By Francis Moran
A few years back, my pal Ian Graham acquainted me with his “law of three.” If any subject or person or issue crosses Graham’s attention three times in relatively short order, he believes he ought to pay attention to it. It’s an intriguing notion that I have found plays out in my own life more often than I might expect. Graham’s law intersected last night with my colleague Leo Valiquette’s piece earlier this week about “the mocking white glare of an empty page.” Having begged off posting yesterday to finish a client project and faced with having to produce a post for today, I was struck by an article I read about Canadian movie house Alliance Films seeking to charge Canadian journalists as much as €2,500 for interviews with bold-name stars such as Brad Pitt at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It was the third article I read this week about interesting and controversial developments in modern journalism and, not wishing to be mocked either by my empty screen or by my hardacre blog editor, the idea for this post was clumsily conceived.
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By Francis Moran
I have shamelessly adapted the headline of this post from a Wall Street Journal article I read on the weekend that reviewed two excellent books tracking the ascendancy of Africa over the past decade and predicting that the continent’s rise as an economic force to be reckoned with would continue in similar fashion for the next decade. Acknowledging the structural problems many African countries face on the political front, one of the reviewed authors was quoted as writing, “there is no magic recipe for turning countries around, only good cooks.”
The sharp application of the sentiment to the founding of companies was immediately and forcefully impressed upon me. There is no magic recipe for a successful company. There are only good cooks.
When I founded inmedia Public Relations at the height of the telecom boom in late 1998, I used to say our template client was “three engineers, a brilliant idea and $10 to $15-million in U.S. venture capital.” We were seeing these companies form at the rate of several a month, and I thought they were all going to succeed.
Boy, was I wrong.
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By Francis Moran
Regular readers of this blog will know that I spend a fair bit of time in the Waterloo region where both the buzz and the substance of the startup scene seem to get louder and more solid every day. (And before folks in Ottawa think I’m ignoring my hometown, let me acknowledge the high-energy, very high-volume event at The Hub last night where the Capital Angel Network brought together an extraordinary collection of entrepreneurs, angel investors and an encouraging cross-section of the local ecosystem. I left quite hoarse from all the fantastic conversations I had, many of which revolved around great things happening on the Ottawa scene.)
I spent much of last week in Kitchener-Waterloo, however, and, as always, came away with a bunch of favourable impressions.
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This is the sixth article in a continuing monthly series chronicling the growth path of Screenreach Interactive, a startup based in Newcastle upon Tyne in England’s North East. Screenreach’s flagship product, Screach, is an interactive digital media platform that allows users to create real-time, two-way interactive experiences between a smart device (through the Screach app) and any content, on any screen or just within the mobile device itself. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Alexandra Reid
When we last checked in with Screenreach, the company was in the midst of tweaking the new version of its Screach application for a March 7 launch. The team was well on track and seemed to have all of its ducks in a row. They had found out what their market needed, solicited feedback from beta testers, sharpened their story, identified qualified customers, worked collaboratively, promoted their product and garnered media attention.
But as can be expected at a startup company, things didn’t go completely as planned. On launch day, the Apple application store informed the team that there was a problem.
In this post, Screenreach CEO Paul Rawlings explains what the team did to push through to launch.
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By Francis Moran
FounderFuel is a Montreal-based startup accelerator for which I have been a mentor through its first two cohorts. I recently caught up with John Stokes, a partner with Real Ventures, the seed-stage venture firm behind FounderFuel. Following is an edited and condensed version of our conversation. I started by asking John how FounderFuel was going in general, now that it was well into its second cohort of teams.
“Most of the people involved here, certainly myself and (Real Venture general partner) Alan (MacIntosh), have been pretty involved in other accelerator programs to one extent or another. But when you are running on your own and you really get down to brass tacks, there’s always more to it than you see. We took a long time to decide when we were ready to do it, and I think that decision, that preparation was worth while.
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A few years back, my pal Ian Graham acquainted me with his “law of three.” If any subject or person or issue crosses Graham’s attention three times in relatively short order, he believes he ought to pay attention to it. It’s an intriguing notion that I have found plays out in my own life more often than I might expect. Graham’s law intersected last night with my colleague Leo Valiquette’s piece earlier this week about “the mocking white glare of an empty page.” Having begged off posting yesterday to finish a client project and faced with having to produce a post for today, I was struck by an article I read about Canadian movie house Alliance Films seeking to charge Canadian journalists as much as €2,500 for interviews with bold-name stars such as Brad Pitt at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It was the third article I read this week about interesting and controversial developments in modern journalism and, not wishing to be mocked either by my empty screen or by my hardacre blog editor, the idea for this post was clumsily conceived.
