ByteClub.tv is a new online show which has been profiling Toronto-based startups. They have produced 14 episodes so far, covering local startups like b5media, Clear Sky Media (RedFlagDeals.com), among others. Their videos are short (about 5 minutes in length) and feature candid interviews with the founders and other employees of the startup they visit, providing a great insight into that startup's culture.
Their latest episode features Learnhub, which is a "social learning network" primarily targeted towards high school and university students in India looking to study in the US, UK, etc. It was launched by Savvica, founded by the husband-wife team of John Philip and Malgosia Green, who moved to Toronto from San Francisco to start this venture. As John mentions in this video, they have their development office based in Toronto, while marketing to an Indian audience!
Savvica is one of the few venture-backed startups in Toronto, and its founders have been an active member of the local startup community, having initiated and hosted Founder's Lunch to enable entrepreneurs to network with each other. Check out the ByteClub video:
Nuvvo is your way to teach on the web. Sign up for free in under a minute. Your free account comes with a host of easy-to-use features so you can... [more]
As a follow-up to our January 2009 Canada Startup index yesterday, comScore has provided us with their take on the top contenders.
In the above chart, the Online % Reach is the percentage of Canadians online that each entity reaches. As an example, Metrolyrics reached 8.9% of all Canadians during November 2008, making them the hands-down leader.
ZipLocal had the biggest month-over-month improvement rising from 2.7 to 3.2 and leapfrogging RedFlagDeals.
Thanks again to comScore for sharing this valuable data with Techvibes.
RedFlagDeals.com is Canada's largest bargain shopping community! Saving money is as Canadian as poutine or rolling up the rim on a double double.... [more]
Founded in 2004, MetroLeap Media Inc. is leading provider of entertainment content within the music and video game Internet market. Its flagship... [more]
ZipLocal is the difference between getting advice from the phone book vs. your trusted friends and neighbours. ZipLocal makes it easy to find what... [more]
Via David Crow's Blog, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation announced funding today of up to $500K in 8 companies through the Investment Accelerator Fund.
Ontario has announced new investments in eight promising high-tech companies. The funding comes from the $29-million Investment Accelerator Fund, which helps eligible start-up companies develop their technology and gain entrepreneurial expertise to bring their product or service to market.
The eight lucky companies are listed after the jump.
C2C Link (Hamilton) – This McMaster University start-up makes optical crystal chips that efficiently convert laser light from one colour to another. The company’s technology is the only known method for producing commercially viable green and blue optical chips. Industry experts believe these chips will be the driving force behind a new generation of laser-based displays so advanced that they will even replace LCD-based TVs and monitors, due to better quality and greater energy efficiency.
Echologics Engineering (Toronto) – According to an International Water Supply Association study, 20 to 30 per cent of drinking water produced gets lost on the way to the tap. A December 2007 Sustainable Asset Management study estimated that total water lost in the US alone is 23 million m3 per day – roughly the equivalent of 9,200 Olympic-size swimming pools. Leaks are considered to be the major cause of this water loss. Echologics Engineering Inc. is developing and commercializing technology to reduce leaks in water distribution systems.
IPeak Networks (Kanata) – IPeak Networks has developed a solution for improving the performance of applications across wide area networks like the Internet. IPeak's technology dramatically reduces packet loss and boosts file delivery speed. The results include smooth and uninterrupted VOIP calls and video transmissions, and increased realism for online games. In December 2007, the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation voted IPeak one of Canada’s Top 10 technology companies.
Kneebone (Toronto) – Kneebone Inc. offers proprietary software and related services to corporate clients seeking to make their marketing more effective. Marketing performance measurement tools make it possible for clients to measure the impact of their marketing initiatives, helping them maximize the return on their marketing investments.
Nulogy (Toronto) – Nulogy Inc. develops supply-chain management software for logistics and contract manufacturing companies. Its flagship PackManager product provides real-time labour, production and inventory information, helping businesses operate more efficiently. Nulogy has received several accolades, including winning a 2008 Red Herring Award for being one of the most innovative and promising companies in Canada.
