By Francis Moran
Last week was quite an extraordinary one for Ottawa’s start-up community.
Wow. When was the last time over the past six or eight or 10 years that I could make a bold statement like that and not have the guys in the white coats start measuring me for a jacket that buckles in the back?
And no, I’m not referring to a spate of product launches or company foundings or even venture capital funding announcements that would have been the basis of such enthusiasm in the past when Ottawa’s technology sector was dominated by capital-intensive efforts to invent a better telecom system or new semiconductor.
Instead, my enthusiasm today comes from a series of events we attended last week, all of which we blogged about and all of which contributed to a subtle but undeniable sense that something very exciting is afoot.
On Monday, I joined a warm and standing-room-only crowd at DemoCampOttawa9, where developers from six companies demonstrated their applications and received scads of intelligent, creative and constructively critical feedback from their peers.
Tuesday night, several generations of Ottawa technology entrepreneurs helped Ian Graham celebrate the official opening of his novel and creative co-working and collaboration space, TheCodeFactory. A series of short speeches was book-ended by veteran Denzil Doyle and emerging company founder Scott Lake. We here at inmediaare such big fans of what Ian is doing that we’ve signed on as founding partners of TheCodeFactory and we’ll be watching with more than passing interest as he builds a facility that is much needed in this town.
Wednesday night was The Ottawa Network‘s regular monthly Start-up Drop-in at LaBarge Weinstein and this was when the penny really dropped for me. As I wrote here Friday, every speaker was, among other things, sounding the consistent notes that Ottawa’s start-up community is focused on exciting new opportunities in the online world, is actively supporting its individual members and is building a broadly collaborative and globally minded ecosystem that may just yet spit out the next Facebook.
Thursday night I took a pass. But my colleague Leo Valiquette attended an event that in many ways emphasised one of the key realities of this exciting new world. In a session titled, “Buddy, keep your million, but buy my product,” The Ottawa Network in collaboration with the city’s various technology clusters came to the inevitable next stage of its now three-year-old series on how to tap into venture capital.
The first year, the title was, “Buddy, can you spare a million,” emphasizing the traditional route to building a company — beg for whatever venture capital you can lay your hands on.
The second year’s title, “Buddy why should I give you a million,” betrayed the fact that most of the begging was going wholly unanswered as VCs shut their wallets and became unyieldingly skeptical about the business plans they were seeing.
Last week’s title brought the whole thing full circle. If you can’t beg funding from VCs who either don’t have it or won’t invest it, then you have to build a company the old-fashioned way — develop a product and find someone who wants to pay you money to buy.
What a concept.
Fortunately, this reality now aligns with what Ottawa’s startups are doing anyway. Exciting and promising new ventures really can be launched on a shoestring. When a budding entrepreneur needs help, there is a wealth of events to attend, or many willing peers in the community who will contribute counsel or even hands-on support. When the venture grows a bit larger, places like TheCodeFactory will give it an affordable home. And by the time the VCs come calling, they really won’t be needed very much.
Hold the buckled jacket. It really is an exciting new day here in Ottawa.
By Danny Sullivan
A lot of PR people seem to be a little nervous when it comes to dealing with the blogosphere. There exists a sentiment that there is some kind of black magic at play – and if you don’t know the magic words you might end up spending the rest of your days as a toad flack.
Fear not. Bloggers are not really any different from the media – they have the same interests, in the same topics and, for the most part, respond to PR in a similar way to the media. If approached, they are not (usually) inclined to destroy your fledgling career with a casual flick of their wand.
There are certainly some ways to make your life easier when dealing with blogs, but none of these are unique to the space. Like the media, bloggers prefer to know about stories in advance, so embargoes are appreciated and usually honoured without question. And in the same way as the broader media despise receiving news that is irrelevant to them, so too bloggers rail against such indiscretions. Basically, if something usually pisses the media off, then you can be pretty sure it’ll piss off a blogger too.
In fact, continuing to refer to bloggers and the media as two separate entities is probably well past its sell-by date. The large numbers of media sites that have now recast themselves in a blog-style format is surely proof enough of this. They must be considered one and the same by PR people and should not be avoided out of fear of the unknown.
By Francis Moran
The official theme was “Ottawa’s digital media industry,” and the gamers, social networkers and content developers were there in spades. But what I heard at Wednesday night’s regular Start-up Drop-in put on by The Ottawa Network at LaBarge Weinstein had as much or more to do with propagating and supporting the entire start-up — indeed, the entire technology — community in Ottawa than it did with digital media per se.
In keeping with the format now well established by LWLaw partner and event host James Smith, we heard briefly from several different actors before the headline act shared what is billed as “words of wisdom.”
First out of the gate was a quartet of self-described “next generation” entrepreneurs who see themselves as having a serious role to play in cultivating and supporting their fellow tech entrepreneurs. Putting their blogging skills where their mouths are, they run StartupOttawa.com, an active blog by and about the start-up community. Mercury Grove‘s Scott Annan, Shopify‘s Scott Lake, TravelPod‘s Luc Levesque and Jean-Sylvain Sormony of Fuel all talked about the importance of cultivating “our generation of entrepreneurs,” as Lake put it.
Two start-ups whose very business model is all about propagation went next.
David Thompson described his company, Noleo, and its platform that hosts social networking applications, allowing them to simply and simultaneously run on a number of social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Alan Isfan’s FaveQuest is also all about propagating content across social networking sites, in this case taking broadcast television material and packaging it for redistribution to the social networking ecosystem.
Ben Houston, a fascinating young developer whose computational magic has been seen in several Hollywood movies, was an example of the propagational potential of the Start-up Drop-in itself since that’s where, a few months ago, he first met Keith Taylor, the business executive he has now recruited as president of his company, Exocortex Technologies.
I was momentarily stuck when Distil Interactive CEO Robert Thompson began to share his words of wisdom since it was not immediately clear to me how his comparison of Ottawa to other tech-savvy centres in which he worked would fit into my propagation theme. But his talk was really about challenging the 50 or so company leaders and managers in the room to propagate their obvious enthusiasm, commitment and empowerment throughout the rest of their company employees and, indeed, throughout the rest of the community.
It was a high energy evening, as have been the last several of these drop-ins.
By Danny Sullivan
I’ve written a couple of posts recently about social networking and its link to PR, but its growth in this area was firmly driven home to than by a recent conversation with a reporter at a leading US trade magazine.
We were discussing a client and the relative merits of the company’s position as an expert source for future articles, and she indicated that we should join her LinkedIn group. She went on to explain that her first stop when looking for information for a story these days is now to poll her LinkedIn buddies. And what’s more, it really seems to work for her – usually getting a range of responses, allowing her to pick and choose the best ones to follow up on.
If ever we wanted proof that social networking is here to stay, then surely this is it. Only by providing true value to professionals in their day-to-day work can the phenomenon be expected to succeed, and this is a perfect example of such value being achieved.
