This past weekend, Startup Weekend Hamilton had its successful third year of business creation. Over 50 people from around the Hamilton community and surrounding areas gathered at Radius Caf on James Street South for a weekend of hard work, innovation, and fun.

Imagine trying to create and build a business in just 54 hours, that's exactly what Startup Weekend is all about. Two groups of developers, designers, marketers, business professionals, animators, and engineers came together to do the impossible, and took away some great prizes aimed at their brand new start-ups. Congratulations to Pastee, winner of a 2 hour consultation with Strategic Innovation Works and to Walkbug winner of a 1 hour consulation with Strategic Innovation Works, a Net@ccess hosting package, a SEO package from KKTI, and 6 months of office space at Platform 302.

If you missed out this year, keep checking back for more information for Startup Weekend Hamilton 2014!

Innovation is the key to business success and staying ahead of competitors. But many businesses struggle to find the innovative thinkers they need to enhance their existing processes, products and technologies.

Mitacs is a national, not-for-profit organization that connects businesses with academia for research projects, innovation and idea sharing. Partnered with universities across Canada, Mitacs is able to link companies with the right expertise, specialized knowledge and skills they need to develop solutions to problems, conduct research, or overcome challenges.

Two internship programs operate in Southern Ontario - Mitacs Enterprise and Mitacs-Accelerate.

Mitacs Enterprise is exclusive to small and medium-sized STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) companies operating in Southern Ontario. Through Mitacs Enterprise, businesses can access a recent university graduate in a STEM field for a full-time, six-month, cost-shared internship - with Mitacs paying up to half their salary. Mitacs will work with the company to determine how the program can provide maximum benefits, then develop an internship proposal and help find a suitable graduate with the right skills and qualifications.

Mitacs Enterprise provides the ideal opportunity for companies to evaluate new graduates as a potential future employee, while accessing their skills and knowledge. As an added benefit, Mitacs provides the intern with business management training and any intellectual property developed during the internship belongs to the company.

Mitacs-Accelerate, is for shorter-term (minimum four months) research-based projects, where graduate students or postdoctoral fellows help solve a specific challenge or develop ways to improve existing processes. The internship is cost-shared, allowing businesses to leverage their R&D budget for maximum return. For a four-month internship, the company contributes $7,500, with Mitacs matching this for a total $15,000 of research funding.

This investment provides the industry partner with an experienced researcher, unique access to university facilities and new connections within the academic community. Mitacs-Accelerate is open to all industry sectors and companies across Canada; applications are accepted year-round and usually approved within four to six weeks.

If your business has a research challenge or is looking for new, innovative ideas, visit the Mitacs website and learn how Mitacs programs can give your business the competitive edge.

In the last year I have moved my residence and my business to Hamilton ON. I have recently transferred both my personal and my business banking from one of the big banks in Toronto to First Ontario Credit Union. I am using their location on King St. W. in Dundas, ON.

I have been able to open both personal and business accounts with no monthly fees and a USD account with a very low fee. These savings alone make my move to First Ontario a good choice . I have also found services not available to me at my previous bank. I often need to transfer money in different currencies to suppliers outside Canada. First Ontario's Hyperwallet allows me to do this online, which saves me a trip into the bank. Additionally, the cost of the email transfers to banks outside of Canada is significantly lower than a wire transfer, which adds to the savings with First Ontario.

I have found the PAT system (Personal Assisted Tellers) easy to use and convenient because of the extended hours that it is available. What I have come to appreciate most with the PAT is the documentation that comes with each transaction which creates a good paper trail for my bookkeeping.

In addition to the above, I have been impressed with First Ontario's staff and their service and interest in my business needs. I think First Ontario is able to combine the benefits and efficiencies of internet banking with the personal service required to respond to more complex banking needs. I highly recommend First Ontario for other businesses.

Irene Healey, New Attitude
Hamilton, ON

Well, like any organization or individual, it is important to understand where you are today, where you want to be in the future, and then all you are left with is planning how to get there. Start with where you are today, what challenges is your organization faced with? Once you understand these challenges, you can use them as a guide to identify what stage of growth your company is in and how to get from one stage to the next.

Generally there are four stages of growth an organization goes through with a single product:

1. Start-up
2. Scale
3. Compete
4. Transition

By understanding these challenges in the context of your growth stage you will recognize what is important, what to address, and how to take your company to the next level.

Doing all of this on your own proves to be difficult; time constraints are ever difficult to overcome. You may also not be willing to spend an exorbitant amount of money on consultants, and even if you did, do they have access to the right connections and resources that will see any strategy through the implementation phase? Not likely, which is why Innovation Factory, Hamilton's Regional Innovation Centre, developed LiFT, a program specifically designed to help you see the big picture, understand the challenges you face, design and work through an implementation strategy, all while connecting you to the resources and expertise to ensure the greatest impact for your organization.

With the LiFT program, you will get access to expert resources including seasoned executives, tailored workshops, and innovative seminars that will help you drive the innovation-based growth throughout your organization and take it to the next level. Best of all, as a non-profit, these resources are available to you for free or at very little cost.

To launch this program Innovation Factory will be hosting a kickoff conference on March 19 from 8:30am to 12:30pm at The Atrium in McMaster Innovation Park (175 Longwood Road South). The conference brings together leading innovators in the Hamilton community and surrounding region to discuss the challenges they have faced in various stages of growth and how being innovative enabled them to succeed. You will also hear recently appointed CTO of Canadian Tire, Eugene Roman give a keynote address and learn how one of Canada's oldest corporations is leading through innovation.

For more information about the conference, or to register go to: 2013liftconference.eventbrite.com

To connect with Tyler please call 905-667-2611 x224 or email lift@innovationfactory.ca

The call for nominations is now open for the CDMN Moonshot Awards, established to recognize Canadian companies that create jobs and wealth for Canada through innovation in digital media (ICT and mobile). This is the inaugural year for the awards, designed to acknowledge leading companies that contribute to the CDMN Moonshot goal, that anyone can do anything online by 2017.

An expert panel of judges, including Host: CTV Question Period, Correspondent: W5 & Digital News Evangelist, Founder of New Man Media, Kevin Newman; Director at OMERS Ventures, Sid Paquette; Deloitte Canada's Chief Innovation Officer, Terry Stuart; RocketScope Managing Director and Founder, April Dunford; and, CDMN Managing Director, Dr. Kevin Tuer, will be evaluating the nominees and determining the winners.

The ceremony for the first ever CDMN Moonshot Awards will take place on Tuesday, May 14 at CDMN Canada 3.0 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Ontario, where awards will be presented in four categories:

CDMN Digital Media Dynamic Company of the Year

Recognizing the Canadian company demonstrating the greatest increase in productivity through the adoption of digital media; three finalists will be recognized.

CDMN Digital Media Globalizer of the Year

Recognizing the Canadian company demonstrating the greatest increase in international sales, investments or other contributions to the growth of the Canadian digital media industry internationally; three finalists will be recognized.

CDMN Digital Media Innovator of the Year

Recognizing the Canadian company demonstrating the greatest degree of innovation through the adoption of digital media; three finalists will be recognized.

CDMN Digital Media Company of the Year

Recognizing the Canadian company that made the greatest contributions to the growth of the Canadian digital media industry in 2012/2013, selected from entrants to the CDMN Digital Media Innovator, Globalizer and Dynamic award categories.

Any Canadian company is welcome to apply; self-nominations are also welcome. Nominations close at 11:59pm ET on April 12. Finalists will gain entry to CDMN Canada 3.0 2013 to attend the awards ceremony at an unpublished discounted rate. By submitting a nomination, the nominee agrees to let CDMN use the nominee's company name in marketing and promotional material for the CDMN Moonshot Awards and CDMN Canada 3.0. Visit www.canada30.ca/awards for updates.

1. Awards Day at Radius

2. Halloween & Game Crash

3. James Street North Supercrawl

4. Launch Day

5. Orientation Night

6. Installation Day

7. Energy Mid-Week Challenge

8. Information Mid-Week Challenge Scavenger Hunt

9. Relationship Mid-Week Challenge

10. Daily Dose of Information Poll

We are constantly striving to show the world the greatness of the innovation and tech industries that Hamilton has to offer, and with competitions like STARTOFF, we have that ability. STARTOFF was able to capture the love for innovation and originality in Hamilton through the 27 unique and very creative startup companies who participated in brand new competition.

Hamilton is a growing community of startups and entrepreneurs, companies are flocking to Hamilton to take advantage of the growing innovation and technology community. That's why STARTOFF is such an important and much needed competition to raise awareness for the budding industries. Innovation Factory is so proud to be a part of this process and seeing these companies succeed is our upmost important goal. Innovation and Hamilton go hand in hand, we need to increase awareness and show the world the amazing talent we have in our beautiful city!

