By Leo Valiquette
Kudos to Ian Graham and TheCodeFactory for renting out the entire fourth floor of the premises at 246 Queen St. in downtown Ottawa.
I had the honour of being among a select group of friends, family and supporters that celebrated the milestone last night over wine and cheese.
With the fourth floor fully rented, the facility now has a firm foundation on which to proceed as it works to drive up the volume of users for its informal co-working space on the second floor. With the start of the school year, Ian says the amount of foot traffic is rising steadily, as word gets out that this is the place to come for collaborative work, complete with full Internet access and a coffee bar as well as a Wii and a foosball table to let the steam off.
Ian launched TheCodeFactory in May to serve as a private business accelerator and incubator intended to help fill the gap between a great idea and a commercial product gaining traction in the marketplace.
TheCodeFactory’s fourth floor is the incubator space, offering office space for startups looking for a desk without all the administrative and costly aggravation of setting up their own offices. The co-working space on the second floor is intended to serve as a proving ground for entrepreneurship and innovation, for entrepreneurs at every stage and code warriors from local schools to network, collaborate, troubleshoot and refine their ideas, even connect for potential employment opportunities.
It’s a great addition to the local tech scene and Ian should be commended for his dogged persistance to get TheCodeFactory off of the ground. To say it’s been a labour of love is a gross understatement.
Congrats, Ian.
By Francis Moran
We’ve written a couple of posts about the wisdom of continuing marketing activities through the summer months when, it is broadly assumed, everyone is on vacation and so not paying attention to such things. Our consistent counsel has been to maintain a steady level of activity since not everyone is on holiday at the same time, mind share is a highly perishable commodity that needs constant refreshing and you might even gain a leg up on the competition that put its marketing on a summer hiatus.
One area where this does not apply seems to be our own business development activities, which are largely based on networking and getting out where we know we’ll meet technology companies. There are precious few such events during the summer months and this isn’t entirely a bad thing since it vastly reduces the time I need to spend, especially in the evening hours, doing the networking thing.
But man, I tell you, come Labour Day and the whole tune changes, and this year seems to be even more pronounced than usual. I don’t know whose hand was on the dial this year but the volume has been cranked way up.
Here in our home town, The Ottawa Network has introduced a new schedule of events that gives us somewhere to go every Wednesday evening. Judging from the numbers turning out so far, they’ve hit on topics and approaches that are drawing a good crowd.
OCRI, of course, greeted September with a new season of programming and we’re regular attendees at many of these. On the private-sector side, Ian Graham of The Code Factory — and a client of inmedia‘s — has a pretty full calendar of activities at his downtown business incubator.
The start-up community here in Ottawa and elsewhere is also newly galvanized. We’re looking forward to Ottawa’s first DemoCamp of the season, the city’s 10th edition of the wonderfully grassroots event that sees six new companies show off their product or application and get feedback from a room of their peers.
On a somewhat larger scale, the superb Toronto-based blog startupnorth.ca is organizing a two-day conference it has grandly titled Startup Empire. Featuring two days of workshops, speakers and networking “by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs,” the event takes place November 13 and 14 at The Diesel Playhouse in Toronto.
I don’t know if I’ll make it to Startup Empire but I’ll seize any good reason to go to Montreal if only because it provides the opportunity to tuck into the best smoked meat on the planet at Schwartz’s Montreal Hebrew Delicatessen. On November 27, there’ll be a lot more than good brisket bringing me to town, however. inmedia has singed on as sponsors of StartupCampMontreal3, which will see scores of new companies compete to be one of five that will formally present to what organizers hope will be hundreds of attendees. This is our first interaction with the Montreal startup community and I’m very much looking forward to it.
Also on the list of firsts for inmedia was the foray I made down to Waterloo a couple of weeks ago to attend the official launch of the University of Waterloo’s VeloCity residence and to also drop in on the exciting and so-successful-it’s-bursting-at-the-seams Accelerator Centre. I blogged about this visit and will keep you up to date as I return to VeloCity October 16 for a presentation on public relations.
And, last but not least, my time at the Red Herring Canada Conference 08 at the beginning of last week yielded not only a well-read blog post on the antics of organizer Alex Vieux but also introductions to a couple of dozen new companies.
Bottom line: We’re less than a month into the new networking season and this PR guy has one full dance card. Let’s hope these trade winds steer me into some high-value ports.
By Leo Valiquette
When it comes to the next generation of technology companies taking root in Ottawa, Enablence is definitely at the top of the heap. At OCRI’s Technology Executive Breakfast this morning, CEO Arvind Chhatbar revealed that the company’s meteoric rise over the past 18 months has been driven by the often elusive ability to recognize true opportunity when it arises.
As Arvind described it, Enablence is in the business of making the optical part of optical networks work more like electronics. With more than a dozen different product lines already in its pipe, the company develops and manufactures optical components, subsystems and systems to meet our ever-growing appetite for high-bandwidth services. A key focus is FTTH, or, fibre to the home. Enablence is eager to sing the death knell of copper-based networks that suffer from extreme bandwidth limitations that only get worse with distance.
Arvind offered the telling example of trying to download a movie over a standard “high-speed” Internet connection over copper wire, vs. fibre. What would take a couple of hours on the one is reduced to a mere minute or so on the other.
