By Francis Moran
When the British Columbia Lions and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers meet in the 99th staging of the Grey Cup, Canada’s professional football championship, in Vancouver this Sunday, both teams will have squads of cheerleaders jumping and shouting from the sidelines in a loud and colourful effort to get the B.C. Place crowd roaring for their side. But while the young women in short skirts waving pompoms might be interesting for some to look at, nothing that they do is actually going to move the ball even a single yard down the field. They will score not a single point. Their contribution to the spectacle will not be captured in a single game statistic.
This morning, I was at the second event in as many weeks where the whole game plan seemed to be on pumping up the volume of the cheerleading rather than on the fundamentals of moving the ball down the field.
Speaker after speaker at these two events — last week’s kick off to Ottawa Entrepreneur Week and this morning’s regular monthly execTALKS event, both organised by the Ottawa Centre for Regional Innovation — spoke of the imperative that more “buzz” be created around Ottawa’s moribund technology scene as though sheer enthusiasm alone could overcome the very real challenges that face this critical sector of the local economy.
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This is the third article in a continuing series chronicling the growth path of CommentAir Technologies, a startup based in Ottawa, Canada. CommentAir is developing a wireless technology fans can use at sports venues to receive the same real-time commentary as fans watching from their televisions, a wireless technology that also creates a platform for targeted consumer interaction. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
When we last spoke with CommentAir co-founders Katie and Luke Hrycak, the siblings were busy scraping up the cash for Katie to attend the 2011 Sports Management Conference and Trade Show in Toronto. Unfortunately, she never made it.
In our last post, we talked about how important it was for the bootstrapped startup to garner some face time at the conference with the sports industry decision makers who were in attendance. Katie was determined to make the most of the opportunity by having a working prototype in hand.
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This is the third 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 Leo Valiquette
In our last post, we caught up with Screenreach Interactive founder and CEO Paul Rawlings on his way out the door to attend the Digital Signage Investor Conference in New York. We explored how the company has developed its target markets, including the digital signage, or “out of home advertising,” market.
It has been a busy month for the company since then as it continues to build market share in the digital signage, television and radio industries.
David Weinfeld, Screenreach’s chief strategy officer, is based in New York. He and Rawlings hit the tradeshow floor together to speak with experts in the digital signage industry to deepen their understanding of how best to serve this growing global market.
“The conference really gave us a chance to get into the shoes of the clients we wish to serve,” Weinfeld said. “As a result, we are making some exciting changes to the product that we think will make a significant difference in how useful and appealing it is to advertisers and digital signage operators.”
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By Francis Moran
Two of the many events at last week’s Waterloo Region Entrepreneur Week featured presentations by young entrepreneurs who were generous in the sharing of personal stories and business and life lessons learned. Ryan Blair is a self-confessed former hoodlum and street-gang member who eventually embraced “legal entrepreneurship” and has built and exited a couple of companies. Y Combinator general partner Garry Tan shared his journey from “born employee” to reluctant entrepreneur and the lessons he learned along the way.
Here are a few of the things I heard that I really liked.
“You have to figure out what the customer is afraid of and become a solution.”
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, David French, a senior Canadian patent attorney with 35 years of experience, now provides a further of his commentaries on the importance to a company of protecting its Intellectual Property.
By David French
In the last blog post in this series we identified how “loopholes” can seriously undermine the value of a patent. In an earlier post, we touched upon the novelty requirement for obtaining a patent. In this post, we address in greater detail the reality of the existence of prior art and its impact on potential patent coverage.
The Golden Rule of patent law is that a patent claim cannot take away from the public anything that was previously available to the public. That is, the claims of the patent, defining the exclusive rights of the owner, cannot describe or read on anything that existed previously. If they did, the patent could be asserted against something that was previously available. That is prohibited.
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By Francis Moran
