shelling out several hundred dollars for Visual Studio. And likewise for other tools from Microsoft.
The result has been that over the past several years, most startups developing consumer web applications have built their product offering on the "LAMP" stack, using free and open source software like Eclipse, Apache, Linux, MySQL, etc. The most popular example of such a startup is probably Facebook. For a developer-focused company like Microsoft, this couldn't have been a palatable situation. BizSpark seems like a win-win program for both Microsoft and startups alike.
My experience with having used Microsoft's .NET, the LAMP stack and also the J2EE environment for creating web applications has been that for the fastest time to market - nothing beats Microsoft's tools, if you can afford them. LAMP stack is free and open source, and that is great, but you also spend a lot of time on tweaking things manually, and while that has its benefits, it also means that at the end of the day - the product will ship later than it could have. Likewise for J2EE which involves a lot of time spent in archaic configuration files. Friendster, one of the early social networks, initially built out their product on J2EE. Despite having a JSP book author on the team, they were not able to quickly scale their product and ended up having switching completely to the LAMP stack. By the time, a much quicker site called Facebook, built using PHP, surfaced and trounced them.
For startups with unproven ideas and very limited resources, it is a much better proposition to build something as soon as they can, get it out there and see the market response and then think about the next step. These free tools from Microsoft will definitely help in that.
StartupNorth, the organizers behind the upcoming StartupEmpire conference next week in Toronto, recently announced a revised schedule, price structure and venue for the conference. The event will now run for 1 day only and the ticket price has been drastically reduced to $65. Those who registered earlier on at the higher rate are being refunded the difference.
Jevon wrote on the StartupNorth blog that this has been done to make the conference more affordable for startup founders, students and other would-be entrepreneurs. Considering the immense value it offers, this really is an incredible deal. Have a look at the conference agenda:
| 9:00am-9:30am — Keynote - Don Dodge - Why you should Startup in a downturn. |
| 9:30am-10:00am — Keynote - Lane Becker - 10 Reasons why you should absolutly not start a company. |
| 10:00am-10:30am — Break and Demopods |
| 10:30-11:15am — StartupSchool - From Napkin to First Steps |
| 11:15am-12:30pm — StartupSchool - Your first structures; Legal, Organizational and Funding |
| 12:30pm-1:30pm — Lunch - Demopods |
| 1:30pm-2pm — Keynote - Howard Lindzon |
| 2pm-2:45pm — StartupSchool - The funding game, From friends to VCs |
| 2:45pm-3:30pm — StartupSchool- The Ins and Outs of Term Sheets: Angel Loans to Preferred Shares |
| 3:30pm-4:15pm — StartupSchool - InstaPitch: From Elevator to Power Point |
| 4:15pm-4:30pm — Break |
| 4:30pm - 5pm — Keynote - David Cohen |
| 5pm-5:30pm — Keynote - Hugh MacLeod |
| 6:30-9:00pm — Microsoft Canada – A Startup Celebration
Location: This is London Nightclub, |
If you want to learn the startup chops, and happen to be in Toronto on Nov 13th, this is the place to be. You will learn a lot from the impressive line-up of keynote speakers who have "been there, done that", from the "Startup School" sessions which go into the nitty gritty detail of starting a company, and finally the sheer networking opportunity with local bloggers, investors, entrepreneurs, and others throughout the day and at the evening reception. Click here to register for the conference. I'll be there for sure and will be blogging about some of the sessions right here on Techvibes.
StartupNorth.ca is written by Jonas Brandon and Jevon MacDonald. We are two entrepreneurs who, while running our own startups, decided it was time... [more]
Mobile Monday ("MoMo") is a global network of mobile enthusiasts which started back in 2000 in Finland when some folks got together and started having mobile-related meetups on Monday evenings. The idea caught on and various chapters sprung up around the world, including one right here in Toronto, called Mobile Monday Toronto. It is having its next meetup on Monday, Nov 3rd in Toronto. Check it out:
Topic: Mobile User Interfaces - Creating Engaging Customer Experiences
Guest Speaker: Hanni Doch, Director - New Products, Rogers Wireless
Venue: Dunedain Multimedia Inc., 110 Spadina Avenue, Studio 700, Toronto
Time: 6:30pm
RSVP: RSVP for this event to rsvp@mobilemondaytoronto.com with the following information:
This panel featured a discussion on where / how to get financing for your gaming start-up.
Panelists:
Key points:
Overall, the advice for gaming start-ups seemed to be to seek initial funding from friends/family, seek out government funding options like the tax credits and IRAP and seek strategic partners/publishers to get off the ground.
GameON Finance 2.0 conference wrapped up in Toronto yesterday. It brought together 100+ people from the gaming industry: entrepreneurs, investors, professional service providers and industry leaders. It was held at the swanky Grand Ballroom of 1 King West in downtown Toronto.
The full day of panel discussions and presentations explored topics such as gaming companies business models, financing options for gaming start-ups, angel investment in Canada and economic motivations behind games based on different forms of intellectual property. Networking options for the delegates included 1-on-1 10 minute sessions with other delegates, including some of the speakers. Check out the follow-up posts from some of the sessions I attended.
Overall a fun, informative and useful event, especially for those in the gaming industry. Kudos to Interactive Ontario for putting it together. Their next event would be in March '09 - Interactive Content Exchange (ICE) at the Carlu in Toronto.
Presentation: Key Gaming Industry Trends and Market Overview
Presenter: Wanda Meloni, President & Senior Technology Analyst, DFC Intelligence
Key points:
