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.

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

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.”

The launch of Rogers Ventures marks an exciting new chapter for the company that my father, Ted Rogers, started more than 40 years ago.

So why have we created Rogers Ventures? And why now?

We’re living at a time when technology innovation, new online services and shifts in consumer behaviour are being adopted faster than any other time in history. We want to be part of this innovation and opportunity.

Rogers Ventures is our way of looking beyond the walls of Rogers for outside talent and ideas to fund. We believe that this will broaden our innovation horizons and keep us closer to the forefront of next-generation technology.

Rogers Venture is set up to provide early stage seed level investment for technology start-ups. We look for talented entrepreneurs with big ideas and leading edge technologies that we believe have high potential for business success.

Our long-term goal is to participate in the success of the “next great company.” Who knows, the next start-ups success story could be yours.

We know that our success largely depends upon having a healthy funnel of innovation and talent to choose. That’s why we know that it’s also important for Rogers Ventures to play an active and engaged role within Canada’s innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem.

We provide support to grassroots initiatives within the high-tech community that help to accelerate innovation momentum. We want to help Canada build a better idea funnel.

The Rogers Ventures team is pro-actively looking for great talent with powerful ideas across Canada. We’ll be reaching out to academic, grassroots, entrepreneurial and developer communities to meet people like you – looking to either develop your ideas or take your businesses to the next level.

We’re excited about the official launch of Rogers Ventures and hope you are too. Melinda