Category: Startup

Out of 19 Young Entrepreneurs featured in the Globe and Mail’s spotlight on Calgary, AcceleratorYYC is proud to be the home of 4 of them! Trevor Gair from theSoJo.net, Joshua Pinter from Community Point, Ziko Rajabali from QuickQueue, and Pieter Boekhoff co-founder of AcceleratorYYC and from Fenture Solutions. Although Lloyed Lobo is not an official member of the space, his and Alex Popa’s company Boast Capital is a huge supporter and we are very please to see them represented on the list. 

When it comes to social media platforms, the marketers’ top five social media choices are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and YouTube (and other video) as reported by both Awareness, Inc.’s research and Social Media Examiner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Social media marketing tools marketers are planning to use in 2012: This post covers Google+, Facebook, Blogs and most all social networking and geo-location websites. This report from eMarkter is good as well. Also the Soci

I love Ben Affleck's first scene in the movie "Boiler Room." I always felt that the quote above perfectly relates to companies and press coverage. The ones who don’t get coverage will quickly dismiss it as useless and a waste of time and money to pursue, while the ones who regularly get coverage just smile and hope that you keep thinking that way. Over the last 12 years, I have been featured in hundreds of major newspapers, magazines, websites and blogs (everything ranging from the NY Times, USA Today and CNN to TechCrunch, Entrepreneur and so on), and ...

We work with startups everyday who are looking for guidance and advice about how to best run their businesses and tips they should know about to be successful.  We thought we would highlight this article from VentureBeat since it gives some good pointers for anyone embarking on founding their own company.

Digital Alberta put on yet another excellent event at Innovate Calgary on Monday night: The Mobile innovation Showcase. For my part, I was really impressed at just how mature all these companies are. I'm intimately aware of Kryos Velocity's journey as I helped with their revolutionary Velocity 2 launch. And, even though I thought I knew Poynt, the company continues to make great strides at an accelerated pace – they now have more than 10 million users (Kris wouldn't give us the exact number, but was smiling coyly) and an increasingly developer-friendly focused innovative work environment.

Techvibes has been tracking Kryos Velocity for a couple of years, and it's always great to see a company that is continuously inventing itself as it's success grows. Here's the Techvibes post from last July on the launch of their Android version.

The Velocity 2 release adds HTML5 to the Android and Blackberry versions; it also runs on tablets such as the new PlayBook 2.0 and iPad. There's a lot more to the Velocity 2 launch. A full version of the press release can be found on the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

Tips for hiring an inbound marketing manager or social media manager. Including sample job description. As you may have noticed, some new faces have joined the marketing team here at Marketo to help improve our online engagement and grow demand from inbound marketing sources. Why? Because we believe that to continue our fast growth we need to scale both paid programs as well as inbound programs including SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing.

Calgary-based Trilogy Software announced today that it has raised $3.3M in private equity with funds from founders and local and North American private investors. Read the full press release. This is CEO Cameron Peters 3rd company. He co-created Cantax Software in the 1980’s (now part of CCH), and and co-founded GreenPoint Software and the ProFile Tax Application Suite in the 1990’s, (I had the pleasure to be a co-founder, as well). GreenPoint was acquired by Intuit in 2000, after which Cameron served as CTO for Intuit Canada and U.K.   $3.3M for a first raise for ...

Empire Avenue out of Edmonton is interesting. Using the stock market as a metaphor, members of the community can buy shares in you using a virtual currency at your going stock price. Using a social aggregator algorithm, Empire Avenue evaluates and quantifies what is now commonly referred to as "social leverage"; counting and evaluating your tweets, re-tweest, Facebook and LinkedIn status updates, Youtube activity, Blogs, Flickr, ... you get the idea. Combine that with your engagement and performance in the Empire Avenue "stock market" platform itself; how often and how much do you invest, etc..., and you get a single score ...

Wicked awesome Startup Calgary Launch party last night. About 350 people filled the Roderick Mah Centre at Mount Royal. Great networking and buzz; it's a continued validation that our tech scene is both exploding in both quantity and quality. Festivities got under way around 5:00. Ninecompanies presented to a select crowd of about 50 V.I.P.'s (C100, A100 and Investors) : Opryx,Minigroup, Hubblr, Kudos, Vision Player, New Panda, Transithub, Community Point, and Core Connect. The three companies selected to pitch in front of the full crowd, who had filled the hall by about 7:30, wereOrpyx ...