CRTC Searches for Sustainable Solution to Telecommunications Needs of Disabled Canadians

The Canadan Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission continues its search for a "sustainable solution" to the telecommunications needs of Canadians with hearing and speech disabilities.

"Text relay services available nationwide meet the needs of the vast majority of people with such disabilities," the CRTC says. "However, people with disabilities who use a sign language as their first or primary language have submitted that video relay, a sign-language service, would better meet their needs." So the CRTC has decided that further study is required to better understand the different projections regarding use and cost of the service.

read more

Martin Ouellet, Who Sold Taleo for $1.9 Billion, Recalls His Startup Experiences

Martin Ouellet was the founder of Taleo Corporation, a global leader in HR management software and a provider of cloud-based talent management.  He led growth, funding, and web application development in the early years. Later, as CTO, Martin led product design, strategy, and development; he was also a member of Taleo’s Board of Directors from 1996 to 2005. He exited through a $1.9 billion acquisition from Oracle this year.

read more

Drupal Business Summit Comes to Toronto May 29

Myplanet Digital is presenting the Drupal Business Summit Series in Toronto, Boston, and New York. Toronto’s event will run on May 29 and is free to attend. There are limited spaces, but you can still register here.

“As more enterprises, non-profits and government organizations move towards open source tools, such as Drupal, we are seeing an increased demand for understanding how to leverage these tools in real-world business scenarios," explains Jason Cottrell, the managing director of Myplanet. "Drupal can lower the total cost of ownership while remaining dynamic and adaptable to different types of mobile and non-mobile device types, which is why the demand is growing so quickly.”

read more

Beyond the Rack's Yona Shtern Shares Advice for Entrepreneurs at Accelerate MTL 2012

Yona Shtern is the co-founder and CEO of Beyond the Rack, a Canadian startup that was named the fastest growing E-tailer in the US in 2011 by Internet Retailer Magazine. He has been an entrepreneur for over 10 years and is a frequent speaker and panelist at international marketing and technology conferences. He has also received numerous awards for his advertising, product launch, and marketing strategies.

read more

Is Facebook Going to Launch its Own Web Browser?

This week, Yahoo launched Axis, its own web browser. Considering Yahoo's eroding reputation, and the fact that many sleek and popular web browsers like Chrome and Firefox are already well established, it will be a steep uphill climb for Axis.

But Axis may not be alone in attempting to enter this fragmented, oversaturated space: Facebook is now rumoured to be in talks with Opera over a potential acquisition that would see the social network repolish the web browser into its own - not unlike how it bought Instagram, then launched a mobile app called Facebook Camera.

read more

Ottawa's RentingWell is Like FreshBooks for Property Managers

Toronto's FreshBooks has established itself as a world-class web platform to create, send, and manage invoices online. Ottawa's Sliced Bread has concocted a platform that could achieve the same success in the property management space.

Sliced Bread, an app studio formed in 2010, announced the private beta of RentingWell in April. We snagged a beta code to test the platform and first impressions were strong.

read more

QuickMobile Launches Analytics Dashboard with Real-Time Data for Event Marketers

Event marketers and organizers will now have access to real-time analytics data to improve event logistics and measure success with the release of QuickMobile’s new Analytics Dashboard. Accessible through the Vancouver startup's content management system, the new dashboard is available to all customers and delivers hourly updates of data captured from event attendees’ use of QuickMobile’s mobile meeting apps.

read more

Google Becoming Irrelevant: Social Search to Own 70% of Searching by 2013

Google’s search marketing services may be becoming irrelevant due to the rise of social search. That’s in addition to a failure to recognize that Google+ cannot be the sole solution to social search with an always increasing number of web properties.

Info-Tech Research Group expects that Google, which held 90% of the search market in 2010, will only hold 30% in 2013, due to the rising impact of social search. Most major research companies have struggled to recognize this as they measure search market share by search engine rather than the whole search paradigm.

read more

Canadian Startups Share Stories of Success and Failure at Mesh 2012

Yesterday marked Day 2 of the Mesh12 Conference in Toronto, Ontario. There were some inspiring and passionate presentations during the morning session, with speakers like Rebecca MacKinnon, author of The Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, David Weinberger, co-author of Too Big to Know and The Cluetrain Manifesto, and Canadian Dr. Michael Evans, founder of the New Health Design Lab.

Mesh12 Conference organizers Mark Evans and Stuart MacDonald moderated an afternoon breakout Q&A session entitled “Tales from the Trenches. Stories from Startups” which boasted an impressive list of Canadian startup founder speakers including: Aliza Pulver, Andy Yang, Evgeny Tchebotarev, Dups Wijayawardhana and Heather Payne.

Below are their stories – from getting started to surviving the twists and turns of running a business:

read more