Regen Energy (Toronto) – A building’s 15-minute peak demand can account for 20 to 50 per cent of each month’s electricity bill. Regen has developed a wireless controller that automatically manages electrical peak demand levels for commercial heating and cooling applications, potentially reducing energy consumption at peak demand by up to 25 to 30 per cent. Historically, optimizing peak demand has only been an option for large commercial operations that could afford complex building automation systems. Regen controllers promise to bring better energy management to smaller organizations.
Skymeter (Toronto) – Skymeter Corporation is a Toronto-based company that provides vehicle-use information using a combination of in-vehicle sensors and a patented data processing system. Potential applications of its system (either available now or in development) include road-use charging, parking metering, location-based marketing and pay-as-you-drive insurance.
Sysomos (Toronto) – Sysomos Inc.’s patent-pending technology can monitor the entire social media space, including blogs, social networks, online forums and news sources. Customers use the company’s data analytics services to monitor how their products and brands are perceived online, and gauge customer reaction to ad campaigns and media coverage – all in real time.
The Montreal Gazette's Robert Rocha covered a very timely startup today in his Technocite column.
Got a bunch of gift cards you don’t want for Christmas? Need some cash in these rough times? There’s a crop of websites for people like you.
Gift cards, the perennial gift of choice from the busy or uninspired, are forming their own micro-economy as people seek to exchange them for money or other gift cards.
Such sites as Swapagift, PlasticJungle, CardAvenenue and GiftCardRescue. But Canadians were left out, since the different currencies would make cross-border swaps tricker. But three students at the University of Waterloo's VeloCity dorm created Giftah to give Canucks the same benefits.
It works a lot like eBay: a card holder lists his card, original value and remaining value, and others bid on it. The site keeps sellers honest with a feedback rating system, but Rezart Bajraktari, one of the co-founders, tells me they'll soon have a verification system for cards over $50. The seller won't get his money until it's confirmed that the card has the advertised value.
Great timing for the guys behind Giftah. Mainstream media outlets like CNBC have been reporting that the troubled economy is forcing gift cards recipients to try to convert them into cash to buy the necessities.
Disclosure: Techvibes Waterloo Contributor Henry Finn is one of the co-founders of Giftah.
Giftah is a place to buy, sell and trade gift cards. [more]
Just before everyone took off for their annual Christmas break, MakeFive's Eric Karjaluoto had his Elevator Pitch featured on Techcrunch. While I'm sure Karjaluoto had a pretty strong following to his numerous blogs - IdeasOnIdeas.com, EricKarjaluoto.com, & the MakeFive Blog - before that, there's no doubt that kind of exposure is great for your overall readership.
Karjaluoto is a co-founder of a Vancouver-based interactive agency smashLAB and has been dabbling with a couple startups recently. So when he blogged on Friday about Why your web startup will fail, his readers piled on the comments (148 and counting) and they liked what they read.
In honour of Karjaluoto's current startup MakeFive, I've summarized his blog post into The Top Five Reasons your Web Startup Will Fail:
smashLAB is an interactive design firm. We create digital experiences that are meaningful, memorable and easy to manage. Our diverse clients in the... [more]
MakeFive is a website that allows people to connect through top-five lists. In it users can start topics of any nature and then share their... [more]
Voting for the 2008 Crunchies has begun and Montreal's Akoha is a finalist in the "Most Likely To Make The World A Better Place" category. Competition will be stiff with Facebook app Causes, CO2Stats, GoodGuide, and Kiva also making the final slate.
The 2008 Crunchies is our second annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.
The Crunchies is co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.
Voting for the 2008 Crunchies winners ends on January 5th - so get your vote in now.
In just a decade the Internet’s advances have made the world a better place. At Akoha, we want to take that a step further. With six billion... [more]
Scared to jump head-first into Twitter? Buried under a boring Twitter stream? CitySpeek wants to hear you 'speek'! CitySpeek is a Portland-based micro-messaging service that launched a soft beta in early December and just hit my radar. Naturally, there are a lot of similarities to Twitter. You've got a stiff 140-character cap, you can reply to 'speeks,' save them as favourites, and nudge quiet users. However, CitySpeek pre-emptively answers the "Isn't that just like Twitter?" question with a
no: CitySpeek also offers open and private groups, integrated pics and videos, speeks by category (Overheard, For Sale, Question, News, Rumor, Review, Funny, CheckiT, Event and Info), seamless integration with IM and Twitter, and automatic photo uploading to Flickr.
