What’s the best way to turn a city into a world class hub for high tech startups?

Does a “build it and they will come” overnight approach really work? Or is it a process that can only happen organically over time?

Christine Wong

Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s tiny, brash, billionaire mayor (personal 2011 net worth: $20 billion), is taking the first approach. He’s trying to turn the Big Apple into the next Silicon Valley by offering up $100 million in city-owned land and infrastructure (for free) to build a two-million-square-foot high tech campus on Roosevelt Island, right in the heart of the city. Cornell University and Israel’s Technion Institute took the bait and are now developing the mega project together.

These New Yorkers aren’t fooling around: the campus’s first students are expected to start classes there by 2017, just five years from now. And Bloomberg is throwing some big numbers around, saying the plan could generate 600 startup companies which would in turn create another 30,000 jobs.

The Russians are on the same wavelength as Bloomberg. A similar venture is going on in sleepy Skolkovo, a town just outside Moscow where the Kremlin is building a sprawling facility to boost innovation in energy, IT, telecom, biotech and atomic technologies. The Kremlin is being secretive about exact plans and dollars spent (the KGB legacy is hard to shake, I guess). But skeptics are wondering how startups spawned there will flourish when government corruption and criminal gangs still interfere so much in the nation’s business community.

The Big Build approach to creating high tech cities almost out of thin air has drawn scoffs from the likes of Silicon Valley journalist Chris O’Brien. He points out that in the case of New York, it will take more than a $100 million facility to put the Big Apple on par with the Valley any time soon. New York startups raised $2.2 billion in VC in the first three quarters of 2011, peanuts compared to the $8.4 billion raised by their California cousins. And Silicon Valley had 17 tech and biotech IPOs in 2011, dwarfing the single, solitary stock market debut made by one New York tech firm last year.

Vermont-based serial entrepreneur Ty Danco has a unique take on this. In a year-end blog posting, he gave props to Montreal for “best big push by a city to build a startup ecosystem.” He gives the city a shout out for achieving many milestones since 2009, including: the launch of the FounderFuel accelerator, the creation of new provincial programs set up to match angel funding, the development of AngesQuebec (which he calls “the largest angel group in Canada (and) soon to be one of the largest in North America”), the premiere of the International Startup Festival, and the founding of Notman House, an office and event space for the city’s local IT community.

And of course there is Waterloo, Ont., known as the birthplace of OpenText and the now downtrodden Research In Motion, which both went on to become global giants. But the University of Waterloo had a long history of turning out some of the best and brightest computing and engineering minds in Canada for decades before that.

It also took RIM and OpenText years to get to the international stature they carved out in the market place. It didn’t happen overnight.

When I recently asked Iain Klugman, president of the Waterloo IT organization Communitech,     how RIM’s troubles would affect Waterloo’s IT community, he wasn’t biting his nails.

“There are 800 technology companies in Waterloo. RIM is the biggest and most successful by far. But it’s kind of full steam ahead,” Klugman told me.

His message was clear: since Waterloo’s IT community wasn’t built solely on the back of one facility, organization or company (in this case, RIM), it won’t fall apart just because of RIM’s misfortunes either.

Over the past three years, even in the face of incredible global economic turmoil, Waterloo’s IT sector has still managed to create 531 new companies and 1,441 jobs at startups, plus 1,000 new jobs at medium- to large-sized tech firms.

New York City already has a strong high tech community that’s earned it the nickname Silicon Alley. Plunking down $100 million all at once will definitely boost the activity that’s been going on in the city for years. It may even help NYC give Silicon Valley a run for its money – many years from now.

But from where we’re sitting, Montreal and Waterloo’s little engine that could approach looks like a better use of public resources than the $100 million in primo real estate that Bloomberg is ponying up in a heartbeat courtesy of New York taxpayers.  

By Francis Moran

According to Matt Lemelin, CEO of Genevolve Vision Diagnostics, there are more than 100 occupations which rely on workers having normal colour vision. As we explored in our last post, civilian and military aviation, where there is no room for error, ranks high on this list. Job performance and passenger safety depends on pilots, air traffic controllers and many other technical and support personnel having full colour vision.

It’s easy to understand, then, why Lemelin is filled with such enthusiasm for Genevolve’s prospects when he hears the United States Air Force state that “no colour vision test currently on the market delivers what the Air Force requires.”

“We are very excited about the possibilities of working with the Air Force and other governmental departments,” he said. “We have a fairly complete understanding of their needs in regards to colour vision and we feel we have a turnkey solution to resolve their longstanding issues.”

The challenge, of course, is to bring to market a compelling product that is protected by a rigorous intellectual property (IP) strategy and has garnered the regulatory approvals and industry praise to attract the interest of such a flagship customer. In this post, we will take a look at Genevolve’s product development, IP strategy, business plan and how venture capital does, or does not, fit into the picture.

Finding the right partner … and the right terms

While the ground-breaking genetic research that underpins Genevolve’s value proposition is ultimately intended to treat colour blindness on a commercial scale, the company is first bringing to market the Eyedox Genetic Test for Color Vision – a first step toward creating a global colour-vision standard for all occupations.

“We have identified significant market pain,” Lemelin said. “Everyone who has a colour-vision deficiency needs and deserves to have accurate information about the nature of their colour vision. Unfortunately, even highly trained optometrists and ophthalmologists are unable to objectively discuss colour vision deficiency with their patients because of a lack of a proper diagnosis.”

