Amazon acquires AbeBooks

Today Amazon announced the acquisition of Victoria-based AbeBooks, the company I have been involved with for over 7 years (operationally as COO until October last year, since then as Director and consultant). As you can imagine, I am extremely excited about this deal which makes tremendous sense for everybody involved: Amazon (who has been heavily […]

Relaunch time

Summer seems to be relaunch time for our portfolio companies: TeamPages has a fresh new look and an easier navigation and Tripsbytips completely relaunched its site making it much easier to add recommendations so that the best community-based travel tips should emerge very quickly for the main travel destinations of this world. In addition, LiveCurrent […]

I love these t-shirts!

While Facebook goes for world domination, signing up teens, parents and grandparents alike, Nexopia stays focused on the 13- to 20 years olds– this t-shirt says it all and it has been a huge hit with Nexopia’s users (and strangely enough, often with their parents as well).

German start-up scene – copycats or innovators, enough or not enough VC money?

Fred Wilson published an interesting post today about the start-up scene in Berlin. Having founded my own start-up in Germany (JustBooks, later acquired by Victoria’s AbeBooks), being currently invested in a successfull Internet start-up based in Berlin (Tripsbytips, an online travel community) and working with one of the leading German VC’s (Munich-based Acton Capital / […]

Canada’s largest Internet start-ups

Techvibes.com, the network of local technology blogs, just released their first Canada Start-up Index. The methodology to determine the index is by no means scientific but the list still provides a really good overview of the Canadian start-up scene. The performance of the W Media Ventures portfolio companies (2 among the top 3, 5 among […]