Toronto's Polar Mobile today announced a $6 million funding round led by Georgian Partners.
The new funding adds to more than $3 million invested to-date from private investors and is being used to expand globally and launch MediaEverywhere, a new product line that they hope will transform the media industry.
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The 15th Canadian Finacing Forum is fast approaching and takes place in Vancouver on February 2nd and 3rd at the Fairmont Pacific Rim.
The Financing Forum facilitates relationship building between entrepreneurs and leading venture capital and corporate investors, paving the way for company financings that ultimately sustain economic growth through new business creation and development.
This year's panel sessions have been finalized and they look great. Check them out after the jump.
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The Canadian gaming sector has risen to become one of the strongest in the world and leaders like Albert Lai of Big Viking Games and Alex Sakiz of Gamerizon are examples of how multi-million dollar gaming dreams can become reality in Canada.
A lot of credit for the suddenly thriving Canadian gaming sector compared to a few years ago goes to the extremely generous tax credit programs that attract world-class talent to the country to help out the existing 432 or so companies in the space which Lai says is enough to pay 5000 employees.
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Vancouver's Summify announced this morning on their blog that they have been acquired by Twitter.
Congrats to Romanian co-founders Mircea Pașoi and Cristian Strat (pictured below). Terms of the transaction are not known at this time.
Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.
But don't worry Summify fans, the current product won't be shelved anytime soon although they have disabled new account registration and will be removing a number of key features.
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What does the new generation of tech entrepreneurs need to start their companies? Not much - a computer, some software, internet access, spare time... oh, and rare talent combined with a brilliant idea, of course.
The new generation of highly successful entrepreneurs is worth studying - and as H&R Block decided, worth publishing an infographic about. With multi-billionaire Facebook founder and 2010 Time Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg at the head of the table, we look at him and a slew of other success stories.
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This past November at the 18th Under the Radar conference five startups represented Canada and one took home an award.
Toronto's Rypple and Wave Accounting, Waterloo's TribeHR and Vidyard, and Halifax's GoInstant were among 29 startups pitching at the two-day innovation showcase and business development conference. TribeHR picked up the Judge's Choice award in the Talent 2.0 category.
Now's your chance to get some exposure in the Californian sun as event organizers are calling for companies to present at the 19th Under the Radar conference in Mountain View on April 25-26th.
The deadline to apply is January 20th and this time around they're interested in your company if it falls into one of these categories - Platforms, Big Data, Developer Tools, Analytics/BI, Mobile, Enabling Tools, Infrastructure, Automation, and Performance Management.
Not sure if you're up for it? Check out these event stats:
Enough said.
Can lightning strike twice for Bluestone.vc and Tyler Nelson? The Vancouver-based venture capital firm announced yesterday a new investment in Vancouver's MoneyBar Rewards and has recruited Nelson to join the company as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.
In 2009, the venture firm brought Nelson into marketing firm Silverback Media, which was re-branded as Adenyo and sold to Motricity for $100 Million earlier this year.
Nelson brings over 20 years of experience building, scaling and globalizing successful technology companies. Prior to Adenyo, Tyler held senior executive positions at leading Canadian technology companies including Research In Motion, Bridgewater Systems and QNX Software Systems.
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This morning we opened voting to The First Annual Canadian Startup Awards and among the categories is the Most Significant Canadian Acquisition of 2011.
Unlike the five other Startup Award categories, the list of candidates was limited as there were only so many acquisitons during the year. Luckily Canada had a huge year and our readers had plenty to choose from. And you can vote for one of the three finalists here.
As a Canadian tech site we're happy to report that we had acquisiton activity from coast-to-coast with Zynga shopping in Victoria, BC on Vancouver Island and both Salesforce and IBM taking their shopping cart to Frederiction, New Brunswick. Not surprisingly Toronto lead the way with 16 acquisitions followed by Techvibes hometown Vancouver with seven, Montreal with four, Waterloo with three, and Edmonton and Ottawa with one each.
Of the multinationals shopping in Canada for tech, IBM led the way with three acquistions followed by Google, RiM, Salesforce, and Zynga with two each. Twitter and Groupon also picked up Canadian technology in single deals.
After the jump is a timeline of all the acquisitions that Techvibes covered during 2011.
read moreSoundcloud, known as the "YouTube for audio" ranks 281st in Canada and 364th globally according to Alexa. Techcrunch reports they've acquired a new round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers at $50 million with a company valuation of $200 million.
Gigaom also reports that the mobile app that SoundCloud released has added another million people to the platform.
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With so many talented entrepreneurs and innovative startups right here in Canada, Techvibes deemed it a necessity to recognize, honour, and celebrate these people and their companies. Presented by KPMG, The First Annual Canadian Startup Awards will do that.
Techvibes received well over 1,000 nominations across the six categories via comment, email and tweet. So the finalists were determined by you, our readers. In the case of the overall startup category we weren't able to narrow if down to three finalists which demonstrates the high quality of the current crop of Canadian startups.
Voting is open until 11:59pm PST on Tuesday, January 17th and the winners will be announced on Friday, January 20th. One vote per person.