1. What was the best part of the contest for you?

ilearnulearn - The best part of the contest was the great exposure it provided to some of the entrepreneurial minds and the diversity of businesses that Hamilton's startup community has to offer.

Nervu - The best part of the competition was the chance to expand and connect with the

Hamilton Community, and leverage the publicity to acquire new attention for our business. We received a lot of attention and interest and created a lot of unique, engaging content to connect with our future customers.

Ontario Bamboo - The way we got to see the mass support from our customers and friends.

The BinPad Product - The support we received from friends and family.

Trend Trunk - The ability to involve the community (Hamilton in general, our friends/family and customers)

2. What was the most challenging part of STARTOFF?

ilearnulearn - The most challenging part of STARTOFF was definitely engaging the community to make sure they understood the rules of the contest and getting them to vote 5 times a day for 22 days straight!

Nervu - The most challenging part of the STARTOFF competition was finding a way to acquire votes without irritating our customers and interested parties. The duration of the contest made it such that it was difficult to sustain a high level of voting from different people. Also, the websites server was not equipped to handle such a high volume of people, which resulted in voting being quite difficult at times.

Ontario Bamboo - Getting those closest to us to support and vote

The BinPad Product - The most challenging part was the length of the contest and the toll it took on our family life.

Trend Trunk - Getting people to vote daily (and make sure they vote 5 times each day)

3. Out of the whole prize package, which part are you most excited about? What will be the most useful for you and your company?

ilearnulearn - The entire prize package is great! But we're definitely looking forward to impressing potential clients with the meeting space provided by McMaster Innovation Park and Innovation Factory.

Nervu - The trademark application will be immediately the most important for our company. Our logo and brand are very important to the success of the company and need to be protected.

Ontario Bamboo - The exposure of winning.

The BinPad Product - We are most excited about the help with patenting and marketing and we think this will really help our company.

Trend Trunk - We are most excited about the Trademark application, as we can apply a trademark for Trend Trunk

4. What's your plan going forward after STARTOFF?

ilearnulearn - The plan is to keep this momentum going and continue to push forward. For us, this was only the tip of the iceberg. Although there's still a long ways to go, we as a team have come to enjoy the journey. We hope to launch our beta before the end of Q2 in 2013 for market testing and grow the business going into 2014.

Nervu - The plan moving forward following STARTOFF is to file for our Trademark as soon as possible. We will be launching within the next two to three weeks, and will use the rest of the services we have won throughout the operation of our first three months of operation.

Ontario Bamboo - We just received our long awaited LCBO Manufacturers License so we will use the exposure to invite people to our Bamboo Beer Launch for the Christmas Holiday Season

The BinPad Product - Our plan going forward is to use thehelp and see if we can find an investor.

Trend Trunk - Promote that we won, and share to the press in hopes to get more PR

5. If you were chatting with STARTOFF participants next year, what would be your best piece of advice for them?

ilearnulearn - Think big, think positive. Don't be ashamed to talk to anyone and everyone! Project your ambition and get out of your comfort zone. The more you do so, the more feedback you will receive, and the more that you'll learn.

Nervu - Create unique content and use cool visuals. Sure, you can spend all of your time writing the same 'Vote for me!' message in all your texts, emails, tweets, Facebook posts and so on, but it does start to get old after a while. Pushing out unique content tailored to the personalities of your customers and community members will make them feel not as if they are being coerced into voting, but rather that they want to vote out of their own free will. It also doesn't hurt to make a plan. We found it was difficult to sustain a consistent level of voting because we didn't want to annoy our customers and followers. In order to avoid this, we would do 'voting spurts' where we could post a lot within a short amount of time and not bombard our users with constant pleas to vote.

Ontario Bamboo - No matter the circumstances, just keep going. Competitions like this are here to help you not anything else. I had several business contacts from other cities wishing they had something like this where they were from (Toronto). So be thankful!

The BinPad Product - We would advise them to build a strong support network before the contest starts and be ready for the long haul if its a 3 week contest again!

Trend Trunk - Come up with innovate ways to get your message out

If you want to know more about any of these companies click their names below!

ilearnulearn

Nervu

Ontario Bamboo

The BinPad Product

Trend Trunk

1. What was the best part of the contest for you?

2Go Energy - The best part of the contest had to be the sense of community that it created. People were really involved in the voting process and using their social media to ask others to participate as well.

Athelink - The congrats e-mail!

Campus Helper - Staying within Top 10 and doing everything I could to stay there through the social media channels

dinnerlicious! - It forced us to begin to conceptualize our social media strategy.

Green Pixel - Meeting other up-and-coming, young businesses in Hamilton was the best part! A few years down the road, we'll all be sitting in our yachts saying, 'Remember when we did STARTOFF? That was pretty awesome.'

2. What was the most challenging part of STARTOFF?

2Go Energy - The most challenging part of STARTOFF had to be to remember to cast our daily votes!

Athelink - Keeping our fan base engaged for 3 weeks.

Campus Helper - Reminding and getting people to consistently vote every day and having to send reminders by all sorts of communication platforms (email, text, call, social media alerts). VERY time consuming

dinnerlicious! - That it ran for such a long time and it was hard to keep people interested in voting every day for almost a month.

Green Pixel - Nothing! Maybe clicking on my browser's Refresh button but I wouldn't call that a challenge. The support from iF and the voters made the competition fun, exciting, and very easy.

3. Out of the whole prize package, which part are you most excited about? What will be the most useful for you and your company?

2Go Energy - We're most excited about the KPMG accounting services and the Business Development Loan. Both of these will be really useful to our company moving forward.

Athelink - The Trademark Application

Campus Helper - Ballagh LLP Trademarking services and NetAccess phone services because getting our trademarks was something we had been planning and it'll be nice to look more professional with extension lines.

dinnerlicious! - We're very excited about the trademark application and this will the most useful to us.

Green Pixel - We're most excited about the business and accounting consultations since we could use some advice and direction from professionals in the realm of business.

4. What's your plan going forward after STARTOFF?

2Go Energy - STARTOFF allowed us to establish a consistent communication network which we will continue to use going forward.

Athelink - We are getting ready for launch with our 10,000 player tournament in February.

Campus Helper - Working on execution and growth strategies for our pivot. Also to keep up using social media as one of the foremost platforms to get our name out there.

dinnerlicious! - We're putting our efforts into marketing and expansion.

Green Pixel - We are continuing our projects as usual! The consultations will help us steer the business side of the company in the right direction but, creatively, our production will not change. We'll still be making fun games and having fun making them!

5. If you were chatting with STARTOFF participants next year, what would be your best piece of advice for them?

2Go Energy - Our best piece of advice would to network, network and network. Ask people to post your requests on their Facebook pages and ask their friends to participate. Don't be shy!

Athelink - Build a large following online before STARTOFF so you can rally the troops to vote!

Campus Helper - If you were chatting with STARTOFF participants next year, what would be your best piece of advice for them? Acquire a lot of votes early because it sets the tone, and get the core group of people who you know will consistently (for 3 weeks) do everything they can to get you votes.

dinnerlicious! - Rather than focusing on just getting votes, try to develop a strategy to use the competition to grow your network and social media presence. Rally up your troops early on and post reminders daily!

Green Pixel - Reach out to Hamilton as much as possible! Even if you have clients/fans/customers from all over the world, it's the people of Hamilton - the people who live, work, and play in the city that you're trying to make an impact on - who will vote enthusiastically and consistently. So, reach out to the locals - online and in person!

If you want to know more about any of these companies click their names below!

2Go Energy

Athelink

Campus Helper

dinnerlicious!

Green Pixel

Check out what the media has to say about STARTOFF!

CBC - Hamilton's entrepreneur community gets a boost

The Hamilton Spectator - Startup firms share prize bonanza

Don't forget, just because STARTOFF is over for the year doesn't mean we can't keep supporting our local businesses and entrepreneurs!

We had a very diverse range of companies participate in STARTOFF; we were blown away by the creativity and innovation that these companies brought to the table.Innovation Factory is here to assist startups and entrepreneurs, and that's just want we aimed to do through STARTOFF. We are so excited to see the STARTOFF entrepreneurs grow and achieve their goals and dreams! Many thanks have to be given to all of the STARTOFF participants, each one of you went out of your way to engage the community and garner support from your followers. Without your goals and ambition, STARTOFF would not have been the amazing success it way!

A congratulations is in order, out of 28 companies we have 10 who raised the most votes and won a prize package worth $16,700 each! Including a $5000 FirstOntario Small Business Innovation Loan, Free Business Diagnostic and Consultation with Ideacia ONE, Trademark Application from Ballagh & Edward LLP, appBuilder and Consultation from Weever Apps, Preparation of a Performance Profile from Express Employment Professionals, Online Marketing Seminar from KKT Interactive, Accounting Services from KPMG, Telecom Services from Net@ccess, Meeting Room Space at McMaster Innovation Park, and a 3-Month Membership to iF?s FACTORY FLOOR.