But solving this market pain takes laboratory work—a lot of costly laboratory work. In the typical life science scenario, a startup such as Genevolve would secure a VC round and yield some control and ownership to the investor for the cash it needs to set up its own lab. Lemelin, however, has opted instead to establish a partnership with a third-party certified facility, rather than surrender control of Genevolve’s destiny.

To the best of his knowledge, this partnership is as rare as it is innovative.

“We have established a rather equitable multi-year agreement with one of the most recognized laboratories in the world,” he said. “We were not interested in a joint venture or a formal partnership, thus we worked out a royalty-based agreement taking lab costs into consideration.”

As usual, the devil is in the details.

“When partnering with others, both parties must benefit and any deals made should be mutually beneficial or the partnership will not work. You also want to avoid anything being too lopsided favouring one party over the other.”

To that end, Lemelin negotiated who would handle what share of the logistical and marketing costs to ensure both parties had a vested interest in a successful outcome. While the lab is responsible for the bulk of the logistics around clinical development and Genevolve’s market development, both parties share obligations related to the marketing effort.

Covering your assets

But the most important details of the partnership relate to ownership of IP. As we explored in the first post, Genevolve has an exclusive world-wide licence to commercialize the genetic research of husband and wife team Jay and Maureen Neitz and their colleagues at the Eye Institute of the University of Washington in Seattle.

“IP protection is a major issue in partnering with others,” Lemelin said. “In our case, the key patent which encompasses our genetic discoveries is broad and exclusive but it needs to be clear who is bringing in the IP. And who owns any new IP if any is developed. We are constantly working to build the company’s IP portfolio through additional patents, trademarks and copyrights.” However, at this stage, he is reluctant to reveal too much about the strategies Genevolve has instituted to protect its IP.

One of the greatest risks with trying to commercialize a patent related to a body of research that continues to evolve is the fate of the inventor. In Genevolve’s case, that risk is mitigated by the fact that its IP was developed by a duo supported by a research team that has amassed a large amount of clinical data—at this point, the loss of one individual will not derail the entire venture.

Too often, however, this is not the case. For those startups that are dependent on the grey matter of one person, Lemelin offers this advice:

“Get to market FAST!” he said. “Have a contingency plan for every possible event. Do not make major changes and keep it as simple as possible. Learn every detail possible about the IP in case you are forced to pick up unforeseen slack. Do appropriate technology assessment and have multiple potential paths to market … and insurance coverage can be a possible solution to provide further financial protection for the company and investors.”

The business of health

Genevolve is itself pursuing two primary paths to market:

1. Physicians: Physicians are enrolled through a variety of hooks, including exclusive agreements, patient pipelines, free test kits and the promise of getting a competitive edge by offering improved patient care.
2. Occupational departments: This comes back to those 100 or more occupations which rely on normal colour vision, requiring employers to accurately test their employees. Genevolve is developing specific tests to meet specific occupational requirements.

“We continue to develop distribution partners, not only through our existing global broker network from our laboratory partnership, but with major players like McKesson (one of the largest pharmaceutical distributors in North America), and with companies that develop colour-vision aids with the goal of adding value to our product,” Lemelin said.

An important aspect is qualifying the test for health insurance reimbursement.

Genevolve’s colour-vision test falls into the category of molecular diagnostics, which can qualify for reimbursement through a complex pricing and fee schedule that uses “stacked codes.” These codes are used to tally up the costs associated with each step that is required to carry out the test, as well as the technology involved. A new test must go through a long and complex process to have new codes created and qualify for long-term insurance reimbursement.

“The process of getting a new code can take years,” Lemelin said. “To begin the process, you must prove a need by demonstrating national acceptance of the test. This process is best described as establishing reasonable use or, more generally, clinical utility. It then would be critical to establish a value-based service that can be economically and medically justified.”

For Genevolve, this means validating the test by securing analytical articles in peer-reviewed publications and demonstrating that its test has become an accepted standard of care through physician testimonials and rates of adoption. However, molecular diagnostics is such a new field, said Lemelin, that there is not yet a standard in place that provides Genevolve with a target adoption rate to aim for.

As we mentioned in our last article, Genevolve is planning to make a big splash at the annual meeting of the American Academy for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus in March. An impressive showing here could spark the endorsement and early adoption from the broader medical community Genevolve needs to kick start the process of qualifying for insurance reimbursement.

Lemelin has already received positive feedback from practicing clinicians which has him optimistic that Genevolve will secure adequate physician adoption rates. The company also has a practicing optometrist as an investor, which lends further credibility with other physicians.

To VC … or not

Another risk factor facing the business is U.S. President Barrack Obama’s new health care plan, which threatens to tighten the rules governing what qualifies for insurance reimbursement. While Lemelin remains confident that he will be able to meet reasonable usage requirements and show sufficient physician adoption rates to qualify for reimbursement regardless, the Obama plan does create a measure of uncertainty in the market that has many investors wary.

And while Lemelin has always been reluctant to yield control to a venture capitalist, the fact of the matter is, the costs of getting the test to market requires an investment too small to attract the interest of many VCs. In addition, most are not interested in what they deem to be a “service” business. The next step for Genevolve – bringing to market a genetic treatment for colour-vision deficiency – would likely have greater appeal to a VC, but this would still mean surrendering control of the business to secure an investment.