Over the past four years, Enablence has positioned itself as a key player in this space through innovative product development and timely acquisitions, driven by about $95.5 million in financing to date from angel investment, private placement and a public offering. It has grown from a handful to more than 200 staff. The hockey stick on the revenue projection slide in Arvind’s PowerPoint presentation has to be seen to be believed.
What I found noteworthy is how the company has arrived at this point, which Arvind is quick to say is still an early stage. When Enablence was founded in 2004, the label “optical company” was considered fatal. Ottawa itself was still reeling from the loss of a host of startups in the optical space that had wizened away despite tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in venture backing. Was this a challenge for Enablence? Certainly. But it also provided significant opportunity.
How?
1. Early on Enablence raised $5.5 million in angel financing, a sum that is that much more impressive considering the sour climate at the time. But the money wasn’t raised from local friends and family familiar with the industry. They were still licking their optical-investment wounds. Instead, Enablence looked further afield to contacts who had made their money in other sectors, such as oil and gas, and were looking for fresh investment opportunities.
2. The meltdown that had cut so deeply into the employment ranks at home and abroad had put a lot of top talent into play at a good price. Enablence was able to snap up some of these great people.
3. By the same token, there was a lot of equipment to be had at bargain prices, as well as facility space.
4. Despite the ongoing need for cash, the company wasn’t afraid to say no to the sure thing if the terms were not palatable and instead explored other options, such as listing on the TSX Venture Exchange. In fact, the company turned away a fat cheque that had one key string attached — Arvind had to resign in favour of a new CEO hand-picked by the investor.
5. The company has so far avoided the need to look at outsourcing manufacturing to China by investing in state-of-the-art manufacturing that is highly automated, thereby reducing labour costs from the outset.
It’s by being able to recognize and capitalize on such opportunities that has allowed Enablence to put itself firmly on track to become, as Arvind said, “a force to be reckoned with in the optical world.”
By Danny Sullivan
Yesterday, research analyst Brian Summer posted a blog on ZDNet about how to conduct, or rather, how not to conduct an effective analyst day. While the post is clearly written with more than a little tongue in cheek, his points are well made.
In particular Summer’s comment around over-hyping a product should be taken to heart by many technology companies. He states, “Sure, any one can tell a story but you don’t need someone who’s clearly drank too much of the corporate Kool-Aid giving your pitch. Over zealous pitchmen are unintentionally obnoxious and impossible to believe.” In my experience this is certainly the case, and it ties closely into another of his points that analysts are smart enough to be able to read between the lines.
Working in tech PR, I can relate to many of his points, it’s incredible how many companies will insist on refering to themselves as some kind of “leader” in all their communications, even when this claim has absolutely no founding whatsoever. If you are a market leader, then by all means, shout it from the rooftops. For the rest of us, far better to address your market by focusing on the truly strong elements of your story, than adopting the language of hype to create an impression that will be seen through by most at first glance.
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A great place to go brain picking
September 22, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette Google’s new Chrome Internet browser is the largest open-source application release there has ever been, and the fact that it was an open-source project has been greatly underplayed. Why did Google do it? There’s no immediate financial benefit. All the search engine titan has done is striven to make the Internet better […]
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Positive signs for CRM at Call Centre Expo
September 19, 2008 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan This week’s Call Centre Expo conference in Birmingham was overshadowed by the collapse of Lehmans and the sudden merger of two of the UK’s biggest banks in an apparent attempt to stave off a similar occurence on this side of the Atlantic. Wandering the floor and catching snippets of conversation, the same topics […]
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Highlights from Red Herring Canada 08
September 19, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran I already wrote a post at Dangletech.com, where I try to contribute weekly, about the most fascinating highlight the Red Herring Canada 08 conference held earlier this week at Mont Tremblant. For my money, the best entertainment was the riveting behaviour of Red Herring publisher and CEO Alex Vieux who dominated the […]
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Waterloo’s VeloCity launches
September 15, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran I had dinner Friday night with about 70 students and several other folk at the University of Waterloo as the school celebrated the official opening of its innovative VeloCity, a mash-up of student residence and business incubator. The energy in the room, as one speaker put it, was electric and I was […]
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Eventful PR
September 15, 2008 by Danny Sullivan
By Danny Sullivan Industry events, such as conferences and tradeshows, can be a great place to connect with the media that cover your market, but is there any point in meeting with them if you’re not announcing anything of note? For many organizations, the media are viewed as a channel for communicating news, and little else beyond that. Of course it makes […]
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The odd underbelly of media monitoring
September 12, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette We have often talked about the merits, methods and tools for media monitoring on inmedialog, but it’s the amusing and bizarre aspects of the exercise that I want to illustrate today. Media monitoring is, of course, the process of scanning media coverage for specific keywords and issues and presenting them to clients […]
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BBC shipping container about to set sail
September 11, 2008 by Francis Moran
By Francis Moran In a remarkable combination of innovative journalism, corporate branding and GPS technology, the venerable British Broadcasting Corporation has embarked on a unique voyage of discovery that will see a BBC-branded, GPS-equipped standard shipping container quietly go about its business for a year, all the while beaming its coordinates back to the Beeb […]
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Web 2.0 is a PR expansion pack
September 08, 2008 by Leo Valiquette
By Leo Valiquette In the course of staying on top of what’s the meme of the day in the PR blogosphere, I wade through reams of commentary on social media and how it can be turned to serve a corporate communications and marketing strategy. In fact, one would think it’s no longer possible to run […]
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