By Francis Moran
Although only one team, Cambrian Mobile Content Delivery Network that wants to improve the experience of viewing video content on a mobile network by caching the most popular content at individual cell sites, came away with the $5,000 first prize at this past weekend’s Startup Boot Camp organised by The Ottawa Network, all six of the ventures that were presented to a review panel late Sunday afternoon were viable business concepts that could be made into real companies. And each of them progressed over the weekend from mere concept in the head of the entrepreneur who originally pitched the idea Friday night to unexpectedly polished and, under the circumstance, rather sophisticated business plans by Sunday evening.
This was the real intent of the camp, a weekend-long intensive competition in business-plan development and company creation. Organisers Rick O’Connor and Bob Morais told the more than 50 participants several times that they wanted to see a handful of new ventures emerge from the weekend, something they said would help revitalise a local technology sector ecosystem that Morais said has been knocked back to where it was in the early 1990s by a combination of the global economic meltdown, the flight of venture capital and other funding sources from Ottawa and the uncertainty created by the breakup of Nortel Networks. which had long been the region’s biggest research centre and a regular source of new companies and ideas.
Following are quick summaries of each of the six teams.
Feather Payment Systems
Described by its originator as “what Paypal should have been,” Feather Payments seeks to create a new, more secure and completely private way of making payments both online and in bricks-and-mortar retailers by using a form of public key infrastructure to sign every transaction. The review panel thought it was a good proposition, but one that would be immediately undone “if the credit card companies and banks ever got jiggy with PKI.”
Broadband Networks Corp. wants to bring telecom optical technology to big television players and productions. By building a new optical interconnect module, the company will allow TV production shops to replace bulky and short-haul coaxial cable with higher-capacity, lighter and longer-haul fiber-optic cables. Although I expressed some skepticism based on the fact that fiber is already well deployed in TV studios, entrepreneur Jean-Guy Chauvin insisted his module fills a considerable gap as the industry moves towards adoption of second-generation optical technology.
I’ve already mentioned that Cambrian Mobile CDN was the winner and I agreed with the panel. I thought Cambrian presented the most compelling business case and the clearest vision of how it might be executed. The concept is to develop half-terabyte flash-based caches that would be installed by mobile network operators in their base stations. These carriers would charge high-volume video-content providers such as YouTube to cache their content, a process that would improve the user experience while vastly reducing the traffic load on the carriers’ backhaul networks.
PostKicker was probably the easiest of the concepts from an implementation perspective, and one that, unlike the others, could be on the market in very short order and without much capital. The concept is to eliminate some of the sharpest pain associated with moving by taking over the tedious process of advising everyone of your change of address. The company would develop a web portal through which you could enter your change-of-address details, with PostKicker taking care of actually letting all your various contacts, especially your commercial contacts, know you had moved. Initially, the company intends to do this fairly manually but anticipates that as its subscriber base grows, companies will be persuaded to accept its notifications electronically.
CasaControl has a vision to convert digital picture frames into remote control devices that manage the growing number of automated processes within homes. While I thought it was an interesting idea and the team’s presentation was comprehensive, I agreed with the panel that more ubiquitous devices, such as smart phones, constitute a far more compelling platform for such a function.
A clear crowd favourite all weekend was Carewave. Not only did it attract the largest number of team members, it had a feel-good quality to it that was irresistible. Carewave wants to build an RFID and wireless pager system that transmits a basic safety code to healthcare workers that alerts them about a range of dangers posed by patients in their care. Although Carewave’s presentation was easily the most elegant — industrial designer Mike McGuire even managed to produce plastic prototypes overnight using his 3D printer — the panel pointed out that penetrating the healthcare market is a protracted process.
I will be keeping tabs on each of the concepts and will be sure to let you know if any of them move to then next stage of incorporating a bona fide startup. All the energy and output of the weekend notwithstanding, that will be the real measure of the success of the boot camp. The Ottawa Network plans a second installment in the spring.