Congratulations to dinnerlicious!, The BinPad Products , Nervu, Ontario Bamboo, Trend Trunk, Athelink, Campus Helper, Green Pixel, ilearnulearn, and 2Go Energy!

Thank you again for all your support! Stay tuned for updates on each STARTOFF winner!

Eventity.ca

Asking around here at the office, I realized that one of the best ways to land job or get connections is through simple, old fashioned networking. Finding and keeping these connections are a great way to get amazing advice and support, and building a support system of these connections will truly help you in the long run. Relationships are key, without the backing and hard work that these dedicated people contribute, many of us would not be where we are today. That's why we thought it was crucial to let you say a big thank you to those who have helped you out!

We had a great response and many of you nominated people in your support system for a delicious cupcake from Cupcake Diner! With all the nominations put forward, we put their names into an 8-bit coffee mug and pulled out one person's name. This person was chosen to tell us who, out of the STARTOFF participants, they thought deserved a year's membership to the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce! Congratulations to dinnerlicious!you're our lucky winner of the year's membership! Thanks to all who participated and shared with us their stories!

Voting only goes until October 31st at 4pm,so get your STARTOFF votes in now before it's too late! Vote at startoff.ca from your computer or smartphone 5 times per day per IP address!

Hard-Circle, Inc

After thirty plus years in high tech, it is very difficult to narrow down all the advice to the 'Best Advice I Ever Received' so I will default to the advice that I have repeated most to others: 'You carry your unemployment insurance on your back'. This advice was given by my boss at IBM in 1983 and what he meant was that only you are responsible for your future career. No one is going to hand it to you. The skills and experience you build and display on your resume are what will keep your career growing and keep you always employed. He also meant with this knowledge of always being in-demand and employed, comes the self-confidence to take risks in your career.

From that day forward, I have viewed my resume as the 'productized' version of me. As a product, I have invested in building it by taking lateral moves instead of promotions to fill in a skill or experience gap; by taking on tasks that I really didn't want to touch; by doing jobs that weren't my first choice; and by not chasing some opportunities that would have taken me off-path. While this sounds planned, a great deal of it was serendipity and good luck that put me at the right place at the right time or kept me from making stupid career moves that would have de-valued or crushed my resume.

Employers don't want to hire 'wanna-be's' to fill a job. They want to hire people who have already proven and demonstrated that they have the abilities to do their next job. The risks and costs of mis-hiring are too great to do otherwise. So the advice I pass along to employees early in their career is to take the time to build a foundation of broad skills and experience. Treat your resume like a product and invest in it. And remember, in a twenty-five to thirty-five year career, you are running a marathon, not a sprint.

Peter Smith (@themeafordgroup) is Managing Partner of The Meaford Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in go-to-market strategy & execution for software companies in the one to fifty million dollar revenue range. Pete is a seasoned senior executive with over 30 years of global experience at The Meaford Group, IRI, PeopleSoft and IBM in a variety of technical, sales, consulting and management positions. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of CSDC Systems, gShiftLabs, Headcount Corporation, Vana Workforce and as an Executive-in-Residence at the Innovation Factory in Hamilton.

Here's your chance to tell Innovation Factory who helped you kick-start your business or career and why they deserve a sweet treat from the Cupcake Diner located in The Hamilton Farmer's Market (just a few feet from the STARTOFF 8-bit carrot art installation). Here are the rules:

1. Like Innovation Factory's Facebook Page
2. Click 'share' on our 8-bit cupcake photo and post the photo to your own Facebook profile
3. Post the name of the person who deserves a cupcake in the comments box underneath the 8-bit cupcake photo on Innovation Factory's Facebook page and how they've helped you with your business endeavours, your career, or how they are a business leader in your community
4. Participants who do all of the above will have their entrant's name entered into a draw to win 1 of 15 cupcake vouchers from the Cupcake Diner

Contest opens on Tuesday, October 23rd at 11am and closes on Tuesday, October 23rd at 4:30pm. Let us know and a sweet treat is ready for them!

While you're thinking of who deserves a cupcake, vote for our STARTOFF entrepreneurs up to 5 votes per day per IP address and you can vote on your smartphone! Think of the connections they entrepreneurs will get if they win STARTOFF! Vote at startoff.ca and support Hamiltonian businesses!

Contest Regulations: The Week 3: Networking Week Cupcake Giveaway on behalf of startoff.ca and Innovation Factory runs from Tuesday, October 23rd at 11am until Tuesday, October 23rd at 4:30pm. This is a Facebook Giveaway only. Entrants must like Innovation Factory's Facebook page, share the 8-bit cupcake photo from Innovation Factory on their personal Facebook profile as well as leave a comment below the photo on Innovation Factory's Facebook page that includes the name of one (1) person who deserves a cupcake and why they deserve the cupcake. Only one entry will be accepted per Facebook account.

Vouchers will be rewarded to 15 entrants selected at a random draw. Winners will be contacted by a representative of Innovation Factory by 5pm on Tuesday, October 23rd and may be asked to provide further contact information of the person nominated for a cupcake. 1 voucher will be rewarded to each 15 winners for a complimentary cupcake from The Cupcake Diner, located in the Hamilton Farmer's Market (35 York Blvd, Hamilton, Ontario). The voucher for the cupcake may have its own stipulations from the Cupcake Diner and may not be exchanged for cash value. Innovation Factory reserves the right to award the giveaway vouchers to any qualified giveaway participants selected at random.

Congratulations to Matt Gardner, his collage showcased some great retro items. Check out his submitted collage, great job Matt!

Matt came in to Innovation Factory to pick up his BlackBerry PlayBook today wearing a sweet 8-bit tie! How fitting, congratulatons again Matt!

Thanks to everyone who played, we really appreciate and love the support that STARTOFF is getting in the Hamilton community! Stay up to date at facebook.com/innovationfactory.ca and on Twitter @itbeginswithIF. Stay tuned the upcoming Mid-Week Challenge!

Don't forget to keep voting for your favourite STARTOFF entrepreneurs at startoff.ca, only 11 more days to get your pick to the top of the list and give entrepreneurs a 1UP!

dinnerlicious!

What's better for a busy family than a business that delivers the ingredients of a pre-planned dinner straight to your front door? That's exactly what dinnerlicious! does. dinnerlicious takes the hassle out of cooking and makes it enjoyable again, fresh, healthy, and delicious ingredients are delivered to you weekly with a pre-determined meal plan, and there is no waste since you are only getting what you need! With the focus on local products, dinnerlicious is a safe, easy and Hamiltonian way to prepare delicious meals!
With dinnerlicious! you save money, time, and energy and have more time to enjoy with your family in the evenings! Simplify your life with dinnerlicious!

e-Sports Championship

e-sports, short for electronic sports, is a venture to standardize and professionalize e-sports in Canada. Professional gaming is on the rise around the world and e-Sports Championship is here to help bring light to the professional gaming world. Competitive play has taken on a new name in online gaming, with many players now being sponsored (and paid!) to play. E-sports Championship is an online platform that broadcasts the best of Canada's online sports events. The team at ESC has the belief that electronic sports are just as completive and important as physical sports, ESC supports players and creates top of the line events for those e-sport fans!

Spectergy

Renewable energy and energy efficiency have become a big topic of discussion as of late, with this turn in our outlook on energy, people are starting to change their energy consumption. Spectergy is a solution to the issue of energy consumption, designing and installing new renewable energy solutions in your home! Spectergy also provides homeowners with an auditing service to pin-point the best way to optimize energy in your home with the innovative and up-to-date technology.

The BinPad Products

Picture this, its garbage day, a stormy, windy garbage day. Your garbage bin and recycling receptacles are all over the street, and you think to yourself 'how do I keep them in one place?' A major issue that many homeowners face and have faced in the past is the constant struggle to keep garbage and recycling bins in place without blowing away, getting lost and/or broken. The BinPad Products have solved this issue with their BinPad. The product allows any garbage or recycling receptacle to stay in the upright position throughout the day, no more replacing your bins or chasing them down the street - a home owner's dream!

Ilearnulearn

With the rise in the use of social media in recent years, ilearnulearn is changing the face of online classes. What is more popular to students than Facebook and Twitter? Ilearnulearn aims to bring the ease of social media to online classes through a cloud-based learning management solution. A social education network of students and instructors will promote better learning and more favourable instruction to new generations of web 2.0 youth. Ilearnulearn takes the popularity and ease of use of social media into the classroom to engage and assist in more enjoyable online instruction.

NyaSoft

Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular on a daily basis; companies are pushing their smartphones out into the global marketplace and taking advantage of easy to use operating systems and user-friendly interfaces. What NyaSoft aims to do is bring this ease of use and user-friendly interface to health care practitioners. Effectiveness and efficiency are two very important skills health care professionals are in need of, and with mobile applications tailored to them, jobs and services become much more beneficial for all. NyaSoft works directly with health care providers and agencies to design their mobile application and make sure it is favourable for all parties involved.