Instead, Lemelin prefers to stick with a more measured approach and seek out the support of private investors. A private placement is another possibility. Once revenue is flowing in from the test, it will provide the capital Genevolve needs to forge ahead with bringing its genetic treatment to market.

“I prefer to commercialize the test, gain the credibility from this major achievement and approach our developing physician network and continue to pitch private investors along the way,” he said.

If all goes according to plan, it will begin with that medical conference in late March. In our next instalment, we will take a look at how the stars are aligning for that launch, the insurance reimbursement system in the U.S., and Genevolve’s contingency plan in case of reimbursement denials.

This is the third article in a continuing monthly series chronicling the growth path of Genevolve Vision Diagnostics, a life sciences startup based in Albuquerque, NM that is commercializing cutting edge genetic research to develop new diagnostic tests and gene therapies for colour blindness.

by Nestor E. Arellano 

I was taking drive to Leamington, Ont. this weekend in my lawyer friend’s car when our conversation took a turn towards the one topic that people ask you about lately when they know you’re a tech journalist – what do you think about RIM?

Nestor Arellano

They want to know what new bit of info I have on the company, and I – lacking anything new to add to what they have already read online – attempt to turn the tables on them and try to get them to voice out their own thoughts.

My friend says he was among the many lawyers that Research In Motion began enticing with their first BlackBerry smartphone in the late 1990s and he has been sold on the device’s security and functionality ever since. He also thinks that dollar-for-dollar the company’s heavily discounted PlayBook is a better buy that Apple’s iPad and any of the many Android tablets flooding the market.

I found this somewhat puzzling because the onboard media screen on his Mercedes SUV’s dash showed he was using a Samsung Nexus S and he had an iPad stashed in the pocket on his leather seat.

Slideshow: Advice for RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins

The first ‘to do’ item for RIM’s new marketing chief [Express IT]

AskingCanadians recently conducted a poll for ITBusiness.ca to find out Canadian’s smartphone preferences and what they thought about the future of the embattled national technology icon RIM.

It seems the poll’s findings were dead on if you would look at my friend as an example – we love the idea of supporting RIM, but we find our fingers swishing and tapping on the screen of a different phone.

The survey of 1,076 individuals from across the country showed that a majority of respondents (63. 4 per cent) believe that despite the dire prognosis, RIM is not going the keel over.

When asked about how they feel about the company’s future, 25.7 per cent  said they believed RIM has a “fairly positive future,” another 4.5 per cent said the company has a “very bright” future. Thirty three per cent  said RIM will keep its current status.

At the other end of the spectrum, 87 people or 8.1 per cent believe RIM will “eventually fail and 308 or 28.6 per cent said the company will decline further.

When asked what mobile platform they are most likely to use, the respondents placed BlackBerry behind the iPhone and Android:

• iOS – 427 (39.7 percent)
• Android – 237 (22.0 per cent)
• BlackBerry – 209 (19.4 per cent)
• Windows Phone – 57 (5.3 per cent)
• Other – 146 (13.6 per cent)

BlackBerry’s position may not be all that bad. It’s third, but a pretty close third to Android and the numbers suggest that one in five Canadians would opt for a BlackBerry.

Despite its leadership problems, marketing slip ups and fumbled product releases, I think the company smartphone users need not turn their backs on RIM.

Even industry watchers who argue that the RIM has failed to keep up with the times and offer “sexier” products that would attract consumers aching for a more exciting smartphone often admit that the BlackBerry is a solid and reliable product. The core functionality that placed the BlackBerry on the top of the smartphone market before the touchscreen craze is still very much alive.

If you’re  mulling over whether your company should to stick with your BlackBerry fleet or give into the BYOD (bring your own device) trend consider these:

• Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of switching to another mobile platform. Determine if your investment in the BlackBerry platform justifies sticking it out or if it’s time for a change
• Determine how dependent your operations are dependent on the BlackBerry infrastructure. If RIM where to fold tomorrow, where would your operations be?

RIM still provides an excellent mobile communication platform for business users. The BlackBerry OS still offers better security that its competitors and provides IT admins with the tools they need to manage and mobile devices and enforce company network policies.

But if you sense that change may be in the air, it’s best to carefully investigate your options and map out you mobile platform exit strategy rather than just jumping headlong into the current hottest handset.

AskingCanadians™ is a full-service online data collection fir m dedicated to helping market researchers gather high quality information from Canadian consumers. We own and manage the AskingCanadians™ online research community, and its French counterpart Qu’en pensez vous^MC, which includes a panel of more than 160,000 demographically representative and profiled Canadians who have opted-in to participate in online surveys that significantly influence today’s leading brands.

We all know a thing or two about getting what we want in a negotiation and when it comes to cellphones everyone has a tip.

Some believe they know how to get the carriers to kneel to the ground, while others feel like its an exercise in high blood pressure. Either way, these tips will help you avoid a few common mistakes before making that call.

Be careful of the silent “extension” – Here’s the scenario. You call your carrier with the intent of upgrading and end up making a few minor adjustments to your existing plan. (eg. Adding text messaging or increasing your voice mail or data plan) When doing so, make sure your carrier doesn’t extend your contract by another 2-3 years. Customers usually get a rude awakening at a later date, when they discover that was the case and still have months if not years left on that extended contract.

Loyalty will only get you so much – Highlighting the fact that you have been a good client for 10 years doesn’t mean what you think it should. From the carrier’s perspective what it really means, is that, you’re less likely to leave. Statistically they know this and that’s why the deals for long time customers, never quite stack up to the deals being offered to newcomers, so, don’t lead with this as your trump card.

