2008 ACE Exposition

acecanadaAdvancing Canadian Entrepreneurship (ACE) held their showcase of entrepreneurs at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.  ACE is a charitable organization that delivers programming to higher education students to inspire them to make meaningful contribution to words their community by building real world businesses and entrepreneurial ventures.

ACE submissions are from major Canadian schools including BCIT, University of Calgary, Ryerson University, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo amongst others. The Student Entrepreneur Competition requires that students be a founder (or 50% owner of a business) and are selected based on financials and subjective judging criteria. The goal is to submit an operating venture that is ready for growth.

ACE announces 2008 National Student Entrepreneur Competition Champion – Joseph Moncada, Sweet Tooth Candy Emporium

Since 2006 Joseph, a Business student, has owned and operated Sweet Tooth Candy Emporium, a network of stores and kiosks offering rare, unique, retro, and imported sweets from around the world. What started as a summer project through the Ontario Government “Summer Company” program has grown exponentially into a successful franchise.

Now in operation for only two years, Sweet Tooth Candy Emporium employs over 25 people and has grown into three stores based in prominent locations around the Greater Toronto Area and Wasaga Beach.

The focus of the ACE programs is on economic impact on local communities. The submissions are diverse ranging from software to franchises. The 2008 regional winners included software companies, an online retailer, a French language publishing company and a walking stick manufacturer.

  • Ryne Flood, 6am SoftwareOnline Parent-Teacher Interview Scheduler
  • Grahm Watts, Nature Trails – A company that manufactures walking sticks, twig pencils, bird hourses, etc.
  • Brad LeBlanc, Engaging Entertainment – Event mangement, event production and strategic marketing
  • André Wilson, Editions Court-Circuit – A French language publishing company
  • Jill Lennox, Stuffitbag – Custom designed laptop bags with online retailing
  • Brett Patrontasch, Scholars At Your Service Inc. – a student organization offering residential and commercial painting, window washing, and on site automotive detailing to their customers

While most of these ventures probably aren’t venture fundable, the opportunity for students to see entrepreneurship as a career path is needed in Canadian post secondary educational institutions. ACE offers a great structured set of programs for students to get involved and inspired by entrepreneurs in their communities.

StartupIndex: Canadian Startup Map

We just launched a neat new mapping feature on StartupIndex.

As more data gets entered by the community, a lot of the entries contain address information. We weren’t really using this in any special ways until Ali really started thinking about a map.

The map is dynamic and thanks to some slick programming, it will auto-cluster elements in order to make things more intuitive as you zoom in and out.

Is it useful? We don’t know yet. We will constantly be trying things on StartupIndex and we will be testing them to see if they are valuable or not. So please, let us know what you think.

New $150 million Blackberry Fund, based in Canada

VentureBeat decided to jump the gun this weekend and post some news that has been floating around lately about a new Blackberry fund. They deleted the post from their blog, but it was still available in Google Reader and in other places and TechCrunch got to it late on Saturday.

The new fund is being managed by RBC Ventures, who just last week closed an investment in Toronto-Based Blackberry application Viigo, and JLA Ventures. RIM, maker of the Blackberry, is a limited partner in this fund, but is not involved in the day-to-day investment decisions.

The rumor mill has been churning away on this one for months here in Toronto. Originally the numbers we were hearing were $100 million, but as the weeks went by, people started to hint that things had heated up and there were partners involved up to $150 million. That number, $150M, turned out to be true.

Companies funded by the Blackberry Partners Fund do not have to be producing Blackberry applications yet. The press release says that the fund is “Agnostic to both stage and balance sheet, the BlackBerry Partners Fund will not restrict the development of mobile applications and services to any single mobile platform or any specific industry segment.”, which is all true, but only companies who have a Blackberry Application in their roadmap will be funded.

The fund will be will be announced at WES in Orlando tomorrow morning.

It is interesting to note that RBC Ventures recently funded another Balsillie company, Igloo Software with $4M. Jim Balsillie, the CEO of RIM, is on the Board of Directors of Igloo Software, who closed their financing last week.

In talking to Rick Segal, one of the partners at JLA Ventures, about this new fund he put it very plainly: The test will be in 6 months when we look at how many deals have actually gotten done.

Will this be another Java Fund? I certainly hope not, espcially for Canadian companies who have a chance to connect with some known VCs and tap in to a strong fund with great connections to the maker of the most popular Web, Email and Voice device out there.