2Go Energy

What do you reach for when you're looking for a quick snack? Many of us answer some sweet like chocolate or salty like chips. 2Go Energy wants to change that thought and bring health eating into our daily snacking routines. Food allergies are becoming more sever and more prevalent and food choices are not rising with the demand. 2Go Energy produces and distributes Go Energy Bars and power truffles that are gluten, wheat, and soy free in a small, delicious, and nutritious package for everyone to enjoy on the go!

Great news is hard to come by, but Hamilton has a wealth of amazing news outlets and a wide variety of sources. So my question to you is: where do you get all your up-to-date news? How do you stay on top of the happenings around you? Let us know on our Facebook poll!

We want to know where #hamont gets their news! Help us out and we'll make you a super sweet pie (chart).
Don't forget to keep voting at startoff.ca and keep up-to-date on all the STARTOFF happenings on Facebook and Twitter .

1. Find a VHS tape, a rotary telephone and one (1) STARTOFF 8-bit art installation (check out the map at startoff.ca/fun)

2. Snap a photo of each of these three items with your Smartphone device

3. Using your Twitter account, send each photo to Innovation Factory (@itbeginswithIF) using the #STARTOFFhamont and the #HamOnt hashtags (example: I went on a @itbeginswithIF #STARTOFFhamont scavenger hunt in #HamOnt!) Don't forget to attach pictures like the one below!

Participants who tweet all three photos in three separate qualifying Twitter messages or on Twitter using a photo collage application will be entered into a draw to win a Blackberry Playbook! Start your hunt on Tuesday, October 16th at 11am. The contest closes on Thursday, October 18th at 1pm. At 1pm on the October 18th, we'll enter all the successful players into a draw for the grand prize! A Blackberry Playbook!

Contest Regulations: The Week 2: Information Week Scavenger Hunt on behalf of startoff.ca and Innovation Factory runs from Tuesday, October 16th at 11am until Thursday, October 18th at 1pm. To be entered into a draw to win a Blackberry Playbook, Twitter participants must submit a photo of all three (3) items stated: a VHS tape, a rotary telephone and one (1) STARTOFF 8-bit Art Installation. Entries must contain the Innovation Factory's Twitter handle (@itbeginswithIF) and the hashtags as follows: #STARTOFFhamont and #HamOnt. Entries can be submitted as three separate photos and tweets or can contain all three photos in one tweet using a collage application. This contest takes place on Twitter only, photos will not be accepted through Facebook, email or any other means. Photos determined to be clipped from the internet/ taken from other contest participants will be disqualified.

Innovation Factory reserves the right to disqualify any contest participant for foul play or poor sportsmanship. One winner selected in a random draw will be rewarded one (1) Blackberry Playbook. The winner of the contest will be contacted by a representative of Innovation Factory by 5PM on Thursday, October 18th and may be asked for further contact details.

Also this weekend our sister organization Mississauga RICC is hosting their first ever Startup Weekend! All Startup Weekend events follow the same basic model: anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it's a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback. It's a pretty amazing weekend filled with great ideas, good food, and awesome startup-ness! To register or find our more information head over to: http://peel.startupweekend.org

Innovation Factory and the STARTOFF team are taking every precaution to ensure measures are in place going forward to defend the system against unauthorized voting and server malfunctions. Regrettably, one of these measures includes the permanent removal of the STAR POWER feature which enabled temporary unlimited voting for guests to startoff.ca at selected times as authorized by iF. Going forward, startoff.ca will ONLY allow a maximum of 5 votes per IP address per day on a permanent basis.

We apologize to the STARTOFF Hamilton competitors, their networks, and the Hamilton community who have been so committed to supporting this important initiative for start-ups in our city. Voting will remain open, and we encourage you to support your favorite contestants daily by visiting startoff.ca to vote.

Thank you for your patience while we work toward a full resolution of this situation. If you have any further questions about this situation, or information that may be helpful in our investigation of the perpetrators of these attacks, please email stephanie.shuster@innovationfactory.ca.

The jar actually contained 4936 beans; we had a great response and in the end, we picked the four closest guesses without going over the actual amount of beans.

Congratulations to Alistair James Morton and Jessica Combate, our first place winners of a $25 Green Smoothie Bar gift card and a choice of a muffin or Death by Chocolate brownie at Radius Caf. Andrew Johnston and Steve Onland were our second place winners of a choice of a muffin or Death by Chocolate brownie at Radius Caf!

Stay tuned for next week's challenge for your chance to win some more great prizes! Like our page at facebook.com/innovationfactory.ca and follow us on Twitter @itbeginswithIF to stay in the know! Keep checking in and voting at STARTOFF.ca and support Hamilton entrepreneurs! Give your favourite start-up a 1-UP today!

It has come to our attention that 'unlimited voting' has been enabled on startoff.ca once again. This is NOT authorized. Please do NOT flood startoff.ca with votes tonight while we investigate this issue. We are in search of the party responsible for these security breaches, and will keep you updated as we have more information.

Email stephanie.shuster@innovationfactory.ca with any further concerns.

Thank you for your patience as we resolve this issue.

**UPDATE**

8:50pm - We have disabled voting on startoff.ca until further notice. We will keep you posted as we have more information.

9:45pm - We have re-enabled voting

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused for our STARTOFF Hamilton contestants, their fan bases, and the voting community.

In the future, please be aware that when and if temporary exemptions on voting restrictions are implemented, we will publish this broadly on startoff.ca, the iF Facebook Page, and on Twitter @itbeginswithIF - stay tuned there to be the first in the know!

Thank you for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue, and if you have any further questions about this situation, please email stephanie.shuster@innovationfactory.ca.

Our tech team is working away to determine the issue. Rest assured, we will respond to all comments directed to iF individually and in a timely manner, by no later than 5pm EST on Thursday October 11, 2012.

We are investigating this issue thoroughly in order to preserve the integrity of the STARTOFF Hamilton competition, and we are taking all concerns very seriously. Once we have enough information we will issue an update about tonight's events.

Stay tuned to startoff.ca, keep your eys on the iF Facebook Page, or follow @itbeginswithIF on Twitter to be first in the know!

We are signing off for the evening, but will answer any further concerns tomorrow - if you have a specific concern please feel free to email stephanie.shuster@innovationfactory.ca.

Thank you for your patience while we resolve this issue.

Guaranteed Interview
There is a problem in Canada that has been noticed, but until now has not been solved. Many of our veterans are having a difficult time attaining work after their time with the military is finished. Guaranteed Interview is a program for those veterans who are looking to transition from their military work into civilian-professional careers.
The Guaranteed Interview program was founded by Ken Seville of Civiside and Ty Shattuck, CEO of PV Labs when they noticed a lack of assistance for our hard-working and deserving veterans. The Guaranteed Interview program companies guarantee one qualified veteran an interview for each job posted on guaranteedinterview.com and in return the positing company can take advantage of ClearfitTM technology. Spreading the word of Guaranteed Interview will take on a new form with STARTOFF and show many people the resources that veterans now have!

Tidy Feeder
For over 25 years, the Trauttmansdorff family has been growing and producing premium quality hay on their family farm. Their farm is recognized world-wide as a prime spot to buy hay for large animals. As a family of innovators and hard workers, Michael Truattmasndorff and his family looked into hay for smaller, domesticated animals. They saw a lack of great quality hay for these small animals and came up with a new and innovative way to distribute the hay.
Out of this innovative and forward thinking came Tidy Feeder, a more convenient way of packaging hay for small animals. Tidy Feeder is described as 'a clean, convenient, and natural way to feed hay,' reducing waste and saving time and money for pet owners! With a variety of hay for all different types of small animals, Tidy Feeder is bound to go far! Tidy Feeder is spreading their hay with STARTOFF!

Green Pixel

Green Pixel was born out of the love of gaming. Co-founders Joe Pendon and Rich Halliday created their company as a result of their talent for video game development and their passion for video games. Luckily for both of them, they enjoy playing and making video games and have built a company out of their common goals and interests.
Their goal for Green Pixel is to make games they themselves want to play. Their web based 8-bit video games are well liked and played worldwide. Not to mention they're right on target for STARTOFF's 8-bit theme!

The Mustard Seed Coop

In recent history, we have seen a rise in community operated and produced businesses. Many of these fall into the category of a co-op, a business run by its members. The Mustard Seed is a co-op run by members who love food and want to share with all of Hamilton. In Hamilton, we see barriers to food access to some Hamiltonians; The Mustard Seed aims to change that. The Mustard Seed aims to be the connection between food access for all, local growers and producers. Hoping to open their doors in the spring of 2013, STARTOFF would help them with their essential needs and get their business going.

