Breaking into the Valley? Use the “Canadian mafia”
There is a PayPal mafia, a Facebook mafia and a Twitter mafia, all powerful networks of entrepreneurs and investors based in the Valley. And now there is a really strong “Canadian mafia” emerging. It started to formalize with the launch of the C100 a few years ago. The organization is comprised of a select group of mostly Silicon Valley-based Canadian […]
New investment: Edmodo, social learning network for teachers and students
Education is – besides health care – one of the verticals with the most amount of opportunity still left in the digital world. And still a lot of innovation in this space in the past few years was rather incremental (e.g. online test prep, language learning) than ground breaking. Things are starting to change and […]
The stream is broken
One of the key innovations in social media was Facebook’s newsfeed and it transformed the site from a social network built around profiles to a truly engaging communication platform. But as every site with a focus on social has adopted a feed, the noise seem to have reached an unproductive level. No viral marketing strategy […]
Amazon’s new Vancouver office is great news
Yesterday’s news that Amazon is opening an engineering office in Vancouver is a really good one for the city. While development offices can never replace having “real” anchor companies in a community, they can help attract and train talented developers that at some stage leave the company and start new companies. It is this typical […]
Looking back at my 2010 predictions
The year is slowly coming to an end and it is time to look back at my 2010 predictions for the consumer internet space – overall, I would give myself a 3.5 out of 5: Prediction #1: Facebook will lock down on its dominance of the social graph: Facebook Connect will become the standard for […]