By Alexandra Reid
Startup entrepreneurs have a lot on their plate already without having to decide on a fabulous name. And who cares about the name anyway? You can always change it later. Surely angel investors don’t care about it. All they care about a business model that will turn them a profit. And even if they hate the name, you can change it once you’ve received their investment to keep them happy, right?
Sure, this works, but it isn’t in your startups’ best interest. Settling on a bad name can damage your brand, jeopardize investment opportunities and discourage customer support. Author, speaker and CEO of Buyosphere, Tara Hunt, went through this rather chagrining experience last year when her company’s original name, Shwowp, was dubbed the Worst Brand Name of 2010.
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By Linda Forrest
Thanks to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for inspiring the title of this post; much to the chagrin of my colleagues, I was quite excited about the wedding, hence the title. In all seriousness, when this last week’s many news events – the royal wedding, Osama bin Laden’s demise, and the Canadian election – were taking place, social media took centre stage, eclipsing traditional media as the place that consumers turn towards for news as it happens. As Brian Solis said earlier this week, news no longer breaks, it Tweets.
As Twitter continues to make inroads into the mainstream, especially as a channel for breaking news, I thought it pertinent to check on the status of Twitter and the rest of the popular social media tools in the business world.
Based on my findings, I can say with confidence, the honeymoon is definitely over.
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked serial entrepreneur Jason Flick to share some of his insights on getting technology to market. This is the second of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By Jason Flick
As I mentioned in my last post, startups don’t have a common culture. This is a myth that’s been created, perhaps intentionally, by the 95 percent of people who’ve never worked for a startup.
Who would want to search out and work for a company that can’t pay much, if anything, in salaries, expects you to work 12-hour days and in the end, has a 50 percent chance of failure? Over the past 21 years I have created four startups, been employed by five others, and mentored and worked with nearly 100. None of them has fit this mould, or any other.
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By Francis Moran
The morning after the election that wouldn’t change anything, the political landscape in Canada has been radically, perhaps permanently, altered.
The Conservative Party of Canada, led by prime minister Stephen Harper on his fifth stab at power, finally grabbed the brass ring, winning 167 seats and a decisive majority. That he did it with just a handful of seats in Québec defied all conventional wisdom that said Canada can’t be won without Quebec. Certainly, no Tory predecessor has managed to take the country with so few seats in Québec.
The Liberal Party of Canada, long nicknamed the Natural Governing Party for its historic hold on the broad political centre of the country, went down to its greatest defeat in history. First-time campaigner Michael Ignatieff, better known in Washington and London as a globe-trotting journalist and intellectual before returning to Canada several years ago, did what no Liberal Party leader, not even John Turner with his epic 1984 loss that yielded a scant 44 seats, has managed to do before — reduce the once-dominant Liberals to third-party status for the first time since Canada was born.
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This is the 14th 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
“If Canadians were as good at innovating as we are at explaining why we’re bad at it, Canada wouldn’t rank 14th among industrialized nations in the Conference Board of Canada’s report card on innovation. And because innovation is the key to improving productivity, we wouldn’t be earning $7,000 less a person each year than Americans.”
That blunt comment came courtesy of none other than Conference Board president and CEO Anne Golden in an editorial published last August in the Globe and Mail titled “Canada’s innovation malaise: The cure’s in our culture.”
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Startup lessons from Tungle.me founder Marc Gingras
April 29, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
The Canadian startup community rang in another win this week as RIM, the maker of BlackBerry phones and the new PlayBook tablet, acquired calendar and scheduling application Tungle.me […]
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Election emotion and the politics of fear
April 28, 2011 by Bob Bailly
In my first posting I promised that this blog would investigate how human evolution has impacted the way we do business, why we are the way we are, and why we act and feel the way we do in our personal and business lives. When it comes to evolution, two areas of investigation are of interest: first, the evolution of the human brain as it relates to how we make decisions […]
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Trade magazines are dead, long live trade magazines!
April 27, 2011 by Linda Forrest
One thing you can rely on in the media game is change. The media industry, as ever, has been aflutter this past week as trade publications both in North America and Europe either swallowed whole their counterparts in a high-profile merging of brands, or print editions of long-standing B2B trade publications announced their intentions of moving strictly online. In reaction, many proclaimed, once again, the death of the trade magazine […]
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Culture of risk: Are you willing to bet the farm?
April 26, 2011 by Francis Moran
In our various interviews for this series, one of the most elusive topics of discussion has been culture of risk. Elusive in that it strays into the realm of stereotype and generalization.
Can it be defined by borders, or is that a naive misconception? […]
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Lean startup: It’s the Canadian way
April 20, 2011 by Jason Flick
You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the billions in venture capital flooding into the Valley. Venture firms raised over $60 billion in Q1 2011 alone. We have also heard how some of the companies are now ramping from zero to billions in revenues in years now rather than decades. Students fresh out of school are being offered six-figure salaries, four-month signing bonuses and iPads to come on board […]
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PR lessons from Playbook
April 19, 2011 by Linda Forrest
Happy Playbook release day, everyone! Today is the fateful day when Canada’s own Research in Motion begins selling its long awaited Playbook tablet. You might have heard that this was coming, as the media has been very hungry for news on tablets set to compete with iPad; it’s a topic we’ve covered here as well […]
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Taking the lean approach to market
April 18, 2011 by Francis Moran
It’s fitting that we follow up last week’s post on the strategic value of marketing in its purest sense as a process for enabling customer validation and iterative product development with a definition of this thing called lean startup.
Strategic marketing is a fundamental aspect of the lean startup methodology, a methodology first defined by Eric Ries almost three years ago […]
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Earth to startups: They won’t come just because you’re on social media
April 15, 2011 by Alexandra Reid
Earlier this week, we explained that so many startups fail because they adopt a “build it and they will come” mentality and neglect to define the market opportunity for their product […]
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By Alexandra Reid 
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Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
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