Pitching day
The GROW conference has brought dozens of high-profile VC’s and super-angels to Vancouver which presents a wonderful opportunity for many local start-ups to get exposure to out-of-town investors. So today is “pitching day” jointly organized by W Media Ventures and Bootup Labs. 7 companies will take the stage: CompassEngine (location-based gaming platform), EmpireAvenue (influence stock […]
New investment: Barcode Hero, a “Foursquare for shopping”
Image via Wikipedia After the investment in Empire Avenue last week I am very excited to announce another investment today: Barcode Hero‘s mission is to help shoppers in physical stores, through breakthrough mobile technology. Simply put, it is like a “Foursquare for shopping”: Barcode Hero users scan products at home or in a store, build […]
What GROW means for the Vancouver tech community
For the next 3 days the Valley descends on Vancouver for the GROW conference and you can feel a real excitement in the local tech community about hosting entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh (Zappos) or Andrew Mason (Groupon) as well as investors like Rob Hayes (First Round Capital), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Jeff Clavier (Softtech) or […]
New investment: Empire Avenue, the world’s first influence stock market
Image via CrunchBase With the explosion of social media in the past few years, we now have millions of people broadcasting and curating information on a daily basis, making personal recommendations and endorsements to their friends and followers and creating personal brands on the Internet. But with that explosion of small “media outlets” it is […]
Why Demand Media (and similar models) will succeed
Image via CrunchBase With Demand Media filing for their long-expected IPO last week, the discussion around scalable content generation platforms (or “content farms” as critics of those models prefer to call them) is back in full swing. As an investor in Suite101 (the third-largest platform behind Demand Media and Yahoo‘s Associated Content), I have been […]