The sorry state of VC in Canada

Paging Mark, David and the crew at StartupNorth. I’ve been talking about this for over a week and forgeting to post it. Mark McQueen of Wellington Financial has a fantastic post about a recent Delloite report revealing the sad state of venture capital AND a detailed set of recommendations on how to fix it.

According to Ruffolo, the results of the global VC survey should trigger alarm bells throughout the industry and government. “If not fixed in the near term, the Canadian VC ecosystem – made up of successive and sequential stages of capital investment from early seed financing through initial public offerings – will collapse. We need the government’s help to pull the industry out of this crisis,” he says.

Why Mark is also so surprised that the BDC, despite perhaps even their best intentions, may have been stepping in to fill some part of this financing gap in recent years, is, a whole other debate. In the meantime though, check out what Deloitte has to say and have your eyes opened to a very real problem with venture financing in Canada.

see also, the comment thread on this startupnorth post for more context.

Posted in Archive, canada, investment, vc | Leave a comment

Last Call for Lift Early-Bird Pricing

LIFT08Reminder, Friday is the last day for early-bird pricing to Lift08. Laurent writes:

a quick email to remind you that the LIFT08 price will go up by 200CHF on Friday. If you want to participate in this year’s event for only 650CHF (390 EURO, 570$, 280£) and get your yearly dose of new trends,
innovative people and ideas, please register before midnight on Friday.

After that date attending LIFT08 will cost 850CHF (510 EURO, 750$, 365£). Register now and join the 215+ persons who already signed up.

Visit http://www.liftconference.com/lift08-registration for more information. Best regards and see you at LIFT!

Oh, and Email me if you want to be on the Lift08 Team Canada email list.

see also the Lift Group on Facebook, and the Lift08 event page.

Posted in Archive, awesomeness, canada, lift08 | Leave a comment

Web programming tip of the day

Helpful programming tip of the day. Brought to you by the letter dumb and, today, by the MyRogers Change Your Contact Information secure online form.

Let’s suggest you have a common webform that accepts addresses including standard Canadian postal codes. Lets assume your database only accepts postal codes in some format, say, xxxyyy as opposed to another other commonly used variation such as xxx yyy (with a space in the middle).

Algorithm Suggestions:

10 Accept postal code
20 Does postal code have a space in it?
30 if yes, 
     
     Link Style="font-color:RED; set-tone:vaguely-indignant; 
     Print err423: "The format of the Postal Code entered is invalid. 
                    Please ensure that the Postal Code entered is 
                    correct and try again." 

     remove extra space

40 Store postal code to database
Posted in Archive, humanfactors, postalcode, rogers, useability | Leave a comment