Don’t say no to a contract to spite the man and end up hurting yourself – Here’s a scenario we see much too often. Client purchases an iPhone outright and then discovers it doesn’t work with one of the newer carriers. Okay, no big deal, until they also realize that the plan only offerings aren’t as good as the offers on subsidized deals on a 3yr contract. Making matters worse, they end on a cell phone plan that is horrible, with, less overall features and for example, 100MB of data. 100MB of data on an iPhone, is like winning a Ferrari with a limiter set to a max speed of 40KM an hour. In the end, the client is out of pocket upfront by $500-$700 or more and with the higher monthly costs over the same period there is no benefit of giving up your hard earned cash. Some will argue that their freedom was worth every penny and maybe they’re rich enough to do so, but you paid for that right. So, that’s the reality of the cell phone game today, and of course, I hope it changes – soon -, but as they say, don’t bite off your nose to spite your face.

Bite your tongue and make good notes - Do NOT get into a pissing match with any carrier representatives, despite your frustrations. Put yourself in their shoes, would you budge if someone was calling you every name in the book to save $5 or get some feature for FREE? Furthermore, once they make their notes in the system, it becomes exponentially harder to get them to go against each other so, stay cool and make good notes of all conversations. In the end, you don’t want to have to rely on their word against yours, despite the fact that they can record calls. So keep track of dates/times and representatives you spoke to, as well as get the details – confirmed and reconfirmed.

Make your business work for you - If you own a business you should never be paying for your cell phones personally. In addition to tax write offs and other benefits, business cell phone plans tend to have more incentives and more value overall. Examples include, bill credits to cover existing termination fees, cheaper phones and other feature and promotional incentives that are richer than regular consumer cell phone deals. The more devices you have in your business the more difficult it can be to make the comparisons and an informed decision, so let our team help you reduce your cell phone bill.

Lastly, do your homework. This may seem obvious but we realize how confusing things can be and simplifying the whole cell phone experience was the main reasons we created myCELLmyTERMS. So either get some help from our team, especially if you have a business with several users, or do the research first on our site before making that call. Also remember, the iPhone and other market leading smartphones are really computers and they costs more than some big screen TV’s today, so either you buy it outright ($500+) and search for a good plan, or save your cash, get a better plan and take the subsidized pricing with the contract (sometimes as low as $50). When it comes to plans and features, know your usage profile currently and if upgrading to a smart phone understand how much data you need.

by Ann Cavoukian 

I am becoming increasingly concerned about the lack of understanding of a key privacy issue – the ease of data linkages in an ever-increasingly online world, that renders otherwise non-identifiable information, identifiable.  

Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario

New analytic tools and algorithms now make it possible, not only to link a number with an identifiable individual, but also to combine information from multiple sources, ultimately creating a detailed personal profile of a personally-identifiable individual.  

In this information age, people are sharing personal information about themselves in new ways, including through personal blogs and social networking sites. Imagine a scenario where your “anonymous” comments on a newspaper website or in an online chat forum could be tracked back to you personally, simply by linking your IP address and browser data across multiple platforms. 

Even more troubling to me, the federal government is expected to introduce “lawful access” bills, if passed in their original form, would provide police with much greater ability to access and track information about identifiable individuals via innovative new communications technologies, without a warrant or any judicial authorization. In my view, this represents a looming system of “surveillance by design,” that should concern us all in a free and democratic society. 

Fortunately we have a solution. By proactively embedding the principles of Privacy by Design(PbD) into the development of new information technologies and systems, personal information may continue to receive the protections intended. PbD was developed in part to lay to rest the dated “zero-sum” mindset that privacy must be sacrificed for security. PbD seeks to accommodate both legitimate interests in a “positive-sum, win-win” manner, not through the “either/or, zero-sum” approach, where unnecessary trade-offs must be made. 

If we ever lose our right to privacy, there will be little to distinguish our society from that of a totalitarian state.  Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen… Let us make sure that privacy and freedom live on, well into the future.    

To commemorate International Privacy Day, I am holding a public Symposium on Friday January 27, Beware of “Surveillance by Design:” Standing Up for Freedom and Privacy, where highly-respected thought leaders will discuss the privacy implications of proposed federal bills providing police with “lawful access” to individuals’ telecommunications. I encourage you to sign up for the webcast to learn more about this serious issue. Details can be found at www.realprivacy.ca.

by Christine Wong

Assessing the debris of the Research in Motiondebacle – longtime co-CEOs swept aside, stock price in shambles, failed PlayBook launch and customer confidence rocked by service outages – it’s easy to forget this fallen giant was once a Canadian IT startup.

Christine Wong

While founder Mike Lazaridis and his former co-CEO Jim Balsillie took heat for occupying the top jobs at RIM for far too long (27 and 19 years respectively), today’s startup founders seem to be hanging up their entrepreneur’s hats way earlier.  There are no outlets that officially track tech startup M&A deals. But according to an unofficial count by Techvibes, there were 35 Canadian startups acquired in 2011, up from 27 in 2010.

Why are so many Canadian tech startups cashing in their chips early instead of soldiering on to grow and develop their companies into the next RIM (pre-meltdown, of course)?