By Francis Moran
For the first time in practically the decade-long lifespan of this technology-focused PR agency, I did not attend any part of the Ottawa Venture and Technology Summit held last week at the Chateau Laurier. Actually, that’s not quite true; I went to a packed StartUp Drinks in the Byward Market on Wednesday night and from there popped briefly into the thinly-attended Young Venture Capitalists OVTS networking event that was happening just a few doors away. But the point is, I didn’t see any of the company presentations, hear any of the speeches or, most importantly, glom onto any of the corridor scuttlebutt that is usually the most interesting aspect of these things.
In the days since, I have heard various reports from attendees from across the investor-entrepreneur spectrum and I have read what little reportage made the public record. Very little of what I’ve heard or read left me terribly hopeful that a new crop of exciting Ottawa technology ventures was about to get funded any time soon. The most consistent sentiment seemed to be contained in the comment VG Partners managing general partner Pat DiPietro made in an Ottawa Business Journal story on the fact that the OVTS and a similar event in Banff had a scheduling overlap. “But on the other hand there are no VCs investing, so it doesn’t really matter right now,” DiPietro said.
This caused me to wonder if venture fairs have passed their sell-by date. Can anyone remember the last company that could claim to have met at one of these things the connection that led to successful funding?
Then my pal James Smith weighed in on his newish blog, Startup Great White North. Unlike me, James not only attended the Ottawa venture fair, he also winged out west to the Banff shindig. Despite the fact he there witnessed “institutional investors focused principally on shaking off modest Thursday night hangovers and cradling Blackberrys and iPhones like long-lost friends” rather than paying attention to the entrepreneurs’ pitches, he decided in the end that investors don’t regard those pitching companies “with the attention my mini-van driving wife might give to passing picked-over roadkill on the road to our cottage.”
I’m not sure I’m as persuaded as James but he does go on to provide a solid list of techniques that serious venture-seeking entrepreneurs can deploy to improve their outcomes from such an event.
While we’re on the question of the utility of VC fairs, we might as well start asking questions about the utility of the VC model itself. We have begun work on a series of articles about this very question. We will look at who is actually funding startups in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. We’ll ask experts which pieces of the model work and which don’t. And most importantly, we’ll examine the state of the ecosystem beyond VCs that needs to be in place to help companies, especially those that will never be VC-fundable, bring their technology to market. We’ll look at the proliferation of new government funding here in Canada and compare it with what’s in place in other markets. If you believe you have a perspective on this, we’d love to hear from you. You can email me at fmoran (at) inmedia.com.
By Francis Moran
A weekend-long, competitive startup boot camp in October that will see the winning team take away $5,000 in seed funding was the most interesting piece of a coherent new programming line up announced last night by The Ottawa Network, the city’s grassroots networking club for the technology sector.
The startup camp, which will be repeated in the spring, was the second of four “program pillars” revealed by TON president Rick O’Connor. The first pillar, Network, will see TON continue to hold business networking and educational events, although at two a month, these will happen only half as frequently as last year’s somewhat over-ambitious weekly schedule. The third pillar, Finance, will feature a repeat of last year’s popular Founders and Funders dinners that saw angels and venture capitalists rub shoulders for an evening with entrepreneurs looking for funding. Details of the final pillar, Grow, will come later.
TON will also start charging a membership fee for the first time since it was founded in 2001 by a cohort of down-sized refugees of the telecom crash who gathered together to commiserate and help each other found new ventures and find new jobs. General membership will cost $25 per year in a move O’Connor said the organization hopes will lead to a more committed, targeted and involved membership.
The first startup boot camp is scheduled for October 23 to 25, and TON hopes to attract up to 75 participants who will self-categorize themselves into the various functions a new company needs, such as development, marketing and so on. On the Friday evening, as many as a dozen of the participants will pitch their ideas for a startup and teams will be formed based on who else wants to join them to work on that pitch for the weekend. On Sunday evening, each team will make its pitch, with the winner coming away with $5,000 if it incorporates as a fresh start-up.