Snakehead Games

Need a break from dreary office work? Snakehead Games has come up with a solution to this age old issue. Through web browser games, Snakehead Games provides a free, social, and casual way to relieve stress and take a little time to clear your head. SHG has provided us with some great (time wasting and fun!) games like Spybattle 2165, Star Pirates and Coliseum on Facebook.
With recent expansion in the mobile apps market, Snakehead Games are building on their idea of a gaming community, always interacting and checking in with their rookie and veteran players. Getting the community involved is what they do and what a perfect fit for STARTOFF!

Nervu

So you love to shop for deals but all your favourite stores are drowned in the clusters of messages you're getting for irrelevant company's advertisements? Nervu is an SMS based service that allows you to pick and choose which sales you see and which sales you are not interested in. Hear from your favourite brands and stores (only those you choose!) and get deals on all your favourite products and services. With Nervu you cut out all the unneeded chatter and focus on the sales you want!Nervu is hoping the spread the word of their 'textiness' through STARTOFF!

Many of us find energy in caffeinated beverages, but let's think outside the (coffee) box. What are some other, less caffeinated ways to pump ourselves up for that long day, or night, at the office? How do you find energy to keep going in your most exhausted state? Not all of us can grab the gold rings like Sonic does to keep going, so tell us: how do you retain energy?

Since I'm not a big coffee fan (I know, I'm working on it! I've eased myself onto Mochas from Radius Caf), I find my energy in different ways. A non-caffeinated option for me is to take a hike at Webster Falls, or along the Bruce Trail. Hamilton offers a wide array of hiking and walking trails, a great and natural way to get energized and an amazing place to stew up amazing ideas in your head! I also love and completely recommend grabbing a nutritious snack, think almonds or apple slices! For these delicious foods, and much more, I always head down to The Hamilton Farmer's Market. Much to my chagrin, I have to say one of the best ways to get energized is to listen to loud, cheesy and amazing pop songs from the 80s and 90s, listen loud and proud and hype yourself up to pull that all-nighter!

Check out this map and see some of our favourite places to find energy around Hamilton. Also, keep your eyes and ears open to find out how you can benefit from energy this week! Don't forget to keep checking startoff.ca and vote for your favourite STARTOFF entrepreneurs!

Check out the video here and tell us how many coffee beans YOU think are in the jar!

Along with voting for your favourite STARTOFF players at startoff.ca, we're offering a chance for you to level-up too!

Here's your chance to win big with our Facebook contest by guessing how many coffee beans are in our Energy tank. Here are the rules:

1. Check out our Energy Tank at Radius Caf (151 James St. South) or the photo of the tank on the Innovation Factory's Facebook page.

2. Write your guess under the photo on our Facebook page. Prizes will be rewarded to the four closest guesses without going over! (Only one guess per Facebook account)

2 first prizes of:
- $25 Green Smoothie Bar gift card
- muffin or death by chocolate brownie at Radius Cafe
2 runner up prizes of:
- muffin or death by chocolate brownie at Radius Cafe

3. Contest opens Tuesday, October 9th at 12PM and runs until Thursday, October 11th at 12PM.

Contest Regulations: The Week 1: Energy Contest on behalf of startoff.ca and the Innovation Factory run from Tuesday, October 9th at 12PM until Thursday, October 11th at 12PM. Only one guess per person. This contest takes place on Innovation Factory's Facebook page only. The 2 people with the closest guesses without going over by 12PM Est. will win a $25 gift card to be used at Green Smoothie Bar (236 James Street North) in Hamilton, Ontario as well as the choice of a muffin or death by chocolate brownie from Radius Cafe (151 James Street South) in Hamilton, Ontario.

We can't wait to introduce all of the wonderful and very innovative STARTOFF participants and help make their ideas and passions come to life. Starting on October 9th at 10am, log onto startoff.ca and find out about all of our great players and their companies. Choose your favourite company and give them a 1UP by voting for them to win $16,700 in prizes. You may vote up to five times per day, and use your votes how you see fit, it's up to you! Don't forget you can also vote on your smartphone!

By voting, you'll help some lucky Hamilton entrepreneurs make a name for themselves. With ten prizes of $16,700, the top ten winners will make progress with their start-up businesses!

Set your alarms and reminders, write in your daily to-do list, do whatever it takes to remember to vote daily for the STARTOFF entrepreneurs and take part in Hamilton's economic, innovative, and creative growth! Keep checking in at startoff.ca for updates; follow us on Twitter @itbeginswithIF and on Facebook.com/innovationfactory.ca

Have you ever gone back to your parent's house where you grew up and gone through all your old stuff? If you're like me, you've done this at least once. Last week, I went through my old cupboard of toys and games that still resides in my family room and found my very cherished, albeit discoloured, Super Nintendo and all my favourite SNES video games, not to mention my Spice Girls sticker collection and remote control pick-up truck, let's pretend I was normal.

But why do we love our old video games, what makes them retain that special place in our hearts? I chatted to self-described news junkie and very active Hamiltonian Joey Coleman about why we love playing video games created 20 plus years ago. Joey put it in simple terms for me, it's a cultural reference point that many of us share. These games deeply resonate with us because of the timelessness they have, as Joey put it 'there are dozens of Angry Birds, but only one Mario.'

The imperative question then is: How can I play my favourite retro video games without my old gaming system? No, we don't have to find the hidden keys in any Super Mario levels, we just have to look to the influx of new technology at our fingertips. Our very favourite and beloved smartphones and tablets (and those pesky large tablets with keyboards, people call them computers?) Retro video games are getting more popular because of the generations that grew up with them, as the innovators we are, the generations who grew up with the 8-bit gaming systems have come up with innovative ways to play the old games.

So what are the best ways to play old favourites like Mario Kart? The simple answer is, look to the newest gaming systems. The Nintendo Wii has Mario Kart, I bet you're thinking 'it's different, not nearly the same game!' Take a second look, the Mario Kart franchise hasn't changed much since is original form, sure the graphics may no longer be 8-bit, but the game play is just the same. Joey said many gaming systems like Wii have kept their followers because they stay true to the games; they just take advantage of newer hardware.

In the Hamilton area we have some great gaming stores to connect you with some great retro video games. Check out 1UP Games in Westdale (opening October 6th!) and Entertainment Overload on Barton Street East.

There are also some of our old favourites that are available devices that we carry with us every day. Were you a fan of battling Garland in Final Fantasy? FF is available on Apple devices with iOS. If you're like Joey and I, you prefer the old controller driven game system. Lucky for us, there are Bluetooth controllers and Joystick extensions for tablets like the iPad that we can utilize to play the old retro video games.

With the ever increasing love and nostalgic feelings for our childhood video games, developers are ever challenged to create new ways to make this retro gaming possible (hint hint: Hamiltonian inventors and entrepreneurs!).

So unless you can dig out your old Sega or Nintendo, don't fret! There are ways to play your favourite retro video games. And if you're still looking for your fix, check out STARTOFF to get your 8-bit fill!

The summer of 2012 was significant for developments in Canadian copyright law.

First, the much debated amendments to the Copyright Act were finally passed and received Royal Assent on June 29, 2012. They will come into force on a day to be fixed by cabinet. Given that these amendments have not yet come into force, we will leave them for discussion at a future time.

Next, on July 12, 2012, the Supreme Court released decisions in five related copyright cases argued before it at the same time. These decisions have become known as the 'copyright pentalogy'. Although they represent incremental rather than radical change, the pentalogy does decidedly narrow the rights of copyright owners and correspondingly reduce the obligations of users.

Fair Dealing

In Canada, limited dealing with copyright protected works is permitted for specified purposes without infringing copyright. The identified purposes under the current Act include: (a) research and private study; (b) criticism and review; and (c) news reporting. The following factors are considered to determine whether the dealing will be considered 'fair':

• whether the number of copies is reasonable;
• whether a proportional part of the work is copied;
• whether the part of the work that is copied represents the substance of the entire work;
• whether there are realistic alternatives to access the work; and
• whether the copies will compete with sales of the original work.

In SOCAN v. Bell, it was held that making available to consumers short streamed previews of musical works constitutes fair dealing for which no royalties are due from Internet retailers. In Alberta v. Access Copyright, it was held that the reproduction of brief extracts from texts by teachers for distribution to students constitutes fair dealing for which no royalties are due from educational institutions.

In other words, the court recognized that everyday consumer research will qualify as 'research' under the Act and that it is the purpose of the end user which determines whether a particular use qualifies as fair dealing and not the purpose of intermediaries such as retailer or teachers. This expanded recognition of fair dealing will most directly benefit the many educators and businesses which deliver services via the Internet by implicitly authorizing the fragmentary use of works such as thumbnails of photos, sampling of music and snippets of film when used by the end consumer for an authorized purpose.