Well, besides doing a merger or being acquired, the most common exit strategy for startups is to go public on the stock market. But the IPO markets have been soft: companies that went public last year lost 13 per cent of their share value following their IPOs, the first negative return since 2008. Startups could also bide their time by building their war chest as they develop their products and services, but the market for follow-on financings is pretty weak too: there were just under 600 later stage Canadian VC deals in 2011, down from nearly 900 in 2007.

I asked Andrew Macdonald, COO of fashion resale Web startup Shopmyclothes, for his take on why Canadian startups may be more eager to exit through acquisition these days rather than staying the course to grow. Macdonald doesn’t buy the argument that a lack of follow-on VC funding is pushing more startups to take acquisition offers.

“I don’t necessarily think the financing climate in Canada is driving this, though it may be a contributor,” he said. “It may be true that there’s less late stage, large scale capital available in Canada. But there’s no reason Canadian entrepreneurs can’t access U.S. capital pools and avoid an early exit.”

Macdonald also pointed out that although VC disbursements today are smaller than in past years, that shouldn’t be a huge barrier to startups because it’s way cheaper and faster to get a startup off the ground than it was five or 10 years ago. Whereas startups a decade earlier needed office space, connectivity and servers, “nowadays all you need is a laptop and an idea, everything else can be sourced cheaply and on-demand as needed, like server space, storage, design resources and development talent,” he said.

Instead of going big – and taking on all the risk that comes with it – it might just seem safer to go home (early) for a lot of Canadian entrepreneurs today, especially compared to their U.S. counterparts, Macdonald added.

“I think it’s because the attitude towards failure differs meaningfully. Everything I’ve read suggests Silicon Valley entrepreneurs view failure as a rite of passage, while the same is not necessarily true of Canadian startups. I think a lot of us are just happy to build a viable business and then take some chips off the table,” Macdonald said.

Regardless of their motivations, why should we even care if Canadian startups choose to exit early rather than grow their businesses? If they went out on a limb, came up with great ideas and bootstrapped their businesses, why not just celebrate their buyouts and pat them on the back for their success?

Well, it may be worth worrying about whether this trend could have a long term impact on Canada’s IT sector. If all this great startup talent or innovation is being taken off the table so early in the game, does it chip away at our likelihood of building the next global category killer like RIM?  

And these very same startups are already lamenting the lack of seasoned veteran IT entrepreneurs in Canada who can hook them up with great financing connections and advise them on strategy as they plot their business plans. Won’t the early exit trend deplete this pool of mentors even further?  

Yes, the misfortunes of RIM and Nortel Networkshurt thousands of their shareholders and employees. Yet if those companies had called it a day at the startup phase, decades of job and knowledge creation that took place as those firms flourished never would have happened at all. And Lazaridis probably wouldn’t have donated well over $100 million of his personal wealth to charitable causes so far.  

Each time a large Canadian company in any industry gets taken over by a foreign giant there are rumblings about the hollowing out of corporate Canada. Yet I haven’t heard the same concerns about an early exit trend among Canadian startups.  

Many have sneered at the recent misfortunes of Lazaridis and Balsillie – but at least they can be commended for leading a Canadian startup that stuck it out.   

By Francis Moran

In our last post, we looked at Screenreach Interactive’s recent inroads in the radio and television industries, including its appearance on Popular U.K. television program The Gadget Show at Radio Festival, Europe’s top radio industry event, and its new “experience” for long-running U.K. current affairs program Dispatches.

Making a splash at major industry events and with high profile clients demands one thing – a compelling product. But a compelling product can’t be developed in a vacuum; it must address a clear market demand. As we have emphasized time and again, marketing and product development must work together from the get go. To quote guest commentator Ronald Weissman, “Great companies constantly test the market, for validation and feedback.”

The team at Screenreach has taken this to heart. With a new version of the Screach app expected to launch in February, every effort is being made to solicit input from beta testers and prospective users. In this post, we’ll look at how Screenreach approaches the beta testing process, what third-party tools it has found to make life easier and the lessons it continues to learn along the way.

In beta with social media

While the team is reluctant to reveal too much about the new features and functionality that will be included in the new version of Screach, it is safe to say the app has been in a constant state of evolution since its launch in the summer of 2010. Market feedback has been fundamental to the process, with social media emerging as a primary means to attract and engage users.

Screenreach’s blog has proven to be a useful tool and this time around, the lure of winning a MacBook Air is an added incentive. But building a community following on Twitter has been fundamental to mustering a strong and outspoken group of testers. The team has built its following by getting involved in specific industry conversations on Twitter and constantly discussing Screach through the micro-blogging platform.

“There is a need to strike a balance between too few and too many beta testers,” said Screenreach CEO Paul Rawlings. “Realistically, you may have a lot of people signed up for beta testing but experience has shown us that only 25 percent of those will actively download the app and provide feedback – perhaps even less. So from that point of view you need to account for drop off.”

The mobile platform being tested also impacts how large the group can be. At this stage, Screenreach is only testing the iPhone version and Apple limits beta tester groups to 100. Google, on the other hand, imposes no such limitation for the Android.

Finding the forest among the trees

It’s one thing to build a strong community of beta testers who are willing to provide useful feedback and quite another to manage the logistics of all that crowd-sourced input and distil it into meaningful data. For that, Screenreach has found two useful third-party tools.

The first is Test Flight, a free web service that provides developers with an easy means to distribute their beta apps for testing. For the Screenreach team, there just isn’t anything else comparable.

“TestFlight has proved to be a useful tool for us, it has a great dashboard and organizing tools,” said Rawlings.

