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
It’s been an interesting spring and summer here at inmedia.
The global economic downturn undoubtedly had its impact on us. Although we are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, we have not been an Ottawa agency for a long time now. Over the past few years, we have worked for clients in Kelowna, Calgary, Toronto, Montréal, Halifax, Fredericton, Moncton and St. John’s. Outside Canada, for many years we have had a substantial footprint in Scotland, where we have clients in Glasgow and Livingston, and we have worked for clients in Farnborough and London in England. In the U.S., we’ve had clients in Boston, Jersey City, Chicago, San Jose and Phoenix.
Based on this extensive geographic diversification, we thought we might be able to better weather the economic storms that began to rage last year.
We were wrong.
Though our clients might be almost everywhere, they are, in the main, selling into just one market — the U.S. enterprise. And that market is a very badly wounded beast that is only now, and very tentatively, beginning to get back on its feet. As our clients cancelled or delayed programs, their spending with us fell and we found ourselves once again in an adjustment mode that, after nearly 11 years as a technology-focused public relations boutique, is not unfamiliar territory to us.
Our response was three-fold.
First, we’ve gone virtual. We’ve put our servers and shared resources in the cloud, locked the office doors for good and given back the key. With clients all over two continents, we’ve essentially been virtual to most of them anyway. We believe it makes us the kind of agile and responsive service offering this new economy demands.
Second, we focused our PR business development efforts on opportunities where we believed we would be given a real chance to demonstrate our differentiation. This has paid outstanding dividends, with four new clients engaging with us over the past 60 days. Two others have renewed their programs, and two more that had reduced programs are again spending a bit more with us, albeit on an ad-hoc basis as they continue to sharply evaluate every dollar and pound. And our pipeline is fairly robust.
Third, and most critically, we also began to focus on areas where our unique capabilities would gain us higher-value work. Public relations is a terribly commodified business, and the buyers of PR-agency services are still too-often wedded to ancient notions to which our approach simply fails to pay homage.
(This is not a universal truth, let me hasten to add. Our most recent account win saw us triumph over three U.S. boutique agencies and a large and experienced agency with extensive feet on the street on both sides of the Atlantic. The final round, between us and the big guys, offered the client a sharply differentiated choice, I believe. Entirely to their credit, they gave us every chance to show them a clear foretaste of what they would experience if they hired us, and they obviously liked what we showed them. Far too often, however, we never even get the chance to show how we’re different, or the prospect simply fails to grasp how that difference might change the PR agency game in their favour.)
In addition to this long-standing commodification of PR, the economic downturn has created a new class of competitors and made all existing competitors even hungrier. There are now legions of one-person PR shops staffed by perfectly competent former agency and client-side types whose practically non-existent overhead and sometimes-lifestyle approach to business make it impossible to compete. At the other end of the scale, we have bowed out of agency-selection processes where large multinational agencies were offering more services at a lower cost than we could manage as they struggled to at least cover their infrastructure costs.
It’s enough to make any wise business person look to new opportunities, and we have, with considerable early success.
So where are we going? We will continue to seek out high-value PR opportunities where our value proposition as a small but very senior band of sharply focused players with global capabilities can compete. But we’ll also look for opportunities to work with clients on a more strategic level, where the broader marketing and even business decisions get sorted. Although much of the last 10 years has been about guiding technology companies through the specific challenges of harnessing media and analyst coverage, we have a broader and more strategic pedigree that we’re keen to put to work.
In short, we bring technology to market. Stay tuned for more on this as we renew our commitment to this blog.
By Mark Sue
(Mark Sue is managing director of RBC Capital Markets. This blog post is a summary of his report from the recent RBC Technology Conference.)
- There’s a sense that the worst is behind us, according to key executives who presented at the RBC Technology Conference. Focus companies included Bigband Networks, Brocade, Ciena, JDSU and Sigma Designs. We noted various encouraging trends dependent on the end markets. The consumer segment seems to have led while we are also seeing firming trends in the enterprise. Service-provider-centric companies seem to be lagging, although specific names are noting improving order trends.
- Ciena CEO Gary Smith highlighted that although carrier customers remain cautious and are still budgeting month to month, sentiment has improved and orders show encouraging trends. Orders turn into deployments and, subsequently, revenues and Ciena has already endorsed sequential revenue growth for the current quarter. New products like CoreDirector II should also contribute to revenue growth in early 2010.
- Our read on F5 was encouraging, and the stable environment may provide for product revenues to start growing again. Recent F5 potential customer meetings in NY pointed to a more positive tone. F5 has a major operating system refresh (TMOS v.10) and CEO McAdams said initial feedback from customers was favorable.
- Brocade pointed to the overall health of the business and the relative strength in storage spending. Brocade has the added benefit of gaining market share, according to CFO Richard Deranleau. Brocade remains very pleased with the reception with its new Ethernet partner IBM and partnership benefits are expected in fiscal Q4.
- JDSU may see a full recovery later than some, in our view, yet CFO David Vellequette reminded investors that the March-April period marked an improvement from the January-February period. That said, inventories are lean, down to 4-8 weeks in optical components from 12-16 weeks just 18 months ago.
- Sigma Designs CFO Tom Gay pointed to modest improvements in visibility, healthy subscriber growth at AT&T and the resumption of international IPTV projects in 2H09. Positive themes on video growth were echoed by Bigband’s CFO Castonguay who pointed to opportunities in SDV and digital ad insertion.
