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
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.”
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.
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:
Register to attend DemoCamp Vancouver here. Article excerpted from the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society.
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
Date : October 15th, 2009 Time (Unconference session) : 3pm to 6pm EST Time (Standard Conference) : 6pm to 11pm EST Location : SAT – Société des arts technologiques Address : 1195 Saint-Laurent boulevard, Montreal This is the fifth edition of Startup Camp Montreal, an event dedicated to everything Startup. It is the forum where early stage companies, investors and on-lookers alike can share information and validate pitches live. Join us as we learn from each other about the ins and outs of pitching a start up. This event is not just for Montrealers, all are welcome. Rogers Ventures funded Thoora will be presenting this evening. Full details here.
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