TON’s new programming line up is a welcome evolution for an organization that significantly revitalized itself last year after a couple of years of fairly moribund existence. We’ve been big supporters of the network almost from the beginning, and I saw several instances last year where exciting new ventures got a solid helping hand as a result of a TON initiative.
Even better, in my view, is the introduction of a membership fee. As Shopify founder Toby Lutka said at a different event a few months ago, “Twenty four dollars is a slightly more annoying version of free.” His point, which I thoroughly endorse, is that if you have created something of real value, people ought to be willing to pay you something to use it. Not incidentally, in the process of charging for something, you also find committed customers, rather than just tire kickers. Those who can’t afford the fee — TON has always been attractive to those looking for work or operating ventures on a shoestring — can still attend up to three events a year without paying anything.
I’ll be a regular at TON events both for its inherent value to my own business and so that I can continue to bring its news to readers of this blog.
By Francis Moran
I had the chance last Thursday to attend for the second time one of the best networking events I know, Montréal’s StartUpCamp. I tweeted the highlights of the company presentations, as did some others, and you can see them here.
Because it constitutes my main business-development strategy, I am a relentless networker and let me tell you, there are several things that sets this event apart from many others I attend.
First is the energy in the room, which derives perhaps from its staging at the terribly hip Société des arts technologiques, located at the very epicenter of arguably Canada’s hippest city, or maybe from the funky lighting, house music and well-patronized bar. Granted, the noise level is not the most conducive to meaningful conversation, but even this somewhat hearing-impaired old guy managed to get by okay.
Or maybe the energy is simply organic to StartUpCampMontréal itself. With more than 400 attendees, Thursday night’s crowd was a cross-pollinating mix of about 70 gurus (the term its organizers use to indicate the more experienced business and investment people who help the presenting companies hone their pitches), 250 entrepreneurs, 50 students and 30 others.
Second is the format, which is a bit of democamp-meets-dinner-speaker. Five companies, selected by a jury of gurus, each presents for five minutes followed by questions and answers. This, the fourth edition of StartUpCampMontréal, saw about 30 companies apply for one of the five slots. The company presentations are book-ended by a pair of short, lessons-learned-style keynote speeches from entrepreneurs who bring some from-the-trenches wisdom to the night.
Third, the organizers work hard to make this a thoroughly interactive networking event. Phil Telio and Vincent Guyaux of Embrase are the main hands behind StartUpCampMontréal, although they have attracted a lot of other helpers. From the perspective of this sponsor, they settled on a brilliant tactic to encourage attendees to connect with us: they gave us a stack of drink tickets and then pointed each of us out at the beginning of the event and encouraged attendees to come and cadge a free drink from us. I can tell you it started a lot of conversations for me.
One of the things that impressed me most at the previous StartUpCampMontréal, which we also sponsored, was the open and receptive nature of the audience. Maybe that, too, is a Montréal thing because at most other venues, I’m the guy nosing into a group of people with my hand out in friendly introduction; here, it was the other way around. Several people approached me simply to thank me for our sponsorship and three became solid business leads. One of those leads came up to me again at last week’s event and then insisted on introducing me around to everyone he knew there. It was phenomenal.
We already have one superb client from Montréal, Xsilva Systems, whose suite of Mac-based retail tools is winning with high-concept retailers in both the bricks-and-mortar and online economies. It’s a city I’m always happy to spend time in, and not just for the incomparable smoked meat at Schwartz’s. Judging from what I saw Thursday, it’s fertile ground for us.
What about StartUpCampOttawa?
As a final note, I don’t know why Ottawa doesn’t have a similar event. We have camps galore, and an active and inter-networked start-up community. Next week’s Founders and Funders dinner is also a pretty good way for entrepreneurs and investors to come together, albeit a whole lot less structured than StartUpCamp. If there are others in Ottawa interested in exploring how we can bring this event here, I’d be delighted to hook up with you. And Phil Telio, the main organizer of Montréal’s event, has repeatedly expressed to me his interest in also helping make it happen here.
