By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are CIO, V3, Fast Company, MarketingWeek and Dave Fleet.
Big data analytics a big benefit for marketing departments
Today’s companies collect a lot of consumer data, but much of it sits on servers. Here’s how firms in a variety of sectors can mine that data and turn it into increased revenue (and how IT departments can help).
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By Alexandra Reid
Ottawa’s startup ecosystem received some much-needed support this month as TheCodeFactory launched Government to Startup (G2S), an incubator program developed by the learning centre’s founder and president Ian Graham to address the challenges faced by displaced government workers in Ottawa.
For those of you who have been ignoring the news lately, the Government of Canada has set in motion austerity plans that will see the reduction of 19,200 federal public service jobs over the next three years.
To encourage displaced workers to remain in Ottawa rather than uproot and seek employment elsewhere, the program will provide them with the skills and knowledge to start their own businesses. The program promises, “No startup will be left behind,” with the goal that participants will have fully functional and profitable businesses on exit.
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Social Media Explorer, TopRank, Financial Post, Forrester, Forbes, Copyblogger, and Startup North.
How data hype is destroying your social media ROI
We are all looking for the latest nugget of data that will help us optimize our social media strategies for success. Every time we see a post with an infographic about the best time to tweet or what social networks our audience is using we get excited thinking it’s just the right information to help us take our social media strategy to the next level. That’s why you see so many status updates hyping the data because it’s finally the answer we’ve been looking for … or is it?
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By Francis Moran
Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that I am passionate about entrepreneurship and a huge fan and supporter of startups. So it’s not unusual to find me at almost any event where startup entrepreneurs gather.
On Monday, however, I found myself in a bit of a more atypical venue for such a gathering — the barrel cellar of Laughing Stock Vineyards on the Naramata Bench near Penticton in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. (I snapped the alongside picture from just outside the cellar.)
Gathered around a long table in the cellar was an eclectic collection of agriculture and agri-tourism entrepreneurs, brought together by Laughing Stock co-founder and former investment executive Cynthia Enns. Cynthia took advantage of the arrival in BC of Startup Canada’s national tour and invited a number of her neighbours and other local stakeholders to come together to discuss how they could help each other and better promote their region.
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By Leo Valiquette
As Francis will blog about later this week, Victoria Lennox and the team at Startup Canada were back in Ottawa last week and my brief showing at one of the events left me with plenty of food for thought.
Startup Canada wrapped up two busy days in Ottawa with a “Wine Down” event at The Hub on Bank Street on Friday evening. For those of you who don’t know it, The Hub is a co-working, meeting and learning space focused around social entrepreneurship.
I am a Gen Xer, not a boomer, and yet, to be in that room, I certainly did feel my age in a way that I haven’t before. There was plenty of idealism, ambition and energy. There’s plenty of idealism, ambition and energy to be found all over Ottawa wherever young entrepreneurs tend to congregate, be it The Hub, TheCodeFactory, or any of the various open labs, watering holes and caffeine bars that lie in the orbits of Carleton, Ottawa U and Algonquin.
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By Alexandra Reid 