However, its current version does have one drawback.

“One problem we have experienced with TestFlight is that it only allows you to assign one account to your device which has posed problems when a beta tester has previously registered another account,” said Rawlings. “It means they have difficulty swapping the accounts over – this was something we were already aware of and could help the testers resolve but it’s definitely something you need to be aware of. Anything that inhibits the tester from downloading the app as quickly as they need to obviously isn’t great.”

The other tool is Get Satisfaction, an online platform for brands to host their community of users.

“We looked around at a number of tools that could be used to collate feedback on the new app and we chose Get Satisfaction for a couple of reasons,” said marketing manager Sarah Athey. “First, we really liked the way it allows a user to categorize their posts. It means we can manage feedback based on whether it’s a question, idea or problem. It has useful admin features too, such as a management view which helps you to track and stay on top of all your posts.”

The Screenreach team never really considered handling these kinds of logistics in house.

“Third party apps like Get Satisfaction are good at what they do and make it easier to categorize feedback topics and assign the best team member to respond to a specific question, problem or idea from a tester,” Athey added. “It also creates a forum for testers to compare notes with each other and for the whole team to get involved in these conversations.”

In some instances, however, nothing beats good old fashioned face-to-face contact. While Get Satisfaction has proven effective for engaging in conversations through online forums, the Screenreach team has still found it useful to hold focus groups for feedback on the Screach experience for versions that have been customized for a specific market vertical, such as television programming.

“We’ve also had a couple of testers who have really gone the extra mile and their fresh perspective on Screach has been fantastic, so we’ve thought about inviting them in to meet the team and see the impact their feedback has made,” said Athey. “Some of the testers put a lot of their time and thought into the process and we’re very grateful for that.”

Lessons learned

Despite the benefits of using social media and specialized third-party tools, the team has found that the process can be more complicated than expected, with a host of small details to manage around the release to ensure the install of the beta version is as painless as possible for testers.

“One thing we’d say is make sure you have the full team involved in the process. Everything that comes out of this involves just about every aspect of the organization,” said Rawlings. “It’s also an interesting way to generate new ideas within the team. We’ve always placed great emphasis on every team member being deeply involved in the user and client perception of Screach so this is an important part of that.

“For example, your developer needs to be ready with the technical aspect of things but this has to be correctly communicated to your marketing person for them to translate that message to the user. Then there will be feedback that revolves around design or bugs or product questions in general – you need to have all of the correct people on board to answer these questions.”

One risk the Screenreach team took was opening beta testing during the holidays.

“We took a bit of a risk, but as it turned out, it meant our core testers had free time on their hands to get more actively involved,” said Rawlings. “You need to be aware of things like this.”

The important thing, Rawlings added, is to immerse yourself in the feedback that you receive by asking followup questions to understand the thought process behind why a beta tester is making a specific suggestion.

The learning process never ends. The new version of Screach will soon be pushed out to Android beta testers, which promises to provide a whole new flood of feedback given the growing variety of Android devices that are now available.

“We’re aiming to launch in February so things are very full on at the moment and the beta tester feedback is at the heart of everything we are working on,” said Rawlings.

In our next instalment, we will take a closer look at the launch efforts for the latest version of Screach, provided, of course, that the team’s best-laid plans do not go astray.

This is the fourth 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 Leo Valiquette

In our last post, we spoke to Katie and Luke Hrycak, the sibling founders of CommentAir, about their challenges as technology entrepreneurs who do not have a background in technology. A process of self-education and aggressive networking to tap into the expertise of supportive advisors and mentors has been key.

The need to seek out external business and technical expertise of course extends to the team they must build to move CommentAir along. As a bootstrapped startup, they must not only find individuals who compliment their own strengths and weaknesses, but also share their passion and are willing to put in long hours without a regular pay cheque.

In this post, we take a closer look at what the siblings have learned about themselves, about building strong teams and how this must be applied to the business.

Who should be the next hire?

CommentAir took flight in early 2010. As we explored in the previous post, Zhu Li, a PhD candidate in wireless communication at Carleton, became Katie’s technical advisor and, now that he has returned home to Hong Kong, is on deck to serve as the company’s Chinese connection when the product is ready for mass production. (However, he has yet to join the company as a founder or employee.) CommentAir has also enjoyed the support of Carleton University professor Tony Bailetti and Ed Strange, coordinator of applied research and investigator of special projects at Algonquin College, who put together a student team with funding through Ontario’s FedDev program to work on CommentAir’s prototype.

While Luke and Katie have secured the support of a number of other advisors and mentors, their first true hire came this past summer, when they brought on board as chief designer and project manager Andrew Lowe.

“I went to go talk to him about manufacturing and plastics, and he liked the idea so we offered him equity in the company for his designs and knowledge on manufacturing and electronics,” Katie said.

For 2012, Katie and Luke are planning to add a technical cofounder as they work toward major field tests this summer.

“We need someone like this as soon as we start getting to either some major first tests or before a launch, because technical things are going to go wrong and it’s out of our knowledge base to fix them,” Katie said.

“I would like a telecom or electrical engineer, preferably someone who has many others to vouch for their work ethic and projects,” she added. “They have to also enjoy sports and understand why we are doing what we want to do. An entrepreneurial mentality isn’t a top priority, but definitely a creative mind that can work around unforeseen problems. It’s also important that it’s someone we can get along with.”

But there is a clear distinction between getting along with someone and always being in agreement with them.

