Ottawa-based Iotum Wins Demo God Award
It's good see Iotum come home from Phoenix with a 2006 Demo God Award - a nice laurel for Alec Saunders and Howard Thaw, who have been toiling away trying to sell their innovative relevance-engine telecom software to carriers, ISPs and investors for the past year. Maybe  this will be what Iotum needs to attract VC support. I'm willing to bet they may even get some calls from Canada's conservative financing community now that Iotum has been given the official stamp of approval. Truth be told, there are simply a lack of Iotums in Canada. For all the talk that we're a world-class innovation country, there's a troubling lack of high-tech entrepreneurs, start-ups and financing to really make it happen. Even Web 2.0 services, which cost little to develop, are few are far between at a time when Silicon Valley is flush with interesting start-ups (even if few of them real business models.)
February 11th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Your right, Alec is kickin' ass — and I agree, even with the dramatically lowered cost of starting something up, we're still seeing little in the way of new innovative ventures in Canada that are pushing the edge. But I think this time around, we'll do a bit better — access to global talent and capital is easier in this era than before IMHO, all we need is to have folks step it up. The culture IS slowly changing I think. Waterloo is still no Stanford when it comes to migrating top technical talent into REAL VENTURES (per capita) — even as they produce some of the best technical minds in the world.
The most important thing we can do here is just lead by example and keep stirring things up to help cultivate a culture and awareness of entrepreneurialism. I think between guys like Alec on the startup side, Rick Segal on the funding side, and David with things like TorCamp on the grass roots developer side — things will really start picking up over the next few years.
But my guess is that Canada is going to be a relatively more innovative in the next decade (2006-2016) than the last decade that I've experienced working here as being paid to “build things technology” (1996-2006).
And, as you may recall from April 2000 when I first showed up publicly on your editorial radar at the Globe, me and the team (made up of mostly serial tech entrepreneurs) at BubbleShare are not risk adverse and enjoy stirring stuff up.
February 11th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
Mark, posted a quick blog back to you here:
http://simplyalbert.blogspot.com/2006/02/state-of-canadian-techinnovation.html
while you're there at the site.. you should check out our select list of new features/changes in our first major overhaul of bubbleshare… i'm sure you'll find the new site to be a big leap forward.