Today is the last day that TechCrunch is taking nominations for their 2011 Crunchies.

This year's Crunchies are the fifth annual competition and award ceremony recognizing and celebrating the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.

Thanks to Bob Chaworth-Musters of the Angel Forum, Vancouver-based angel investor Boris Wertz might have a shot to be recognized down south in the Angel of the Year Category.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.