This is the sixth article in a continuing monthly series chronicling the growth path of Screenreach Interactive, a startup based in Newcastle upon Tyne in England’s North East. Screenreach’s flagship product, Screach, is an interactive digital media platform that allows users to create real-time, two-way interactive experiences between a smart device (through the Screach app) and any content, on any screen or just within the mobile device itself. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Alexandra Reid
When we last checked in with Screenreach, the company was in the midst of tweaking the new version of its Screach application for a March 7 launch. The team was well on track and seemed to have all of its ducks in a row. They had found out what their market needed, solicited feedback from beta testers, sharpened their story, identified qualified customers, worked collaboratively, promoted their product and garnered media attention.
But as can be expected at a startup company, things didn’t go completely as planned. On launch day, the Apple application store informed the team that there was a problem.
In this post, Screenreach CEO Paul Rawlings explains what the team did to push through to launch.
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By David French
“How can we find out whether we’re getting value for all the money we’re spending on patents within the company?”
This is a question I’ve heard before, and it’s a tough one to answer.
Corporations today are spending money on intellectual property. This includes not only patents but also trademarks and copyrights and occasionally industrial designs. All these items should be addressed in the modern high technology environmental. But a difficulty exists, particularly with respect to patents, in determining whether money invested in patents is money well spent.
There is a story going around that companies should have a large portfolio of patents in order to protect them in case they are sued by a competitor. The theory is that if you are sued then you will counter-sue, relying on one or more patents in the patent portfolio. But there is a fallacy involved in this scenario.
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By Alexandra Reid
Introduced at Social Media Breakfast as the guy Klout calls an “authority on shoes,” Ottawa Tourism’s director of digital marketing, Nick Iannitti, is attempting to do what my fellow Ottawans might consider the impossible: change the perception that our beloved city is “safe and boring.”
As you may have guessed, he is employing the powers of digital marketing to influence potential tourists to come to the city. Mainly, he is aligning social media with a creative content marketing strategy to promote Ottawa as a destination and to encourage people to book vacations through the Ottawa Tourism website.
According to Iannitti, a city like Ottawa should be regarded as a very large brand with something to offer everybody. In Ottawa specifically, there are three broad categories of potential tourists:
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By Terry Lavineway
While last week’s federal budget contained widely anticipated changes to the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit, it also contained many other aspects of funding and incentives to encourage innovation and commercialization.
$400 million to help increase private sector investments in early-stage risk capital, and to support the creation of large-scale venture capital funds led by the private sector.
The government recognizes that access to capital for small and medium-sized businesses in Canada is both critical for growth and difficult to find. The venture capital and angel investor industries in Canada have been inconsistent for many years for many valid reasons. This budget commits $400 million to help address this problem. At the time of the budget, the government was not clear how, where or when to deploy this capital to incentivize private sector investments, other than to allocate $100 million for Business Development Bank of Canada venture capital activities. Certainly this amount of money is worth tracking to see how it will be deployed to help companies in need achieve their growth objectives.
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March was an exciting month, full of changes and new developments.
In the commercialization ecosystem, all eyes were on the federal and Ontario budgets, which shook up government investment and spending in Canadian business and innovation. In social media, the Stop Kony 2012 campaign went viral, spurring fervent debates between its supporters and critics all around the globe. Facebook also unveiled its new brand pages, leaving many businesses scrambling to update their pages and understand the new format on deadline. We covered all of these subjects and more last month on this blog. If you missed any of our posts, here is a handy roundup.
March 22: What an IP co-ordinator should know, confidentially speaking By David French
March 14: Looking for that sweet spot to get market traction by Francis Moran & Leo Valiquette
March 01: Yikes … we forgot the demo! by Peter Hanschke
And on a related note…
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Getting ready for the big show
April 03, 2012 by Francis Moran
Crawford & Co. labels itself as “the world’s largest independent provider of claims management solutions to the risk management and insurance industry.” In other words, it handles insurance claims on behalf of insurers and, with operations in more than 70 countries, it certainly does not lack for scale […]
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Making measurement work for communications professionals
April 02, 2012 by Caroline Kealey
Some words are hard to love, and I have to concede that “data” is one of them. It doesn’t have any magic that makes the heart of a strategic communicator beat faster. But really, it’s so important that we should all learn to love it a little. Why? Because it’s […]
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Great articles roundup: KPIs, avoiding founder failure, email attachments, social media, SWOT & startup customer acquisition
March 30, 2012 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 The Telegraph, On Startups, eMarketer, Guardian, Inc., and Startup North […]
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Will the SR&ED tax credit changes have a meaningful impact?
March 30, 2012 by Terry Lavineway
The Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program was one of the long-anticipated and highly debated areas expected to be addressed in the 2012 Federal budget […]
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FounderFuel emphasizes mentor interaction in second cohort
March 29, 2012 by Francis Moran
FounderFuel is a Montreal-based startup accelerator for which I have been a mentor through its first two cohorts. I recently caught up with John Stokes, a partner with Real Ventures, the seed-stage venture firm […]
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Ontario 2012 Budget: perspectives on business incentives
March 28, 2012 by Terry Lavineway
The Ontario 2012 budget was released March 27, 2012. The general theme of the budget is getting efficiency out of the prior investments and government spending and cultivating the growth presumably inspired by previous stimulus budgets. This focus on […]
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SoLoMo: How governments are engaging their constituents
March 27, 2012 by John Craig
My firm, Purple Forge, has developed a very meaningful relationship as a supplier of mobile applications to governments at the municipal and federal level over the past two years. Given the integration of social and location-based information into our applications […]
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Government incentive programs set for major shakeup
March 26, 2012 by Francis Moran
The eyes of the Canadian commercialization ecosystem will be focused sharply on Toronto and Ottawa this week as the Ontario and federal governments bring down new budgets that are expected to considerably reshape broad programs of industrial, research and […]
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