We’ve just discovered that GridCentric, one of our portfolio companies, has a lot in common with hot dogs and buns! They’ve just released a new video that provides a great explanation of their technology.
Open Coffee in Ottawa – May 26
Rogers Ventures is headed to Ottawa and looking forward to meeting up with the founders of our capital’s startups. Come join Jonas Brandon for an Open Coffee next Wednesday, May 26 at Bridgehead Coffeehouse (109 Bank Street, Ottawa) from 10am to 1pm.
Open Coffee
Bridgehead Coffeehouse
109 Bank Street, Ottawa
10am to 1pm
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A Swing Through Western Canada
Mike Lee is in Calgary today to host an event at Cambrian House put together by Digital Alberta. He will be hearing pitches from local startups between 10 a.m and noon at Cambrian House in an open forum (all are welcome). We’re then having lunch with several local community instigators and supporters to learn more about the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Calgary. Thanks to Sarah Blue of Cambrian House and Rene Smid of Digital Alberta for helping put together this event. We’re looking forward to it! Then, it’s on to Vancouver for Fusion Forum, a Western Canadian financing forum dedicated to digital media. It showcases early and growth stage companies that are original content/intellectual property ventures and firms businesses developing new platforms and applications. About 20 start-ups are expected to present.
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An Interview with Melinda Rogers
Since Rogers Ventures launched last month, we’ve been a lot of great coverage from the media and bloggers about our mandate to provide seed capital to smart entrepreneurs with great ideas.
In today’s National Post, Matt Hartley interviews Melinda Rogers, senior vice president of strategy and development with Rogers Communications. Melinda talks about why Rogers Ventures was created, its investment mandate, and Canada’s venture capital landscape.
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A Great Day in Waterloo
Thanks to Waterloo community for a great day of activities and discussions.
We started our day at Velocity, a residence created by the University of Waterloo’s Sean Van Koughnett for entrepreneurially-minded students. We met Jesse Rodgers, the community manager, and Virginia McLellan, the recruiter for Velocity.
Velocity wants to become a mecca for entrepreneruship. They’re considering things such as opening the residence to any entrepreneurial-minded student across Canada. Students spend at least four months in residence to develop their ideas, meet other like-minded students, and get connected to the community to broaden their networks and increase their changes of success. Velocity’s students, David Wilkin andPaul Butler, showed off their projects including FroshPerks.
StartupCamp – “Serious Ediition” then took place at the Accelerator Centre, Waterloo’s premier incubator space. Thanks to Communitech and AC staff for helping StartupCamp Instigators Jesse Rodgers and Mic Berman pull off an impressive pitch session that featured 18 companies. Companies ranged from someone with an idea just emerging into alpha, university professors looking to commercialize their technology, and fully fledged in-market companies. Here is a sampling of those who presented.
- Occasions Network
- LinoWave
- Enflick
- DossierView
- Bayalink
- Bookfly
- Allerta
- Crez
We finished the day with dinner with a great group of community instigators, founders, and bloggers to discuss the opportunities to better support and enable the Waterloo innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Some of the key ideas mentioned were:
- Talent is an issue, especially for senior staff – Iain had put in place a boomerang program, branding and awareness seems to be key
- We need to get the word out that entrepreneurs are important and valuable to the Canadian economy. We need to help build this brand, the concept that it’s okay to choose this as a career path, and that it’s alright to fail.
- Attracting young entrepreneurs is powerful thing, especially in Waterloo, which is looking to leverage the student community of co-ops and post-docs
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Kudos for the Thoora “Posse”
It has been an exciting month for one of our portfolio companies, Thoora. The news discovery service launched its private beta last month at TechCrunch50 in Silicon Valley, and then unveiled the public beta last week at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas.
The reception from the media, bloggers and users are been enthusiastic as people recognize that Thoora is a new and unique service that helps people discover the news attracting the most attention within social media (the entire blogosphere and Twitter) and nearly 5,000 traditional media sources.
Today, Thoora received a great review from Thrillist, a popular Web site that puts the spotlight on the new products and services. Here’s an excerpt:
“From a posse of Canadian developers, Thoora’s a news aggregating service highlighting the most buzzed-about stories as covered by non-mainstream sources around the web in real time, via a complex algorithm that constantly filters, calculates, and ranks the subjects and content of blog posts, Twitter updates, and comments to determine what’s actually attracting attention.”
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DemoCamp Calgary, Oct 27
If you’re in Calgary, check out DemoCamp October 27th, at 6:30pm. There are already a couple of great Demos lined up and the team are looking for more. The event will be at Seven RestoLounge, on 8th Ave and 5th St SW. Excerpted from BarcampCalgary. We had hoped to be there but we aren’t able to attend this Tuesday. We are presently working with Digital Alberta for another event in November.
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DemoCamp Vancouver, Oct 22
Mike Lee, the VP of New Ventures at Rogers, will be presenting at DemoCamp 9. You’ll get an opportunity to hear what Rogers’ plans are to work with and support tech ecosystems across the country, and what their investment plans are. I’m hoping for a lively Q&A as well. The second featured presentation will be Tim Bray. Tim is a technologist with a long history of being involved in interesting things. Although he’s based in Vancouver, he spends a lot of his time traveling and presenting around the world. The presenting companies have been selected and are as follows:
- Recotype – Recotype is an open framework for requesting and receiving recommendations on Twitter
- Yummy Republic – a wireless platform to link take-out restaurants with internet to enable them receive online orders and send back confirmation to customer instantly. YummyRepublic includes bespoke GPRS terminals, and several servers to control those terminals.
- Troovy – a web and mobile-based local discovery platform. Users find recommended places and people based on their own travel and feedback patterns.
- Deets.me – cloudy contacts
- Layerboom – Layerboom provides hosting companies with a comprehensive software platform which gives them the ability to turn their dedicated servers into virtual private server clouds.
Register to attend DemoCamp Vancouver here. Article excerpted from the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society.
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Waterloo Startup Camp Serious Edition Oct 20
Date: October 20, 2009. Location Communitech common space in the Accelerator Centre Hagey Blvd, Waterloo, On.
More information can be found on the Startup Camp wiki page
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Thoora is hiring!
Thoora, one of our portfolio companies, is searching high and low for both a Product Whisperer and a Graphics Craftsman.
If you’re interested, or know someone that you think fits the bill, please check out the details below and feel free to apply at jobs [at] thoora.com.
Thoora – Product Whisperer
Thoora – Graphics Craftsman
http://thoora.com/company/jobs