US Startup Visa Bill - Great News For Canadian Entrepreneurs Looking To Head South

Remember John Kerry, the Democratic Presidential candidate in 2004 ? Well, couple of weeks ago he introduced a bill in the US Congress on a special visa for foreign start-up entrepreneurs. This bill is the result of extensive lobbying efforts by prominent Silicon Valley folks who figured that easing the process by which foreign entrepreneurs could start their companies in the US would be good for the economy. More innovation, more jobs, more wealth creation. StartupVisa.com has been the key focal point of this effort.

Uptil now, foreign entrepreneurs had to go through hoops to setup base in the US. There has been the EB5 visa category, and the much more complex O visa. I've met with Canadian entrepreneurs who've shifted / wanted to move to Silicon Valley but found this immigration thing overwhelming. When you are building new products, battling competitors, and generally just putting everything on the line - not having to deal with immigration is a nice thing to have. If passed into law, this bill would grant a special 2 yr 'Start-up Visa' to foreign entrepreneurs who have raised $250k of funding ($100k from a US investor). After 2 yrs, if the startup has hit one of the following goals, the entrepreneur would become a permanent US resident: created 5 full-time jobs in the US, or raised $1 million in additional funding or earned $1 million in revenue. See more coverage about this on BusinessWeek.

A Canadian entrepreneur's story was featured front and center on the StartupVisa.com movement's website. Eric Diep was a University of Waterloo student whose ideas were able to attract investor interest in the US but due to immigration reasons, it didn't pan out. He had to come back to Canada. Here is Eric's story:

If this bill passes, it would be a fantastic opportunity for Canadian entrepreneurs looking to build on their dreams in the US. The question is, what is being done to retain that talent over here? As recent Techvibes coverage points out, Canada is increasingly becoming start-up friendly, with the removal of the dreaded Section 116 tax provisions and new tech seed startup funds launching, such as Mantella Venture Partners in Toronto and various activity going on in Quebec. Even TechCrunch had a headline today saying 'Canada Now Somewhat Less Anti-Startup'.

Toronto-based Thoora Tracking The World Wide Buzz

Thoora, a new and promising start-up based in Toronto, is aiming to shake up the real-time news aggregation market. It uses its proprietary technology to identify the "buzz" around the web and puts the spotlight on what people are talking about. By tracking the entire blogosphere (81 million blogs and counting..) along with the mainstream news stories and Twitter - Thoora is able to get a pulse on what's making news around the web and displays it like a digital newspaper. Users can see story clusters on topics such as entertainment and tech and even see stats on the popularity of a particular news item, such as how many blog posts, tweets, etc it attracted.

I caught up with Chul Lee, Thoora's Founder / CTO, to get to know more about this exciting new start-up in town. He mentioned that it all started out as a research project back when he was a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Eventually he got together with a couple of other students (Byron Ma and Kyu Lee) and Thoora started taking shape as a news aggregation start-up. Within a year (by 2008), Thoora had Rogers Ventures on board as an investor and the company started realizing on its vision. According to its TechCrunch company profile, Thoora has raised $4.1 million to date in funding and has 17 employees. They launched the core product at the TechCrunch50 conference held in San Francisco in Sept '09. Here is the presentation given by Thoora's executive team at that event:

Thoora, a new and promising start-up based in Toronto, is aiming to shake up the real-time news aggregation market. It uses its proprietary technology to identify the "buzz" around the web and puts the spotlight on what people are talking about. By tracking the entire blogosphere along with the mainstream news stories and Twitter - Thoora is able to get a pulse on what's making news around the web and displays it like a digital news paper. Users can see story clusters on topics such as entertainment and tech and even see stats on the popularity of a particular news item, such as how many blog posts, tweets, etc it attracted.