Technological Neutrality

The principal of technological neutrality was critical to the outcome of two other cases. This principle requires that the Copyright Act apply equally notwithstanding the technological diversity of different forms of media.

In ESA/C v. SOCAN, the court held that there is no practical difference between buying a durable copy of a video game in traditional retail channels and downloading a permanent digital copy of the same game via the Internet. As a result, it refused to require the payment of an additional royalty for the transmission of permanent downloads via the Internet. In its opinion, a so-called 'communication' royalty is due only for transmissions akin to a live performance or television broadcast. Since downloads are not viewed during transmission, they do not infringe upon the copyright owners' exclusive right to communicate the work to the public and, consequently, do not attract a 'communication royalty'.

In Rogers v. Socan, the court held that there is no practical difference between a cable television broadcast to the public and making content available to the public by streaming temporary files for viewing via the Internet. It rejected arguments that such streaming services are not communications 'to the public' since they are private transmissions initiated by the consumer. Instead, it found that streaming temporary files is akin to a live performance or television broadcast and that, in making the work available via the Internet, the work was effectively communicated to the public. As a result, the copyright owners' exclusive right to communicate the work to the public was infringed and a 'communication royalty' is due for each streamed transmission.

Soundtrack v. Sound Recording

In Re: Sound v. MPTAC, a copyright collective sought payment of performance royalties for any pre-existing sound recordings that are incorporated into the soundtrack for a film whenever the film is performed in public. However, the Copyright Act, specifically defines a 'sound recording' to exclude 'any soundtrack of a cinematographic work when it accompanies the cinematographic work'. The court rejected arguments that a 'soundtrack' refers only to the aggregate of sounds that accompanies a film and not to its constituent elements.

Conclusion

The pentalogy is consistent with the Supreme Court's earlier decision in CCH v. LSUC which stated that user rights are to be given a 'large and liberal interpretation'. The natural outcome of that seminal case is a significant narrowing of the rights previously enjoyed by copyright owners.

The pending amendments of the Copyright Act will, in some respects, continue that trend by expanding the eligible purposes for fair dealing to include education, parody and satire. In other respects, the amendments grant powerful new rights to copyright owners - most notably for the enforcement of so-called 'digital locks'. We will review these amendments in detail at a future time.

I bet you're thinking 'What do video games have to do with startups?' Let's take a step back and think about it... What serves as your inspiration for your career path? Can you say Dog from Duck Hunt taught you to always try your best, and not just when fetching ducks? For many of us, our favourite retro video games can serve as our inspiration. Talking to some of our STARTOFF entrepreneurs, we got a more in-depth view of video game inspiration.

Joe Pendon of Green Pixel completely agrees that video games serve as inspiration for his current career path. Joe told us that video games have always been and will continue to be a huge part of his life. 'Ever since I started shooting square basketballs on the Atari 2600, I have always managed to squeeze some gaming time into my day.'

Although we've all grown up, Joe still looks to video games for a source of motivation 'My video game tastes have evolved just like the industry itself but my artistic passion still lies in the games of my past. That is why I love creating pixel art styled games with Green Pixel!'

It's not just those entrepreneurs whose careers involve video games that still find inspiration from gaming, Kevin Choi from ilearnulearn says that video games teach you early on about skills that will take you all the way in life and in your career. Kevin said 'you learn to be patient through difficult times... If you fail, you analyze what you did wrong, what you need to improve, and apply those changes,' shift your focus to the end goal. Kevin told us that all of these lessons he received early on from Mario and Luigi apply not just to his personal life, but he carries them as inspiration for his career with ilearnulearn.

Some lasting advice that Kevin shared with us, 'Remember that slow progress is still progress and that you're farther than where you were yesterday'. Think of your progress as breaking the midway tape in Yoshi's Island, you've gotten this far, now look to the future and find the secret levels!

So let me ask you this, do you think childhood video games sprout entrepreneurs and innovation?

Don't forget, STARTOFF voting starts October 9th, keep your eyes and ears open for updates and ways to get involved. Keep checking back at startoff.ca for more information and follow #STARTOFFhamont on Twitter!

It takes a community to grow a village, just like it takes a community to grow an effective incubator for innovation. Around here we like to say it takes a village to raise a start-up. Luckily for Hamilton, we have a community that caters to forward thinking and innovative entrepreneurs. There are so many opportunities and organizations in Hamilton that prove to be great resources for these entrepreneurs and start-ups.

In recent years, we've seen a surge in the creative community in Hamilton, especially around both the James Street North and Locke Street areas. More and more businesses are setting up permanent residency and more creative industries are being drawn to Hamilton. The question is why? Why are we seeing this outpouring of creative and innovative thinking in Hamilton?

Stephanie Seagram (@seagrams), a creative catalyst in her own right and formerly the manager of the CoBALT Exchange, graciously agreed to chat with us about innovation and creativity in Hamilton and why we're seeing this growth. Stephanie shared with us her view: Both creativity and innovation come out of need; whether it be the need for inspiration or the need for a new way to do things. As a result of the unique identities of both the creative and innovative industries, there is much objectivity to play with. With this need and objectivity, comes entrepreneurial opportunity.

'The city is starting to see the value of creative industries,' said Seagram. 'There's a difference between monetary value and social value, both of which are occurring in Hamilton as a result of the rise of creative and innovative industries here.'

We can see the social value with the popularity of Art Crawl and especially with this past weekend's James Street Supercrawl, not to mention the growth of monetary value with the pull of over 50,000 people coming in to check out the amazing, one-of-a-kind street festival.

So where does Innovation Factory come in, and how does iF make a difference in Hamilton's economy and creative industries? Organizations like Innovation Factory, Hamilton Economic Development (EcDev), and Software Hamilton, along with events such as DemoCamp, Startup Weekend Hamilton, and STARTOFF take a single idea and help turn it into a company, a creation of new jobs and a source of economic regrowth for the Hamilton community. This process, as Stephanie said, can be called a 'through-line of innovation'.

These organizations and events act as an exchange, an exchange of ideas and expertise and a way to network with those who can help launch your business. Creative types and inventors alike come to Innovation Factory, CoBALT Exchange and EcDev to utilize these amazing resources for start-ups and small businesses. Innovation Factory is a connection device.

We're seeing a great deal of creativity and innovation in Hamilton. To see this grow into the future and assist Hamilton not just economically, but also socially, we need to incubate this innovative thinking. Hamilton is making a name for itself as a great city to start and grow your business. Now it's up to us to keep that growth coming, STARTOFF is just what Hamilton needs. STARTOFF is here to spread the word of new and innovative companies that are based in Hamilton.

Keep checking in with us on Twitter (@itbeingswithIF and #STARTOFFhamont), through Facebook (facebook.com/innovationfactory.ca) and at startoff.ca for updates and more ways to get involved! Don't forget that voting starts on October 9th! Help support Hamilton's creative and innovative industries!

...Alright, who's ready to get back to Zelda?

You are all probably wondering what the heck I am talking about. Let me try and unpack my opening sentence and make some sense of it. If you are judging an employee's capabilities and performance, you are doing so in the context of other employees that you have seen doing a similar job in similar circumstances. This becomes your context for evaluating someone as an 'A' player or as a 'C' player. If in your career, you have only worked with a limited set of similar employees; your context will be limited. What appears to be an 'A' player to you (the best you have seen in your limited exposure), may be viewed by me as a 'B minus' player because I have a context where I have seen hundreds of employees performing a similar role in similar circumstances. Until you experience one of my 'A' players, it is very difficult for you to accept that your 'A' player is really a 'B minus'.

Context isn't a phase that I invented. In fact, I stole it from Howard Gwin of OMERS Venture. Howard says the biggest issue in tech in Canada is lack of context.

Unfortunately, in start-up and small emerging companies, the scenario above plays out all the time. Many founders and successful CEO's of small companies have limited context beyond their one or two areas of broad expertise. I recently met with a company looking to take on their first investment beyond their original 'friends and family' round. They have been very successful in establishing and growing their business to a point where they need additional investment to accelerate growth. In their context, they are very successful, so logically and unconsciously it may seem to them that raising money shouldn't be difficult. The company had been referred to me as someone who could help them. Following our discussion, they asked me to propose what I could do to help them raise an investment round. I enlisted a colleague and we put together a proposal to help this company move through what is generally a demanding and draining six month process. Our proposal was split into three phases:

Preparation: 'Getting Pitch Ready' which included gathering and assessing all the business model, financial model, and due diligence material and identifying any gaps that would inhibit an investor from participating.
Working with them to remedy any gaps.
On-going Coaching through the pitching process which also included using our connections and networks to create warm introduction to suitable VC's.

We were confident with our network, credibility and experience that we could significantly impact their ability to raise money.