- Samsung‘s SVP of strategy Justin Denison reiterated the company’s market-share goals and its dominant position in the US in terms of units. Samsung is keenly focused on touch, which grew 10% in 2008.
By Francis Moran
There is something startlingly disordered in the universe when I find myself on the same side of an issue as the Globe and Mail’s irrascible and generally annoying Christie Blatchford and, even worse, Kory Teneycke, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s spokesperson. And yet that is the quite foreign place in which I find myself today with regard to the unguarded comments by Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt that surfaced this week thanks to the sloppiness of Raitt’s communications director, whose inability to keep track of her belongings makes my teenagers look downright responsible.
This is not a political blog; if it was, I’d be rhapsodizing this morning about my old pal Darrell Dexter’s extraordinary victory in leading the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party to victory in yesterday’s general election in that province. But as a former political reporter in Halifax, let me take a moment to congratulate Darrell and his team for achieving something a generation or two of progressives in Nova Scotia despaired they’d ever see. It’s a whole new day in Nova Scotian politics.
No, this is a blog that concerns itself with technology and the marketing of technology. So how the heck does that intersect with Minister Raitt’s frank and open conversation that was inadvertently recorded and then released into the unwilling hands of a Halifax Chronicle Herald reporter? And, more to the point, how does this put me unexpectedly in the company of the likes of Blatchford and Teneycke?
Easy. Minister Raitt’s most controversial utterance was the word “sexy,” which is how she characterised the issue that the supply of medical radioistopes used in a broad range of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures is rapidly dwindling in this country thanks to a spill of radioactive heavy water that has shut down the reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, that provides the lion’s share of the world’s requirement for these most perishable of commodities. Any fair and reasonable reading of her comments — only a handful of words from more than five hours of an accidental recording have attracted any attention — would conclude that Raitt was not calling cancer or the isotope shortage sexy but, rather, stating it for what it was, an issue that was attracting a lot of media attention because it had the elements “radioactive” and “cancer” associated with it. This was Teneycke’s wholly reasonable take on the issue when I heard him interviewed on CBC yesterday morning.
The whole so-called “Raitt-gate” is a sorry symptom of how our media and politicians go for the cheap and easy when a more nuanced and sophisticated analysis is called for.
The Great Canadian Isotope Crisis of 2009 has its genesis in the very expensive failure of an imaginative and technologically advanced initiative launched by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which operates the NRU reactor that is currently the main source for medical radioisotopes in Canada, and Ottawa’s MDS Nordion, which processes the raw isotopes into the compounds used by hospitals and clinics around the world to diagnose and treat a range of cancer, cardiac and other conditions. AECL practically invented the modern era of nuclear medicine and MDS Nordion, which was spun out of AECL in 1991, is still the world’s leader in the field.
Recognising that the aging and increasingly unreliable NRU was causing its customers to be uncomfortable about the security of supply of a perishable commodity that sees half its volume disappear in just hours or days through radioactive decay, MDS Nordion contracted with AECL to design and build a pair of reactors that would be the very first in the world exclusively devoted to the production of medical radioisotopes. Unfortunately, something went wrong on the way to full commissioning of the new reactors, dubbed MAPLE 1 and 2, and the project was essentially abandoned by MDS Nordion and mothballed by AECL.
Without the MAPLE reactors or some other new and reliable way of manufacturing radioisotopes, this crisis is merely the first of many — the second if you count the dustup in late 2007 and early 2008 that saw the Harper government fire the head of the Canada Nuclear Safety Commission because she was refusing to let AECL restart the NRU until a couple of CNSC requirements were met — that will inevitably become a permanent situation when the NRU becomes so old and unreliable that it must be decommissioned.
The real issue here, then, is how Canada is allowing its world-beating advantage in nuclear medicine slip away through turf wars and political hay-making. Rather than ask the tough questions about why MAPLE was abandoned and where the heck MDS Nordion is going to source its isotopes when NRU goes dark for good, the brains on both sides of the House of Commons and in the press galleries overlooking the House would rather focus on the simple. In short, they’d rather drive a minister to a tearful apology than figure out how to prevent Canada from losing one of the Avro Arrows of this age.
It’s enough to make anyone weep.
(Full disclosure: MDS Nordion was a PR client of mine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and again a few years ago when one of my assignments was to develop the never-implemented communications strategy for the official opening of the MAPLE reactors. I’m pretty sure I have not abrogated any non-disclosure obligations here as I confirmed that all the details in this post can be found in publicly available documents.)
By Francis Moran
The following raft of positive news for Ottawa companies was brought to my attention this morning by the irrepressible Andrew Arnott, vice president of commercial financial services with the Royal Bank of Canada’s technology banking group here in Ottawa, and BFF to technology entrepreneurs all over town. (The exclamation marks are his; the journalist in me prevents me from sharing Andrew’s natural exuberance.)
- Halogen Software marked it’s 26th consecutive quarter of YOY growth: May 20th/09!
- Protus hit 83% YOY growth!
- Bridgewater sales rose 64% YOY!
- Dragonwave numbers improve!
- March Networks expects 4th quarter revenue growth!
- Enablence raises $13.8MM US!
- Espial “revenue soars” in Q1!
Is this a harbinger that the good times are here again? Maybe, maybe not. But it certainly is, as Andrew points out, cause for celebration. Congratulations to each of the companies involved and thank you, Andrew, for putting it all together.