Thoora started out couple of years as a research project of Chul Lee, a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Eventually, Chul got together with a couple of other students (Byron Ma and ...) and Thoora started taking shape as a news aggregation start-up. Within a year (by 2008), Thoora had Rogers Ventures on board as an investor and the company started realizing on its vision. According to its TechCrunch company profile, Thoora has raised $4.1 million to date in funding and has 17 employees. They launched the core product at the TechCrunch50 conference held in San Francisco in Sept '09. Here is the presentation given by Thoora's executive team at that event:

Given that there are quite a few players targeting this market, from the dominant Google with its Google News product to niche start-ups like Techmeme, which is a popular automated tech 'newspaper', the key question becomes how does Thoora differentiate itself from other news services, to which I found the answer on their website:

Thoora’s approach to collecting and displaying the most interesting stories is based on what is implicitly happening within social and traditional media – blog posts, comments, Twitter updates and news articles – rather than voting or link analysis. We take into account millions of voices rather than relying on a few editors or A-List bloggers to determine the most important stories. Thoora’s approach is unbiased and uncurated.

The premise and the market opportunity here is huge, and Thoora seems to be in a good position to target it, with the funding and support of Rogers (a major media firm itself) and deep infrastructure and solid tech talent behind the effort. Could this be the Google of Canada ? We'll be keeping an eye out for Thoora. Meanwhile, check out their beta at http://beta.thoora.com/

Dave McClure's Keynote At Canadian National Angel Summit

Dave McClure came up north from Silicon Valley to Toronto last month to give the keynote address at the Canadian National Angel Summit. Here's his bio:

Dave McClure has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for over twenty years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, angel investor, blogger, and internet marketing nerd. Dave currently runs FF Angel, a seed-stage investment program for Founders Fund, and also manages the fbFund REV incubator program on behalf of Facebook, Accel Partners, and Founders Fund. Dave's passion is helping startups with marketing, product strategy, and startup metrics, and he is an advisor or investor for over 30 companies including: Canopy Financial, CreditKarma, KissMetrics, Mashery, Mint, RichRelevance, Simply Hired, SlideShare, TeachStreet, and Twilio..

Check out his presentation below (with audio synced with the slides, courtesy Bryan Watson), and especially the last part about an initiative he is involved with called StartupVisa.com, which is essentially about lobbying the US Congress to create a special class of visas for non-US citizens to enable them to come to the US as startup founders.

The Globalive Saga - Why Can't There Be A Fourth National Wireless Provider In Canada

Things are getting hot in the Canadian wireless industry with the continuing Globalive saga. Globalive, a Toronto-based company, has been eager to launch a national wireless service called Wind Mobile. Whatever their offering, at the end of the day choice is good for consumers. But its not being allowed to happen (at least for now) as it has run into opposition from the established carriers and outdated regulations. Free market ? Not here in the Canadian wireless industry, yet. Here's some background:

In Canada, there are three main wireless carriers, TELUS, Bell and Rogers, and a bunch of other regional players. Some time ago, the government decided that it will be a good idea to have more competition in the market and decided to make some wireless spectrum available for sale. The idea was that Canadian companies will buy that spectrum and offer their own wireless services on it - with the end result being more choice for the consumer. Sounds good, right ?

A company called Globalive went ahead and poured roughly $443 million in buying a chunk of that spectrum. They developed their service offering and have been getting close to launch recently. There were some concerns regarding the company not being "Canadian" enough - but Industry Canada took a look and ruled that it, infact, was Canadian-owned, and as a result Globalive kept moving along in its plans to offer this competing service to Rogers, Bell and TELUS.

Surely a moment to rejoice for Canadian wireless subscribers. No matter how good the existing players are, more competition would mean that the companies would have to fight harder to keep their customers' business - from better pricing to better customer service. Canadian consumers win at the end of the day. That math is not hard.

But someone somewhere (guess who..) felt threatened enough by this to complain to the CRTC, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission, that "hey, take another look at Globalive and its ownership". CRTC ruled recently that Globalive does not have enough of a Canadian ownership to satisfy the commission and as a result cannot be allowed to launch its wireless service in the market. So long for healthy competition in the market..

