GameON: Finance is North America's top business forum for the interactive entertainment industry, connecting developers, innovators, investors and industry leaders. And it's returning to Toronto in January.
Delegates will gather for two days of keynotes, case-studies, lectures and panel discussions providing insight on topics like emerging opportunities in game project financing and deal-making across platforms.
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Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) is on the verge of being sold to Bell Media and Rogers Communications.
Major news outlets are reporting this evening that the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is close to selling off its 79.5% stake in MLSE to the two telecom giants.
While bitter rivals on the sports television scene (Bell owns TSN and Rogers operates Sportsnet), the proposed deal has the competitors partnering to own MLSE’s Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors, and Toronto FC.
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When Bessemer Venture Partners recently published their map of major cloud players, I was surprised to see so many Canadian companies on there.
Shopify, TribeHR, Unbounce, Clio, Hootsuite, Radian6 and Freshbooks made the list and a few others (like Wave Accounting) probably should have been on there as well.
So why are Canadian companies so much better represented in SaaS than in consumer internet?
I see two main reasons:
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In September Techvibes reported that Groupon had acquired a Vancouver company but at the time could not confirm details. Multiple independent sources had told us that a Groupon acquistion of a BC-based company was imminent.
Today Groupon confirmed it in a press release that announced the pilot launch of Groupon Scheduler, the latest addition to its suite of merchant productivity tools. Groupon Scheduler is an online appointment service giving merchants an easy way to manage their schedules and accept bookings directly from consumers.
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At last month's VEF event BC's 2011 Angel Investor of the Year Boris Wertz moderated a Angel Investing panel that included Initio Group's Mike Edwards and Eastside Games' Jason Bailey as well as Scenario Creation's Paul Antoniadis, and Seattle superangel Geoff Entress.
We've summed up Bailey's thoughts on angel investing and the story of Edwards climb to Superangel in less than 12 months but for those of you that couldn't attend the event I thought it would be worthwhile to get back to the basics.
During his panel introduction moderator Wertz shared his advice on how to raise angel money. While Wertz's climb to angel prominence in the Pacific Northwest hasn't been as accelerated as Edwards, Wertz's W Media Ventures has a four-year track record of investing in consumer Internet, SaaS and mobile entrepreneurs.
Here are Wertz's 5 tips on raising angel money.
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According to CNN money, which cites "a source close to Gowalla," social network giant Facebook has acquired the location-services startup.
The report suggests that Gowalla's team will move to Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto as Mark Zuckerberg looks to boost his company's currently small presence in the location-services space. Instead of reviving Facebook Places, the social network aims to integrate Gowalla's technology with its new Timeline feature. It is unclear whether Gowalla in its current state will continue to exist or recieve future updates.
Gowalla was founded in 2009 by Josh Williams.
Radian6's Marcel Lebrun spoke this week at the the Canadian Innovation Exchange and offered some advice for Canadian entrepreneurs.
New Brunswick born Radian6, an industry-leading social media monitoring platform, was acquired by Salesforce for $326 Million earlier this year.
Radian6 secured angel funding in 2006 and brought their product to market by the end of 2007.
Lebrun would go on to say that Radian6 optimized for growth with funding, but never at the expense of profitability. It was also a company that never even saw the “great recession”, so any advice to stay lean expense-wise from investors in difficult times didn’t even apply to them.
Lebrun went on to offer the following 10 business building tips that he learned from Radian6's massive multi-million dollar exit:
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Vancouver's Unbounce announced this morning that they have raised an $850K round of financing by a syndicate of tech investors lead by Mark MacLeod & Montreal based Real Ventures.
Cash-flow positive Unbounce didn't require this capital to maintain our current activities. Instead they'll be able to invest in developing the capabilities and improvements that you've been asking for on a greatly accelerated schedule.
read moreWellington Financial's blog reported today that Toronto's Fixmo has landed a $23.4 Million investment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Paladin (Washington), and Horizons (Hong Kong).
Local boy Rick Segal has drawn one of the big Kahunas of venture capital investing to his Fixmo startup, which was born in Toronto and now has a joint HQ in Virginia. Just two years old, Fixmo began as an idea that would see all of us buy a “Norton Tools” product for our BlackBerries. Who wants to send a “flamemail” without having the chance to reconsider it before pushing the launch button? That idea got some natural interest from large New York law firms, for example, but a partnership with some serious U.S. government agencies has turned the story into one of Mobile Risk Management; and with that, Fixmo appears to have a tiger by the tail.
Fixmo’s existing venture capital investors include Extreme Venture Partners, RHO Canada, iNovia, and Silicon Valley-based Panorama.
Congrats to Fixmo CEO Rick Segal on attracting an impressive and deep syndicate - 7 VCs in a Canadian deal is unheard of.
Canada's venture capital industry is feeling optimistic.
According to a survey of members of Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, 80% of VCs believe that investment over the next 6 months will be the same as, or better than, the last 6 months. And the focus will be on new investments, 61% believe, not follow-on transactions.
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