By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are the Financial Post, The Globe and Mail, ReadWriteStart, Business2Community, Social Media B2B, and CopyBlogger.
‘Secret sauce’ behind Waterloo’s success
How do you build a more entrepreneurial culture in a semi-colonial, don’t-rock-the-boat country such as Canada? That’s the question being tackled by the founders of Startup Canada, an Ottawa-based volunteer movement launched three weeks ago. They’re undertaking a cross-country tour to sound out business owners on how best to unleash Canadians’ entrepreneurial potential. Author Rick Spence brings us up to speed on the movement’s recent achievements.
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By Francis Moran
My day yesterday? Twelve straight hours of startups, speakers, schmoozing and social media as I took in both FounderFuel’s second demo day and The C100’s AccelerateMTL. With what I am sure was more than a wee bit of coordination, one event followed the other in the beautiful and historic Monument-National theatre building at the very heart of this bustling city. The juxtaposition of a 120-year-old 
building with the youth and energy of the startup entrepreneurs was not the least bit jarring, although the canned pre-event PA announcement asking us all to turn off our pagers and cell phones was clearly meant far more for a theatre-going audience than for this crowd bent on tweeting every great line to the outside world.
And there were lots of great lines.
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By David French
This is the conclusion of a two-part series. Part one introduced patent searching and how inventors can use the “prior art wall” to their advantage.
Whether or not a prefiling patent novelty search establishes that the road is clear for you to attempt to obtain patent rights, there is tremendous value to be obtained by just carrying out the search. In my last post, I explored this premise and started down the path to demonstrate how you can conduct a search of documents that are online at the U.S. Patent Office.
To recap, I shared tips for searching with key words using this page on the U.S. PTO website. As an example, the search was focused on an improved garden rake. Documents relating to rakes were located by initially entering the words “rake” and “handle.” I also suggested that searching can be conducted using the classification system available in the U.S. PTO website, which is what I will explain here today.
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By David French
This is part one of a two part series. Part two will be published next week.
I recently had an extended discussion with someone which resulted in the conclusion that there is more to patenting than just getting patents. We started with a discussion of the business value of a patent and then addressed the business value of patenting. Here is the concept.
If you are going to start the patenting process, it is absolutely essential that you do some searching. Searching is essential because you can only patent an aspect of your own idea that is new. There is no point in filing a patent application if you cannot identify a feature that is new. So a patent novelty search is about searching for bad news: defining the boundaries of the forbidden territory that you cannot claim because it is delimited by the “Prior Art Wall.”
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By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly 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 Copyblogger, GigaOm, The Flack and GeekWire.
20 mistakes that will undermine your call to action and cost you sales
As content marketers, we spend a lot of time obsessing over increasing traffic. It’s the sexy thing to do. However, the number of leads fails to match our expectations because we don’t spend enough time creating a killer call to action. There are dozens of call-to-action mistakes that can doom your efforts to convert traffic into leads or sales. Copyblogger shares 20 of the most common.
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As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are the Financial Post, The Globe and Mail, ReadWriteStart, Business2Community, Social Media B2B, and CopyBlogger.