Different branches of the same government have different opinions on the matter, and Globalive's hopes rest with the Industry Minister now. The existing carriers are of course contending that Globalive is not Canadian and shouldn't be allowed. Nadir Mohamed, the CEO of Rogers, spoke about the issue today while giving a speech at the Toronto Board of Trade where he emphasized that competition is good for consumers and he supports that and there are other local wireless companies emerging like DAVE Wireless and Public Mobile, but Globalive is a separate case as "rules should be followed" and not subverted for any one company. He also said that if Globalive is not able to launch, then its spectrum should be made available for sale as its a precious asset and his company would be interested in acquiring that.

How Ottawa deals with Globalive and whether it is Canadian-enough to offer a wireless product here remains to be seen...but I'm wondering even if what it isn't ? Shouldn't we as Canadian consumers be a little happy that someone wants to sell their product here and we get more choice as a result ? Would it be a terribly bad thing if foreign companies are allowed to compete in the Canadian wireless market ? The sugared water we drink - we choose from between US-based Coke and Pepsi. The junk food we eat - again the likes of US-based McDonald's and Burger King. Email systems - again either from a US-based GMail or Yahoo or Hotmail. What about choice in the wireless industry, and how do Canadians benefit if only a limited number of Canadian companies are allowed in the market ? Won't you like to see the likes of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile fighting for a chance to get your business, alongwith TELUS, Bell and Rogers or even Globalive ?

Heck, I'm paying way more for similar wireless services here compared to my friends in the US, and the only good reason for that is because the Canadian wireless market is closed - the incumbents have been able to lobby successfully to keep stronger competition out and as a result keep prices higher. I'm sick of paying exorbitant charges and cooked-up fees and in a free market system, I'll have better and more choices. More innovation, lower prices, better customer service. That's what I want as a consumer, and I guess some other folks would too.

What do you think ?

Toronto's Shiny Ads Helps Web Publishers Grab The Long-Tail Of Advertising

Small web publishers know one thing too well - that often times, that little space on their website 'could' be monetized with ads, that there are potential advertisers who could be willing to pay something for that space. Problem is that ad networks like Google AdSense pay a small, pitiful amount (in "CPMs" - thats how ad units are measured) while on the other end of the spectrum deploying a direct sales force to get a higher CPM is something that is just beyond the reach of smaller publishers. As a result, a lot of potential ad inventory out there on the web never gets monetized properly.

This is where Toronto-based Shiny Ads comes in. It provides a white-label product which enables publishers to engage directly with advertisers. Publishers can set the ad prices themselves', while advertisers can use features like the banner builder to quickly create ad banners, without having to go through the process of finding a designer, etc. The entire interaction happens on the publisher's website, in an embedded widget - so it is a seamless experience for the advertiser - from clicking on the 'advertise' button to quickly creating a banner ad to making the payment (Shiny Ads processes the payment and pays publishers automatically on a daily basis). Click here to see a demo. Here's a screenshot of the nifty little banner builder (it might seem like a minor thing, but goes to show how much thought has gone into making the whole experience as beneficial to publishers and advertisers alike):

Here's more from the company's website:

Our Self-Serve Advertising platform allows publishers to control the ad purchase process by directly offering an ad purchase system to their advertisers. It allows small and local (long-tail) advertisers to quickly and easily purchase advertising without the need of special knowledge of industry terminology, graphic designers, or a large budget. Through our patent-pending automated advertising management back-end process, payment is reconciled, banners are inserted into the publisher's ad server, advertiser's campaigns are monitored, and publishers are paid nightly.

Shiny Ads was founded earlier this year by Roy Pereira, who many in Toronto's start-up community would know for his efforts in organizing the incredibly popular Facebook Developer Camps in town, among other events. Roy has been involved with 5 start-ups till date, including venture-backed firms and spent a few years working in Silicon Valley for Cisco, until he returned to T.O. a few years ago.