“You won’t always see eye-to-eye with your team, and that’s a good thing,” Katie said. “Same goes with informal advisors and partners. It’s all about having different perspectives and taking them all into account. If you have anyone telling you the same thing as you’re thinking, that’s not good.”

“If they aren’t adding value, cut them loose,” Luke added. “Don’t wait and don’t look back. Trust your gut.”

What distinguishes a co-founder or partner from advisors, mentors?

“A partner is someone who is willing to get more involved in the day to day, and bring value beyond just advice,” Luke said. “They’re bringing a skill or trait that we lack, such as the technical know-how, or something to get us to the next stage.”

Or, to put it another way:

“Co-founders and team members are meant to cover each other’s butts when your reputation and product are on the line,” Katie said. “There are always people who will love your idea, but that doesn’t mean you should bring them on.”

But sometimes, an ideal team member may present themselves unexpectedly.

“Sometimes a team member will just fall into your lap, so always keep your eyes open and have in mind a checklist of what you want to add to your team,” she said. “If they believe in your idea and in you, they will come on for equity if you’re bootstrapping and not even question if there is a salary.”

Finding the right people depends on your qualities as much as theirs

Katie readily acknowledges that her greatest weakness as an entrepreneur is lack of life experience, something which cannot be acquired in a university lecture hall.

“Every single meeting or conversation I’ve had with a mentor has left me pretty much floored in just how much I don’t know but should, and how much work I have left to do,” she said. “In order to get over this, I’ve had to self-educate to become an expert in my areas of interest as well as in the business I want to run.”

On the other hand, she considers her greatest strength to be her people skills, which she has already used to her advantage to win advisors and mentors willing to share their expertise.

Luke, on the other hand, has come to realize that his biggest weakness is “assuming any obstacle can be overcome quickly, when in reality, it takes a while to overcome it. My strength is just the perseverance to keep at it over time.”

While they believe their strengths will serve to create a strong and close-knit culture in the business as it grows, they both agree that the best way to overcome their weaknesses is to seek out the input of others before making decisions.

“If we can do this bootstrapping and without having to take money from anyone, that’s the way we’re going to do it,” Katie said. “Keep it in the family and just build relationships with mentors to get the expert advice we need.”

Thinking about the future

While the expert advice they need may someday require bringing on board a savvy investor for a share of equity, Katie and Luke are not yet willing to give up that degree of control.

“It can obviously be beneficial to have someone hands on overlooking the entire operation,” Katie said. “I just don’t think we’re there yet so I haven’t put too much thought into who I would want to invest in us. Would I turn down money if the investor fit wasn’t right? We’ll cross that bridge if we get there!”

Meanwhile, the siblings are intent on building a business with the staying power to continue on without them.

“Some entrepreneurs just want to make big money and go retire on a beach, so they build their companies that way,” Luke said. “In our case, we want to build something that will continue on without us, but we will want to always have a hand in it. We want to take what we build and continue on to grow other businesses as well.”

In our next instalment, we will explore the challenges of paying the bills on a bootstrap budget.

This is the fourth article in a continuing series chronicling the growth path of CommentAir Technologies, a startup based in Ottawa, Canada. CommentAir is developing a wireless technology fans can use at sports venues to receive the same real-time commentary as fans watching from their televisions, a wireless technology that also creates a platform for targeted consumer interaction. We invite your feedback.

by Kye Husbands

So you’re contemplating the jump from BlackBerry to iPhone and wondering what you should expect. Having done the same thing a few months ago, I wanted to share my experience and help you save some time getting your iPhone set up to suit your needs.

You’ve already heard how great the iPhone is, so instead of preaching more of the same, I thought this blog would be more helpful if I highlighted a few of the challenges with making the switch or, a few things you may want to consider before making the switch.

Email on the iPhone versus the BlackBerry

The email experience on a BlackBerry is superior to the iPhone. Yes, I said it and despite having switched months ago, I still reach for my phone occasionally when I hear the unmistakable BlackBerry email chime. The whole premise of checking email doesn’t exist on a BlackBerry and RIM’s push email functionality means that you never have to check your email. On the iPhone you can have your email accounts set up to check periodically – (every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or hour) -, but it just isn’t the same thing.

So, if email is a critical part of your professional life or the BlackBerry has been a part of your cell phone DNA for years, this seemingly simple difference will take some getting use to. On the other hand, cell phones have evolved way beyond simple email messaging devices and the other many advantages of the iPhone outweigh this drawback.

BlackBerry’s Physical Keyboard versus Apple’s Virtual Keyboard

BlackBerry has long touted the advantages of its QWERTY keyboards and five years ago that was all we knew. While yesterday’s power user may still be use to the keyboard for sending emails, BBM messages or whatever, the physical keyboard comes at the expense of a bigger screen, unless you happen to be a BB 9800 or BB 9900 user. 

As a former BlackBerry Torch user myself, I never used my slider keyboard and the virtual keyboard on the Torch can be frustrating at times. A simple email can be a miserable experience just based on where the global language button is positioned with the inadvertent messages in Chinese, Japanese or some other language, and the auto correction/suggestion is lacking at times. Apple on the other hand has perfected the virtual keyboard in my opinion. The keyboard is sensitive and responsive and the auto correction/suggestion is simply amazing, so there is no need to concentrate on where you click on the screen as long as you are in the general area, you somehow get it right. All in all, the iPhone’s virtual keyboard is close to perfection and simply the best virtual keyboard of all the smart phones in market today.