The fate of CitySpeek obviously rests on its ability to draw in users. The user base is currently pretty tiny - it looks like it has the potential to be a fun site once some of the UI kinks are worked out, especially since it offers some features that Twitter sorely lacks. Co-founder and Business Manager Jeff Martens told me that CitySpeek is designed to appeal to the everyday user, those "other 300+ million English-speaking internet users NOT on Twitter." One has to imagine that they are also hoping to take a big bite out of Twitter's userbase.
I really like their concept of categorized Speeks - what I think is best about it is that you can search through public Speeks by category. Check out events, questions or funny stuff; what might be really interesting tweets often get buried in my Twitter stream, and this is a way to sort through posts if you are looking for something in particular. You can receive speeks through the CitySpeek website, or through IM or email.
CitySpeek is also hoping to appeal to small businesses, encouraging owners to start a group dedicated to their business. They are hoping to go mobile sooner rather than later. Their API is there for grabs on the site, and they're actively encouraging community engagement. The site is deploying Google ads right off the bat and is looking at other revenue streams for the near future.
CitySpeek is a micro-messaging service that allows you to stay in contact with your friends, co-workers, teammates and customers through an... [more]
My previous post was about how it takes about a decade longer to exit in companies with venture capital investors.
That's much longer than most entrepreneurs and angel investors would guess.
Most VC funds are designed for ten year lifetimes. In actual practice, it takes significantly longer to actually exit the investments and shut down the typical IT VC fund.
The actual distribution of VC fund lifetimes is show in the graphic below.
The rest of this post explains why entrepreneurs often scare off angel investors by saying they are planning on a VC round.
Angelblog propagates best practices for entrepreneurs and angel investors. [more]
IDC Canada released a new study last week that profiles 10 Canadian New Media Companies to Watch and our readers will be very familiar with most of them. The IDC study hopes to provide insight into the solutions, go-to-market strategies, partners, and customers of the 10 select companiesvendors. Their lessons learned may provide a model for other emerging companies in the Canadian technology marketplace, and help larger vendors and investors identify partnership and investment opportunities.
The ten companies featured in the report are as follows:
The analysis in this study provides valuable input to ICT vendors, large and small, to identify success factors employed by emerging Canadian vendors with solutions that address New Media. Some of the key findings from this study include the following:
b5media is a global new media network featuring more than 255 blogs on a wide variety of subjects ranging from entertainment and news to technology... [more]
Filemobile is a media management and social media platform, providing services and tools to enable social media and networking. Filemobile’s... [more]
MyThum Interactive is a leading mobile media company, helping brands and broadcasters to build a direct relationship with consumers through their... [more]
The impact of social media on public relations and advertising is fundamentally changing the profession. Brand ownership is no longer solely the... [more]
Viigo™ is revolutionizing the way users access information on their smartphone. Every day, people around the world rely on Viigo as their gateway... [more]
LiveHive Systems™ is a privately held software development company that provides real-time, interactive solutions for the entertainment industry.... [more]
Across the hall or spanning the globe, productive teams fuel growth. People network to create business relationships, serve clients and close... [more]
DISTIL creates automated teaching and testing solutions to enhance training and assessment. Our highly intuitive and interactive digital games... [more]
dna13 develops and sells industry-transforming communications and stakeholder management software to help established brands and highly visible... [more]
Statusfirm is a company that specializes in building Internet media networks for business, education and entertainment. Using our exclusive... [more]
ByteClub.tv is a new online show which has been profiling startups and other geeky happenings in and around the Toronto area. Wonder who are the people behind that local startup you might have heard of ? Or, what does their office environment feel like and how do things happen behind the scenes ? Well, ByteClub has been doing a great job at capturing that on video. They have produced 10 episodes so far covering companies such as b5media, Refresh Partners and Unspace; a local DemoCamp and even a look at the Computer Science department of the University of Toronto.
Here's an episode featuring Clear Sky Media (and its founder - Derek Szeto), the company behind the enormously popular RedFlagDeals.com:
Clear Sky Media is a Toronto-based firm that provides unique online channels for marketers to reach consumers with its sites: RedFlagDeals.com and... [more]
