By Alexandra Reid
To break the ice at a recent IABC Ottawa event that dealt with measuring online marketing, Alex Langshur, President of PublicInsite, displayed the Google homepage on an overhead and asked the audience what it was. People shouted out the obvious answers like, “That’s Google of course,” and, “It’s a search engine,” but no one was able to provide Langshur the answer he was looking for. “Google is your home page,” he said. “These days, it is all about search.”
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This is the fifth article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
In his book, The Way Ahead: Meeting Canada’s Productivity Challenge, Tom Brzustowski, RBC professor for the commercialization of innovation at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, talks about the “social contract between science and society in the U.S.” that arose in the late 1940s and gave rise to that unique ecosystem we know today as Silicon Valley.
The basis of this contract is found in Science: The Endless Frontier, a 1945 report to U.S. President Harry Truman by visionary Vannevar Bush that outlined a U.S. post-war science and technology policy that would ultimately result in the creation of the National Science Foundation. In the years that followed, military-funded unclassified R&D in the private sector, driven by the pressures of the Cold War and the space race, laid the foundation for Silicon Valley and made Bush’s vision a reality.
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Thank you for being with us for the first month of our new blog. In case you missed any posts, here is a recap, beginning with, in chronological order, our special report on getting technology to market, The Commercialization Ecosystem, which continues this month.
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By Leo Valiquette
“Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced [sæs]), sometimes referred to as ‘software on demand,’ is software that is deployed over the Internet and/or is deployed to run behind a firewall on a local area network or personal computer. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers either as a service on demand, through a subscription, in a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, or (increasingly) at no charge when there is opportunity to generate revenue from streams other than the user, such as from advertisement or user list sales.”
— Wikipedia
Offering customers this option versus the traditional model of selling boxes of CDs in shrink wrap is a “price of admission capability for software companies these days,” Rob Bell, director of service operation and corporate IT for Kinaxis, said at OCRI’s #smarTALKS event last night.
Bell was part of a panel that included Marc Brule, vice president of client services at Halogen Software, Aydin Mirzaee, co-CEO of ChideIT, and moderator Jeff Bennett, CEO and partner at ServiceVantage Corp. They discussed the transition from the industry’s traditional revenue model to a co-hosted SaaS model.
The key message? The SaaS model puts software vendors closer than ever before to the end users of their products. This is a paradigm shift that, perhaps paradoxically, creates fresh challenges and new ways to get it wrong even as it provides some distinct benefits for both users and vendors.
Here are the Top 10 takeaways from the discussion:
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By Alexandra Reid
Throughout his career, both in Canada and the U.K., Bryan J. Watson has been a champion of entrepreneurship as a vector for the commercialization of advanced technologies. As demonstrated by his concurrent roles as executive director of a number of non-profit emerging-growth venture-fostering organizations including the National Angel Capital Organization, CEO of Fusion and a director of Precarn Inc. and the Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance, Bryan takes an active role in the entire entrepreneurial spectrum from idea-generation to financing to liquidity event.
How are entrepreneurs currently using social media to get their startups noticed by angels?
In general, entrepreneurs are using social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for outreach both to angels and to the wider community. More specifically, they are using these channels to share information about their ventures and to generate buzz. Mostly, it is the web-based companies that are the early adopters of social media as an outreach tool, I find.
For startups, social media encompasses a wider range of online platforms, such as AngelList, Tech Crunch’s CrunchBase, and StartupIndex. These platforms are social in that they allow entrepreneurs to share information about their ventures with investors. On the investment-opportunity-intake side of things, sites like AngelSoft, unlike widely used social media platforms, are secured and closed systems involving only individuals in the angel capital community. Entrepreneurs and investors are using these platforms to share and receive business information and manage deal flow.
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To break the ice at a recent IABC Ottawa event that dealt with measuring online marketing, Alex Langshur, President of PublicInsite, displayed the Google homepage on an overhead and asked the audience what it was. People shouted out the obvious answers like, “That’s Google of course,” and, “It’s a search engine,” but no one was able to provide Langshur the answer he was looking for. “Google is your home page,” he said. “These days, it is all about search.”