Shiny Ads has been off to a great start, with deviantART, one of the most visited websites out there, rolling out their offering (see link). If you are a web publisher, check them out at www.shinyads.com and you might find a way to further monetize your site. Regarding the name "Shiny"...I asked Roy that question but soon realized....it already has your attention too, doesn't it ? :P

Eqentia Brings Custom News To Life

How do you keep track of news on specific topics ? For example, if you are interested in what various tech VCs are saying - sure, you could subscribe to the different RSS feeds in your reader and track the updates. Or, you can do it the Eqentia way - which involves simply going to a custom portal around that topic created by Eqentia. For eg, you can go to a site like http://portal.eqentia.com/techvc where news from the world of tech VCs gets aggregated and updated automatically on the user's screen as and when data comes in. This home page displays news articles and twitter updates on the topic, alongwith various stats, which are pretty detailed and lets just say rather amazing as they even show the geographic origin of the stories and various other graphs on the news and trends. Here's a screenshot:

Toronto-based Eqentia was founded by William Mougayar, who has been in the management consulting industry for over a decade and was more recently the VP of Global Marketing at Cognizant. Previously, William also has been a writer at Business 2.0 magazine. Back in the summer of 2008, he felt the need for a customizable news platform and Eqentia was born.

Apart from offering such out-of-the-box portals on various selected topics, Eqentia's core business opportunity seems to lie in the enterprise space where organizations / groups can configure it as an internal news dashboard on specific topics. From the corporate profile:

Eqentia’s Enterprise Platform is a rapid-deployment Software-as-a-Service solution that can be installed in matter of days. It includes the following integrated functional capabilities:

- Text Mining
- Semantic Entities
- News Aggregation
- Text Parsing
- Sources Management
- Portal Display
- Analytics
- Content Interchange

Check it out at www.eqentia.com.

Telus Launches iPhone Today - Rogers Exclusivity Broken In Canada

Telus has debuted the iPhone today. Drumrolls..

Apple initially launched the iPhone in Canada exclusively with Rogers as it was the only GSM network in the country. Bell and Telus, however, had together been building up their next generation HSPA network (which could support the iPhone) so it was only a matter of time before they broke through the ranks and contract negotations with Apple to offer the iPhone to Canadians.

Given that its still not happened in the US, where AT&T is still the exclusive carrier - goes to show that Rogers simply got outmaneuvered by Bell and Telus. Rogers' exclusive lock on the iPhone is Canada has been broken, and consumers now have more choice - even though the pricing has been kept the same (iPhone 3GS 16GB available for $199 on a 3 yr contract from Telus as well), the choice of the carrier and customer service, etc is now available. For a slightly more technical understanding of the move towards next generation wireless networks, check out this article by AppleInsider.com.

What's Going On At MaRS

The following are selected excerpts from the bi-weekly MaRS Centre newsletter dated Nov 3rd '09:

Six successes in New York City

Last week, MaRS took six Ontario companies on a trip to the 2009 Life Sciences and Healthcare Venture Summit in NYC. The Ontario delegation made up 10 per cent of all presenting companies – an excellent south-of-the-border showing of small, young and innovative Canadian companies.

Thinking Green: An Evening with Al Gore

To celebrate the official opening Canada's newest and greenest conference centre, Allstream presents Thinking Green: An Evening with Al Gore on November 24, 2009. Former Vice President Al Gore, one of the world's most influential speakers on the environment, will deliver the keynote, "Thinking Green: Economic Strategy for the 21st Century." This event will include a Green Gallery of Innovation & Technology where MaRS will showcase leading clean technology companies Clean Energy Developments, Echologics and Skymeter amid top-level corporate exhibitors.