Getting your contacts on your iPhone

Chances are, if you are a long time BlackBerry professional user your contacts are all in MS Outlook. I personally had over 500 contacts in MS Outlook and in order to take advantage of the Apple’s Address Book and therefore have your contacts native to the iPhone 4S you have to move your contacts over. This became the biggest hassle of getting set up on the iPhone, because you can’t simply export your contacts from MS Outlook to Address Book. So in order to do this you need:

1. Export your contacts in CSV format from MS outlook
2. Install Thunderbird (a free email client) on your PC and import your CSV file into Thunderbird.
3. Ensure that your contacts are imported correctly (i.e correct number of records and the data looks fine)
4. Export your CSV file from Thunderbird as a LDIF file. (It must be an LDIF file)
5. Now you can import the LDIF file of your contacts into Address Book on your Mac PC.

This process can be a little quirky once importing to Address Book and may require some additional time finessing the fields of information imported for each contact. With a little patience and good luck, at the end of this exercise you will have your full list of contacts on the iPhone and any updates that you do should be done within Address Book as opposed to MS Outlook, or you’ll have to repeat the entire process. Of course, if you didn’t have your contacts in MS Outlook you can just enter them on your iPhone directly if you have time to burn, or if you happen to be a Google App user, you can install Google Sync and sync your outlook contacts to Google’s cloud and from there to your iPhone.

Adding signatures for multiple mailboxes

On the iPhone 4S it’s easy to set up multiple mailboxes for your email, however, the main challenge you will discover is not being able to have multiple signatures for each of the those mailboxes. In other words, you can only have one signature for all of your outgoing mailboxes. If your in tune with life as an iPhone user then your first thought will be, “there must be an app for that?” A quick search of the Appstore for “multiple mail signatures” yields a few results with very average ratings, but a new addition called MailSig by Ziximo appears to offer some promise. Also, here are 5 iPhone Apps that you didn’t know you want, but can’t live without.

So what’s the scoop?

The iPhone is a lifestyle. Let me repeat that, the iPhone is a lifestyle. It’s your iPod for your music, it’s your camera that takes better pictures than the BlackBerry, it’s your window into a world of apps that can almost do anything you dream of and the overall user experience is superior to the BlackBerry as a result of all of these things plus plenty more. So, until RIM get’s their act together and really ups the ante with some new devices, making the switch to the iPhone is an easy decision.

If you’re in market for a new iPhone, take advantage of myCELLmyTERMS and compare iphone plans to find the best cell phone deal.

If you are wondering what SOPA is then you probably didn’t Wikipedia last week when it shutdown in protest.  SOPA is a bill which the UScongress wanted to pass and it stands for Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

It sounds harmless enough, after all we all want to stop piracy…don’t we! While we are against piracy we certainly aren’t against FREE SPEECH and SOPA takes it too far suggesting a China like authoritarian rule where record labels and cable companies have the power to shut down website because of alleged piracy acts, no matter how small the piracy act is….it may be as simple as you uploading a video of you and your family at a family bar-b-que with Lady Gaga playing in the background. You may be in violation and your website may be shut down.

Still not convinced, here are 5 reasons why SOPA needs to die…

 1. It kills Free Speech

The act is so broad that if you have a link that points to copyrighted content posted by a user making a point about something completely unrelated, your website can be shut down. YouTube would shut down tomorrow, it won’t be able to exist because it would be in constant violation, not because of YouTube but because there may be 1 person in the multitude of people who post videos with copyright content. Wikipedia would cease to exist because its links to a website that has questionable content. Even myCELLmyTERMS would be subject to these same rules based on an innocent link posted by one of our users.

This anti-piracy battle may nearly be won, but the war isn’t over

SOPA would lead to ‘Mad Max’-style Darknet [ExpressIT]

Anti-SOPA protesters relentless after Web strike

 2. It does NOT Stop Piracy

This is a case of anti-piracy theater, where ordinary people like you and me get caught in the web. Real pirates are so sophisticated that if you shut them down, they are back up in hours and have several ways at their disposal at getting around road blocks. This acts affect us more than it affects them.

3.  It puts the power back in the hands of the 1 per cent

The people who benefit the so called content providers, like the Movie studios, Cable companies, Record labels would dictate which websites can survive and which should be shut down. Now why would we want to give them so much power to dictate how we live our lives. The Internet is a domain for everyone and its the one place where everyone has a voice.

4. SOPA affects other countries too, even Canada

This proposed law would give the US Government such broad powers that they can damage websites outside of theUSlikeCanada. Since most Canadian websites are managed by a registry in theUS, this bills directly affects us. The US Government would have the ability to demand that US domain registrars block sites which it may deem in violation and the process of blocking these sites will affect almost every single website connected those domains – in essence blacking out the rest of the Internet based on the US Government’s fancy.

5.  We would lose our right to protest in anonymity

SOPA is against, rather prohibits, the use of tools to get around any blocks put up by the US Government. Incidentally, these same tools allow activists and protesters from countries likeNorth KoreaorSyriato protest freely without being discovered. Banning these tools has the unwanted effect of limiting protest against injustice around the world.

Still not convinced, then check out Wikipedia’s protest against SOPA and show your support for this movement.

Yale Holder is a co-founder of MyCellMyTerms, a Toronto company that  helps cell phone users negotiate better plans with. their carriers.