By Francis Moran
Former Canadian Olympic gold medalist and chef de mission Mark Tewksbury gave a keynote address at the National Angel Capital Organization‘s summit in Halifax in late October. In urging that Canadian business adopt the Olympic movement’s Own the Podium approach that sees athlete funding going disproportionately to those who show the best promise of winning a medal, Tewksbury said we have to move away from the old Canadian funding model. That approach, he said, sees government spread its limited funds across too many recipients, ensuring that nobody starves but also that nobody gets the resources they really need to succeed. As Tewksbury put it, funding before Own the Podium was “one for me, one for you,” ensuring “one for me-diocrity.”
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By Francis Moran
There’s been a growing amount of attention paid recently to the surge in interest by startups in working on enterprise-grade products and services rather than the quick-to-market consumer and web applications that for so long seemed to dominate pitch contests, accelerator program cohorts and media attention.
“Enterprise is getting sexy,” Kevin Rose of Google Ventures said recently. Bernard Lunn has done a 180 on his 10-year-old requiem for enterprise software, saying it didn’t die, it just went into a coma from which it is now recovering. Enterprises, Lunn said, “cannot simply empower every employee with consumer web type tools and hope they all pull together to grow the profits.” Our own Jesse Rodgers wrote earlier this week about the allure of building enterprise products, saying that opportunities in the enterprise are being driven by the BYOD movement that is requiring IT departments to deliver better tools, a higher expectation of a better user experience than that delivered by stodgy old enterprise software, and an easing of the once-onerous burden associated with the enterprise sale.
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By Francis Moran
The National Angel Capital Organization’s Angel Summit, an annual gathering of those critical early-stage backers of new ventures, will wing its way to my former home town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, next week for three days of professional development workshops, company pitches and networking. As has been the case for the past few years, I will be there to report on the latest news and trends out of this important investment community.
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By Francis Moran 
For the past couple of years, with more than a little envy that we haven’t a similar facility here in Ottawa, I have been watching Notman House in Montreal slowly coalesce as a critical locus for that city’s startup, entrepreneur and diverse geek, maker and hacker communities.
For those not familiar with Notman, it’s a rambling old rabbit warren of a place that was built in the mid-1800s and, until 1991, was operated as a hospital for the terminally ill. More recently, the OSMO Foundation, a group of community-minded people, has opened the house up to the broader startup community. In the last year alone, the house has hosted more than 125 events, including user group meet-ups hackathons, and learning events, been home to over 50 startups, and been visited by over 10,000 entrepreneurs, investors, students and others involved in the growing Montreal tech scene. The OSMO Foundation has been trying to raise the funds necessary to build and refurbish both the main building and a large, even more dilapidated, brick building behind it, and operate them as a not-for-profit hub for Montreal’s startup community. This week, they announced they are within $100,000 of completing their fundraising goal, and they’re asking for community support to get them over the finish line.
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My firm, has developed a meaningful relationship as a supplier of mobile applications to governments at the municipal and federal level over the past two years. Given the integration of social and location-based information into our applications, we have been the defacto leader in implementing what is termed SoLoMo (or Social, Mobile, Local) with these institutions and borne witness to their trials and successes in leveraging mobile technology to engage with their constituents.
SoLoMo:
Powered by open dataThe past four years have seen an incredible demand for governments to move towards “open data,” whereby they can stream municipal and federal data into the public’s hands permitting them to create “mashup” applications that, for example, can juxtapose police crime reports against neighborhood maps. And while I always suspected that neighbor who never mowed his lawn or opened his curtains was growing weed in his basement, open data managed to confirm it! This mashup trend first materialized on websites, and over the past two years, as mobile devices became the preferred mechanism for accessing the Internet, has become the basis of mobile application contests. Here the municipality or government runs a competition to see who can make the best mobile application out of the open data sources they have released to the public.
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By Francis Moran