Events @ MaRS Centre

November 3 : Towards an Ontario Strategy: A symposium on neuropathic pain
November 4 : Charging Forward: Opportunities in the Energy Storage Market
November 4 : CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 Building a Business Model, Speaker: Don Duval, Vice President, Business Services, MaRS
November 5 : Novel Ideas @ MaRS, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
November 5 : MaRS Best Practices Series - How to draft a patent Presented and Produced by Ogilvy Renault
November 11: CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 Negotiations Speaker: Michael Erdle
November 12: MaRS Future of Medicine Conference Presented by AstraZeneca
November 13: MaRS Future of Medicine Series - Targeting Alzheimer's Disease Progression from a lead molecule to clinical development

Community and Partner Events

November 3: DIG London Conference 2009 (London, ON)
November 3: DesignThinkers 2009 (Toronto)
November 4: OCAD - From Margin to Mainstream: Refashioning women's 'informal' sector work in the Philippines (Toronto)
November 4: Toronto Showcase - 1
November 5: Accessing $150-million fund for Mobile Software, Infrastructure: Teleforum (online)
November 5: IP Osgoode - Mapping Online Privacy (Toronto)
November 5: Unfinished Business Lecture Series - Nathan Shedroff: Design is the problem (Toronto)
November 6: The 2nd Annual Women and IP Roundtable: Finding the elusive balance in intellectual property (Toronto)
November 9: Toronto Forum for Global Cities (Toronto)
November 9: Annual CGHR Global Health Lecture Economicst to the Rescue? What does the dismal science offer for global health? (Toronto)

Click here for more details about these events.

Funding Fundamentals - From GameON Finance '09

The 3rd annual GameOn Finance organized by Interactive Ontario wrapped up in Toronto last week - after two days of various sessions and panel discussions on the gaming industry which brought together game developers and investors alike.

Scott Dodson, Chief Executive of Divide by Zero Games and a serial, wait.."chronic" entrepreneur (in his own words..) gave a presentation on what budding entrepreneurs need to know about the whole funding process. Now he mentioned he wasn't a MBA, CPA or an attorney, but he simply had a keen sense as a gamer himself and learned about the financial aspects with that as the base. Here are some key points from his talk:

Making a company fundable involves:

Structuring it properly - from filing for incorporation to setting up an initial "cap table".
The team. Single-founder companies often get ignored. And its good to have a balance of technical and business co-founders.
Defining the market and what pain your company / product is going to tackle.
Getting your documentation in order - business plan, executive summary, financial plan.

Structuring an offering:

Equity - Preferred Series A, where types of preferences could include liquidation, conversion, voting, dividend and dilution.
Or..debt - Typically a convertible note. No argument over valuation, lower risk for investor

Sources of capital:

VCs: Typically make investments of $3M+, with 7-10x return expectations. Entrepreneurs need to be aware of the VC fund lifecyle and focus. VCs want opportunities which can be very big and prefer working with people they know and trust and strong, veteran leadership.
Angels: Earlier stage source of capital - investment size $10k - $500k ($25k - $50k avg per angel), with 3-10x return expectations. Raising funding from angels would require many closing conversations as the amount each angel invests is often a fraction of the total amount which needs to be raised. Angels also want to work with people they trust (no surprises there..), to be excited about the business / be a part of something and of course, to understand how and when they can get a return on their investment. Listing of angels: http://www.angelinvestor.ca/Angel_Directory.asp

Other tips:

Focus on the business, not the product.
Practice your pitch.
Remember that investors are investing in *you* - have to be willing to put yourself on the line!

TicketFlow Launches Suggestion Engine

Toronto-based TicketFlow is increasingly becoming the place to go if you are looking to find the best deals on tickets - whether it be sports or some concert. They recently launched a new feature called "SuggestionFlow" to help users find events based on their preferences and other criteria such as budget and timeframe. Here's a screenshot:

Check out this newly published demo by the TicketFlow team to understand what its all about and how it works: