By Francis Moran
We’ve written a couple of posts about the wisdom of continuing marketing activities through the summer months when, it is broadly assumed, everyone is on vacation and so not paying attention to such things. Our consistent counsel has been to maintain a steady level of activity since not everyone is on holiday at the same time, mind share is a highly perishable commodity that needs constant refreshing and you might even gain a leg up on the competition that put its marketing on a summer hiatus.
One area where this does not apply seems to be our own business development activities, which are largely based on networking and getting out where we know we’ll meet technology companies. There are precious few such events during the summer months and this isn’t entirely a bad thing since it vastly reduces the time I need to spend, especially in the evening hours, doing the networking thing.
But man, I tell you, come Labour Day and the whole tune changes, and this year seems to be even more pronounced than usual. I don’t know whose hand was on the dial this year but the volume has been cranked way up.
Here in our home town, The Ottawa Network has introduced a new schedule of events that gives us somewhere to go every Wednesday evening. Judging from the numbers turning out so far, they’ve hit on topics and approaches that are drawing a good crowd.
OCRI, of course, greeted September with a new season of programming and we’re regular attendees at many of these. On the private-sector side, Ian Graham of The Code Factory — and a client of inmedia‘s — has a pretty full calendar of activities at his downtown business incubator.
The start-up community here in Ottawa and elsewhere is also newly galvanized. We’re looking forward to Ottawa’s first DemoCamp of the season, the city’s 10th edition of the wonderfully grassroots event that sees six new companies show off their product or application and get feedback from a room of their peers.
On a somewhat larger scale, the superb Toronto-based blog startupnorth.ca is organizing a two-day conference it has grandly titled Startup Empire. Featuring two days of workshops, speakers and networking “by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs,” the event takes place November 13 and 14 at The Diesel Playhouse in Toronto.
I don’t know if I’ll make it to Startup Empire but I’ll seize any good reason to go to Montreal if only because it provides the opportunity to tuck into the best smoked meat on the planet at Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen. On November 27, there’ll be a lot more than good brisket bringing me to town, however. inmedia has singed on as sponsors of StartupCampMontreal3, which will see scores of new companies compete to be one of five that will formally present to what organizers hope will be hundreds of attendees. This is our first interaction with the Montreal startup community and I’m very much looking forward to it.
Also on the list of firsts for inmedia was the foray I made down to Waterloo a couple of weeks ago to attend the official launch of the University of Waterloo’s VeloCity residence and to also drop in on the exciting and so-successful-it’s-bursting-at-the-seams Accelerator Centre. I blogged about this visit and will keep you up to date as I return to VeloCity October 16 for a presentation on public relations.
And, last but not least, my time at the Red Herring Canada Conference 08 at the beginning of last week yielded not only a well-read blog post on the antics of organizer Alex Vieux but also introductions to a couple of dozen new companies.
Bottom line: We’re less than a month into the new networking season and this PR guy has one full dance card. Let’s hope these trade winds steer me into some high-value ports.
By Francis Moran
I already wrote a post at Dangletech.com, where I try to contribute weekly, about the most fascinating highlight the Red Herring Canada 08 conference held earlier this week at Mont Tremblant. For my money, the best entertainment was the riveting behaviour of Red Herring publisher and CEO Alex Vieux who dominated the event with his bewildering mix of brilliant observation, insightful analysis and boorish, insulting and condescending treatment of those who paid big bucks to attend.
But there was, fortunately, more of value beyond Vieux’s theatrics and here, in no particular order other than how they appear in my notebook, are some of the better gems from nearly two days of presentations, round tables and corridor chitchat at an event focused on technology startups and the venture capitalists they pursue for funding.
Miranda Technology Inc. chairman Brian Edwards said there is a “liquidity crisis in Canada,” leading many funds-seeking companies to consider going the capital pool company route on the TSX-Venture Exchange. “That’s pretty scary to me.” And while he applauded that lots of government money is going into research in Canadian universities, he said there is “very little management of that money. … We need to bet on the creation” of new companies.
Jacques Bernier, senior vice-president at Fonds de solidarité FTQ, was equally skeptical of the temptations of an early or inadequate IPO. “We won’t touch” a company that goes public on the venture exchange for its first million dollars or so and then comes to his firm looking for more. Being public “puts the focus entirely on the wrong place,” he said.
Mike Grandinetti, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, said too many companies looking for funding have “an unhealthy focus on not wanting to dilute” the founders’ ownership. If you’re in it to win, he said, retaining less than 50% ownership — sometimes much less — should not be an issue. As for the view that markets are too unsettled or times are too tough, “turbulence creates opportunity,” he said.
RBC Venture Partners managing director Robert Antoniades agreed with Grandinetti on founders accepting lower stakes in their companies, saying, “You can be a very successful entrepreneur with 10% ownership.” He cautioned founders not to try to remake a “VC process (that) is well understood.”
The critical role marketing plays in the early development and revenue growth of a young company was emphasized by Yahoo Canada general manager Kerry Munro. He encouraged companies to boost their marketing spend when the economy turns sour. “Marketing is the first thing you cut in times of trouble,” he said. “It should be the first thing you invest in in times of opportunity.”
The challenge, he added, is to see marketing in a new light. “Most companies in Canada look at it as a cost and not as an investment.”
One Ottawa CEO who successfully found venture backing earlier this year told the conference he did not share any belief that money is not available, so long as the idea being pitched is worthy. “If you want to raise VC money, you’d better come up with an idea that’s VC-fundable,” said OverlayTV’s Rob Lane, something he defined as having the potential of being worth $100 million some day.