They declined our assistance. What we may have underestimated in developing our proposal was 'Context'. For a company that has never raised institutional money, I am wondering if our proposal seemed overkill. After all, they had built their company from nothing to cash flow and income positive in just a few years and were posting attractive annual growth numbers.

Are they right and will they get quickly and easily funded without our assistance or do they suffer from not enough context and will get surprised? Only time will tell, but my gut feel is they will exit their fund raising process with a heck of a lot more context about how to raise money, some of which I am afraid will not be good.

Vinod Khosla said this week in TechCruch at 'I Feel Sad Sometimes For Y Combinator Companies That Get So Much Hype'. His message was that some Y Combinator companies exit the process with too large expectations and valuations that chase away the very mentors and investors that they need to make them successful. It is the context that these mentors and investors bring that is required. They look at a start-up's problems and challenges through a different lens than the founders. They often have seen the same problems many times and identify it long before it surfaces to cripple the company.

I fear too often that Founders ignore this essential element that is a key to their success. More than anything else, mentors and advisors bring context; context in evaluating talent; context in dealing with customer and marketplace challenges, and context in competing for investment.

So if you are a start-up CEO, recognize if you have a shortfall in context and don't miss the opportunity to broaden your perspective whenever and wherever you can. This means attracting not just investors, but the right investors. It also means surrounding yourself with advisors who have done more, seen more, and have a much broader context.

It's all about strategy, and that's what the STARTOFF participants are building as we speak! The remaining time in September is dedicated to building awareness and support for STARTOFF! All the participants are preparing for the frenzy that they will soon be in! They're building their networks, social networks included, to try to garner support from the Hamilton community! Everything they learned from kitestring branding studio on Orientation Night will be put into practice.

The exciting part starts very soon! Hamilton is on the cusp of a great opportunity for entrepreneurs and Hamiltonians alike. Starting in October voting opens up to the public, STARTOFF will go live! From October 9th at 10am until October 31st at 4pm, the Hamilton community (and beyond!) can vote for their favourite STARTOFF entrepreneur(s)!

STARTOFF voting is all up to the community and the companies involved. To be successful, the participants must encourage the community to vote for them. Each vote counts, just ask Dog from Duck Hunt!

STARTOFF will change the lives and companies of the 10 deserving winners, with 10 prize packs valued at over $16,000 each (that's a cumulative total of $160,000 worth in prizes available!) The package includes amazing prizes that will give new entrepreneurs a 1UP! The prize package includes a Small Business Innovation Loan from FirstOntario, Business Diagnostic and consultation from Ideacia ONE, a legal package from Ballagh & Edward LLP, a 1-year appBuilder membership from Weever Apps, a performance profile provided by Express Employment Professionals, an online marketing seminar from KKTI, Accounting services provided by KPMG Canada, telecom services from Net@ccess, meeting space provided by McMaster Innovation Park and co-creation space courtesy of Innovation Factory!

Make sure you stay tuned to startoff.ca for ways YOU can get involved! Check out startoff.ca for all your information and voting needs!

Unfortunately, Kirby and Donkey Kong didn't show up, but we had a great time none-the-less! We had so many people stop by the booth to participate in the obstacle course and learn more about STARTOFF!

We had an amazing obstacle course set up for all to enjoy. If you took part, you got a bright and beautiful pair of STARTOFF shades, handy for those sunny fall days and on trend with the neon colours (trust me, Mrs. Pacman told me!)

Each station was centered around obstacles entrepreneurs have to face their daily lives in order to be successful. First, players had to 'fuel-up' on coffee by transferring coffee beans with an 8-bit mug, thanks to Hero Coffee for the great smelling coffee beans! The second station challenged players to 'skip lunch' by throwing on a necktie and skipping rope 10 times. Finally, players had to weave in and out of pylons while chatting on the phone and singing 'Taking Care of Business' (pictured below). Close to 100 people went through the obstacle course on Saturday!

One lucky winner took home a brand new iPad stocked with an Atari docking station and all your favourite 8-bit Atari video games! A big congratulations to Taylor Evans with a record time of 24.03 seconds! He could totally beat Link in any race.

Also congrats to our hourly winners Ryan Avola, Andy Hannuford, Rukshi Athulathmudali, Ross Jones and Katie Stonehouse who all won a STARTOFF t-shirt and a gift certificate courtesy of Radius Caf!

We couldn't imagine a better way to let the Hamilton community know about STARTOFF and all the amazing opportunities it will provide for the participants. Keep checking back at startoff.ca for more information and to keep up to date!

Check out some pictures from the STARTOFF Obstacle course below!

We promise Saturday's SuperCrawl will be filled with all the music, entertainment, art, food and fun of last years' event, only STARTOFF plans to make it even better!

Don't believe us? You didn't believe your next-door neighbour when they told you that docking Sonic 3 on top of Sonic & Knuckles improved your overall Sega experience either. Even hours of genius entertainment can always use an improvement in the fun department!

The STARTOFF Hamilton obstacle course in themed after a regular day in the life of a hardworking entrepreneur - only if that entrepreneur was living in a parallel universe within a start-up level of a retro video game. Interacting with the larger than life 8-bit props alone are reason enough to play, take your picture, and post it to your favourite social network!

Come out and visit us at the STARTOFF tent on James Street between Rebecca and Wilson! You can't miss us in all of our 8-bit glory!

I bet you've seen the amazing STARTOFF sunglasses! If not here's a sneak peak:

Dying to get your hands on a pair? No need to go up against Bowser in his castle, don't worry about the Koopa Troopas getting in your way. To get your hands on a pair of these super snazzy sunglasses, all you have to do is come out and visit us and take your try at our super-duper fun STARTOFF OBSTACLE COURSE! We're drumming up support and recognition for STARTOFF, bring everyone you know and spread the word! STARTOFF is all about community support for local entrepreneurs, what better place than one of the best community showcases of the year!

Want to know another secret? If you come out and participate in the obstacle course you have a chance at winning an iPad and an Atari docking station stacked with all your favourite 8-bit Atari video games! Our fastest hourly winners will receive at super sweet STARTOFF t-shirt. Plus join us throughout the day to sample some delicious treats and coffee from our friends at Radius!

The James Street North Supercrawl is going to be a great weekend, with so many activities and events happening you'll miss out if you don't check it out. Also, don't forget to come out and chat with us about all things iF happening soon!

While you're down at Supercrawl, don't forget to check out a couple of STARTOFF's 8-bit art installations in the area, including Hamilton Farmer's Market, the Design Annex, CBC and at the Gorilla Cheese truck! Check out this map for details.

We hope to see all your bright and smiling faces out on Saturday! Be sure to bring your smartphone, without it you cannot participate!!

Last night's STARTOFF Orientation was a huge success! kitestring creative branding studio came out to coach our players in the fine arts of pac man persuasion! The night was all about the exposure and why STARTOFF will be great for these entrepreneurs!

Innovation Factory and kitestring gave some great advice to the players! Stephanie Shuster, iF's Creative Manager, told the players to 'get out there and promote yourself!'

Chris Farias from kitestring told the entrepreneurs to get creative and keep it up during the whole event! Start following #STARTOFFhamont to follow all the action.

We wanted to know the game strategy of a few players, so we asked the question, 'How are you going to win?' Without hesitation, they all said that getting out there and building their social media communitywas their ticket to getting everyone they know to vote and to support their business!

Our excitement for STARTOFF Hamilton is contagious! To get exposed to our group of contestants, check out the pictures above and don't forget to start voting on October 9th for your favourite company!

STARTOFF Orientation is tonight! Want a play-by-play on what our amazing participants will be learning? We've got you covered...

Tonight Innovation Factory will be taking these great start-ups under our wings and teaching them how to grab hold of a joystick and get in the STARTOFF Hamilton game! On the minds each of our 38 participants tonight will be the ultimate question: What does it take to make it into the top score standings to win STARTOFF?

The Answer: It's all about self-promotion and social marketing! We're providing our players with all the tools needed to get their name out there and level up!

kitestring creative branding studio will be coaching our participants in community outreach, developing a stellar online presence, and how to springboard onto social media; the most influential way our entrepreneurial players can use to make that super mushroom grow larger!

Why is engaging your community on social media the best way to score a 1-UP? It is one of the easiest, most economical and creative ways to reach the largest possible audience. Sure, meeting Yoshi down at Cannon Coffee Co. for a face to face meeting is great, but what about Mr. Pacman all the way up at Mohawk College? Social media is the key to making meaningful connections that you wouldn't be able to otherwise, all from the comforting glow of your Commodore 64!

What's a game without rules? We know, not cool, but every player will be given a brief (promise!) outline of all the rules and regulations of STARTOFF because we want you to win, not to get blinded by a Donkey Kong barrel.

The game is still loading - but while we're waiting for voting to begin on October 9th, our participants need to get ready to play! Innovation Factory has the golden coins ready, now the entrepreneurs need to get social online and around town to collect them! Good luck!