By Francis Moran
I had dinner Friday night with about 70 students and several other folk at the University of Waterloo as the school celebrated the official opening of its innovative VeloCity, a mash-up of student residence and business incubator. The energy in the room, as one speaker put it, was electric and I was blown away by the enthusiasm of the students, the speed with which the university brought this facility from concept to reality, and the massive support shown for it by a wide swath of the Waterloo business community. The prime rib was pretty good, too.
I wrote about this so-called “dormcubator” when it was first announced earlier this year. I said at that time that I’d “keep an eye on this initiative and let our readers know how it’s working.” Well, I did one better than that. That same day, I emailed the organizers and offered to help out in any way we could. Contrary to my expectation that, being a university, they’d take their time responding, I heard back scant hours later from VeloCity founder and director Sean Van Koughnett. Sean took me up on my offer and now inmedia Public Relations is a partner with VeloCity, along with such exalted company as Google, Microsoft, Rogers Wireless and what looks like most of the Waterloo-area technology and entrepreneurship brain trust. I’ll be back on campus next month to deliver a session on media and analyst relations.
Sean, who has been at Waterloo for only about a year, said the genesis for VeloCity lay in his wondering “where will the next innovations in technology come from?” The answer for him was that innovation “will come from students” and he set out to create a facility that “cluster(s) talent and ambition in one place.”
The speed with which his vision was realized strikes me as nothing short of breath-taking, even allowing for the fact that, as Sean pointed out when he showed me around Friday afternoon, a glass wall had been installed just the day before, the furniture in the great hall was borrowed from elsewhere on campus and a couple of other finer touches have yet to be completed. The 70 students are housed in a traditional student residence but have access to a state-of-the-art mobile-device lab outfitted by Rogers with a few dozen of the latest cell phones, smart phones and other handheld equipment. There is also a boardroom for presentations and a great hall for social events and larger presentations, and the entire facility was rewired over the summer to support its focus on applications in mobile communications, the web and new media.
The students are expected to form teams and develop business ideas that will be evaluated every term by a panel of business people who can, as the facility’s web site says, “help take things to the next level.”
If Ayushi Patel is at all an example of the rest of the students, get ready for a torrent of new ventures. This spark-plug of energy and excitement and a third-year honours economics major told me she was working with a group of students who had already met to brainstorm ideas and were working towards soon finalizing the first one they’ll pursue.
It’s an impressive facility with an ambitious mandate, but one that synchronizes nicely with the university’s pro-business-creation attitude. I don’t know how unique Waterloo is with what one speaker called its “creator-owned IP policy,” the philosophy that if you develop something of commercial value while a student, faculty or staffer at the university, you own it, and the school doesn’t try to hone in on your action with licensing or partnering demands.
I intend to get to know Waterloo, both town and school, and its technology community better. This was my very first visit to the city that spawned Research in Motion Ltd., Open Text Corporation, Sandvine Inc. and many other companies that trace their roots back to university-based research. While there Friday, I also dropped in to the very impressive Accelerator Centre housed in the Waterloo Research and Technology Park across the road from the university. (My thanks to Claude Haw of Venture Coaches for insisting I go see the centre.) I have an invitation from operations director Tim Ellis to come back and do a PR lunch-and-learn for the centre’s dozen or so client companies, something I’m very much looking forward to doing.
By Francis Moran
In a remarkable combination of innovative journalism, corporate branding and GPS technology, the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation has embarked on a unique voyage of discovery that will see a BBC-branded, GPS-equipped standard shipping container quietly go about its business for a year, all the while beaming its coordinates back to the Beeb where its journey around the world will be tracked.
Members of the public can follow its journey on a special BBC web page. As of my writing this post, the container was just west of our Glasgow-based colleague, Danny Sullivan, where it was picking up its first cargo of — what else! — Scotch whisky. From there, it will go to the huge seaport of Southampton in southern England and from there to Asia. The BBC is hopeful the container will visit every corner of the globe, and that it will not wash overboard. Its correspondents will use the container as a continuing thread to pull together a series of stories that illustrate how goods are manufactured and shipped around the world and the lives of the people involved in doing so.
I was immediately attracted to this story. I have long had a fascination with TEUs, short for 20-foot-equivalent units, the proper name for the ubiquitous intermodal container that has revolutionized the global cargo industry, and the massive vessels that carry them from port to port.
One of the more memorable events I covered as a journalist in Halifax was the arrival of the first so-called 3G, for third-generation, container ship to visit that port. The night before, another reporter and I had been guests at a schnapps-fuelled reception thrown by a Swedish trade mission and then, on very few hours sleep and far too much aquavit, we caught a 6 a.m. harbour tug that was to meet the goliath of a vessel off Chebucto Head at the entrance to Halifax Harbour.
There have been few hangovers as memorable as the one that visited me as I fought for my sea legs on the aft deck of a diesel-driven tug boat out on the freezing cold and choppy waters of Halifax Harbour, all the while focusing a long telephoto lens on the coastline, the other harbour traffic and, of course, the huge ship we towed into Fairview Container Pier.
What I wouldn’t do for a good story and a great picture when I was young and foolish!
By Francis Moran
Those of you among our clients who had Linda Forrest working on your account have been missing her outstanding services these past several weeks because she booked off on maternity leave at the end of July. We’re delighted to announce that her latest project, a joint venture with husband Jack Forrest, has now been successfully launched. Little Parker Simon Edward Forrest came tumbling into the world, healthy if a touch late, on Wednesday of last week.
Linda, who is well used to clients who set, and then never meet, deadlines, managed little Parker’s protracted arrival with the self-same aplomb and reports that he is “a very agreeable baby.”
Like many agencies, inmedia has been staffed mainly by young women over the past 10 years and yet, this is the very first birth to a full-time inmedianaut. So forgive us if we treat it as a very special occasion.
Congratulations, Linda and Jack. Now get that little guy in here so we can properly look him over!