This week we're launching to the tune of ten amazing 8-bit art installations popping up all over the city. From a banana eating mobile installation on the Gorilla Cheese truck to larger than life carrot sprouting from the ground at Hamilton Farmers' Market, Hamiltonian's and beyond will be able to check out these amazing installations through the use of this handy geotag map!

Two of Hamilton's most talented artists set out on the quest to build the Mario-World-inspired pieces. Jason Freiburger (Who has brought Disney's musicals to life at Mirvish) and Steve Mazza (of Hamilton's revered TH&B Collective) have been tirelessly working on the amazing installation pieces.

Check out this sneak peak of our 8-bit vintage camera that will be installed at CBC Hamilton on Tuesday:

What does it take to build these great art installations? We sat down and chatted with Jason and Steve about their art and their love for Hamilton.

Jason and Steve both work daytime jobs in prop and scene building for theater and film. Jason's art has be showcased all over Hamilton, so when he heard about STARTOFF, it was the perfect fit! Steve and Jason have collaborated on many projects and have known each other for quite a while now. Teaming up to build the 8-bit art installation pieces together was as natural for them as two plumber brothers joining forces to take on King Koopa (You know! Like Mario and Luigi)!

Since the 8-bit art installation pieces feature straight lines and a large 'pixel' interface, many measurements and precise cuts were needed to perfect the pieces. Both their trades made for a perfect collaboration. Jason's background is prop and scene building, while Steve specializes is painting and sculpture. So, while Jason was building the pieces and collecting coins for a high score, Steve was busy painting them and strategizing a route to castle to save Princess Peach; a perfect production line!

To interact with these cool art installations, you don't need to climb a bean stock while sporting star power. All you need to do is visit startoff.ca to view the art map and then take a wander to find each piece.

We hope you (joy)stick around for the next two months to see what's next up for STARTOFFhamilton!

Here's a sneak peak of some of the art installations across town!

This extension will only be until the 7th, so please don't hesitate to buy your tickets this week. After Friday, ticket prices will go up! This is your last chance to grab these tickets at the discounted price.

What's the harm in buying early? Like they say, the early bird gets the worm! See you at the LiON'S LAIR gala on October 4th!

Check out http://www.lionslair2012.evenbrite.com to purchase your tickets.

An observation that I have repeatedly made over my career is that the best sales reps think they are losing the deal until the day the win. Conversely, the less successful reps often think they are in the lead right up until they get the call that they have lost. Why is this?

There is a phrase that I first heard 25 years ago: 'He got his happy ears on'. It is easy to fall into the trap of being overly optimistic and overestimate the good news indicators that you hear. The buying process within a company is often a complex. It usually involves many stakeholders with varying levels of influence and control of the final decision. It is also subject to the ambiguities and politics of a decision-making process in an organization, especially in larger companies.

Great sales people cover every base possible. They recognize that there are multiple stakeholders and that solution needs to either meet the needs of the majority (the most powerful majority) while neutralizing the dissent in those stakeholder groups that they can't win over. To do this, they need to understand the prospective customer's organization, people, personalities and politics to determine where are the power bases, who are the influencers and how are decisions really made. Great sales people often have a better understanding of how to drive a decision through an organization than many of the people who work for that organization.
Great sales people also recognize that the buying decision is complex, fluid and constantly changing. This means they must always be in front of their prospect so they can stay on top of the subtle shifts as they happen. They follow the old adage that 'if the prospect isn't talking with you, then they are probably spending time with the competitor ', so they strive to always be present.

If you are a start-up, what does this mean to you?

Many of the lessons that you can learn from great sales people apply to founders. Founders often suffer from 'having their happy ears on'. By nature, they are driven to want to make their 'thing' successful. After all, they conceived, gestated and gave birth to their company. The need for their solution is often intuitive to them and their passion for their company drives them.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't intuitively see what they see. They are looking at the landscape through a different set of lens. All of them have a common equation that they are considering: Risk versus Value.

Investors and prospective advisors see your start-up as one of many trying to establish a share within a market and are speculating on whether the market is large enough and who will be successful. Your prospective customers are considering your viability; ability to execute and deliver; the value of your solution; and the options available from other sources. Your prospective employees are considering the challenges they will face, the experience they will gain, the attractiveness of your culture and rewards they will reap.

Great founders, like great sales people, also cover every base. They assume the investment deal won't happen right up until the money is in the bank and work multiple options at once. They cover every aspect of the investors' needs to ensure they come out on top of the investment selection. With prospective customers, they seek out the innovators and risk takers who have a need or pre-disposition to be an early adopter and develop depth relationship with these key advocates. With employees, they recruit those that thrive on the energy and controlled chaos of a start-up and they weave them into the web that drives their passion.

Raising money, selling early customers, and finding great employees is hard. Don't underestimate it. Invest the time to develop relationships with prospective investors, customers and employees. Make sure every angle is covered. But most importantly, harness your productive paranoia and assume that you are always losing, right up until the day you win.

What does a Startup need to succeed? Funding? A Great Team? Customers? All of these elements are important and we spend a lot of time and energy chasing funding, putting together a great team and acquiring customers and there has been a lot written about each of those topics, moreover you probably know most of it. But humor me for a second and let's take a look at what happens after you put a great team together, get some funding and get going, I postulate that the success of your startup will depend on how your startup deals with 'Innovative Tension'.

So what is Innovative Tension? If you go dust off that Physics book and look up the definition of tension it probably says that 'tension is the pulling force exerted on an object' with that in mind you can extrapolate and define innovative tension as the pulling forces exerted on your startup. As you probably know force is a vector, that means innovative tension is a vector made up of many little forces that add up to one force pulling your startup, hopefully in the direction that you want it to move forward in.

Figure: Innovative Tension Breakdown of Forces

The figure above shows you some of the forces that impact a startup and create innovative tension.

If you've ever seen an investor presentation you've probably seen the 'hockey stick' of revenue or growth for an innovative startup, there is a period of low growth and then a sudden exponential jump - when they cross the chasm. If you zoom into the low growth period, it won't be linear there will be pivots, there will be changes to the product, teams will be disbanded and the markets will change but we gloss over all of that for the exponential growth at the end. In that so-called 'low growth' period is where innovative tension comes into play where innovation actually happens.

Innovation isn't about building more products or selling more products; it's about discovering a better process to build the products or finding a better way to sell more products. Innovation isn't just about doing the same thing as before only better; it's about doing something better by doing something disruptive and different.

An innovative startup tries to solve a problem with a new and different solution. The startup's overall direction will be towards the creation of a profitable solution to the problem. The process of generating that solution and moving in the desired direction is where Innovative Tension comes into play. For example a startup has to be hungry and foolish enough to attempt to tackle a problem by creating a new solution, yet confident enough that a solution can be found and knowledgeable enough to get there. It's a bit like a team of mountain climbers trying to reach the peak, it requires enough risk-taking ambition to make the attempt but also the know how to overcome the unknown obstacles that will be encountered along the way.

The differing backgrounds and viewpoints of team members is one of the most important sources of Innovative Tension. An engineer focused on creating a product with a rich feature-set and well architected codebase may conflict with a designer focused on a simple to use product and a business founder eager to ship a minimum viable product before the competition does first. These differing viewpoints are all attempting to push the startup in a positive direction, but they create Innovative Tension that must be resolved in a pragmatic way that maximizes progress towards the startup's overall direction. The process of resolving Innovative Tension often involves tension between team member egos. Leaders and team members with too much ego, who are unwilling to compromise enough or give up enough control, can be as ineffective as those with too little ego who are unwilling to press ahead with imperfect but pragmatic solutions to areas of tension.

Another area prone to Innovative Tension is the creation of a profitable product and a product that consumers will use, which can be resolved by different pricing and delivery strategies. All these decisions involve tension between trade-offs, which is true of any business, whether it's a mom and pop restaurant or a biotech startup. Innovative resolution of tension involves the discovery of new knowledge and new possibilities that shift the curve of existing trade-offs or eliminate the need for a trade-off and create new value in the process.

While startup founders hope that Innovative Tension is resolved with a profitable solution, this is not always the case, just like in physics sometimes the tension proves to be too much for the system to bear. Team members are let go, startups pivot, investors lose money, and products fail. An awareness of all aspects of Innovative Tension may help minimize the negative impact of these situations or the possibility of these situations occurring at all. But because by definition so much of innovation involves unknowns or unknowable variables, Innovative Tension will always remain the double-edged sword - it's exactly the same process that makes innovation possible that makes failure possible as well.

Now you are probably thinking why is this even relevant? Well because at core of every successful startup is a team and in every team there needs to be innovative tension. Without innovative tension you can't create revolutionary products that disrupt the status quo and without understanding it you can't keep a startup together!

So you think all of this is mumbo jumbo and it probably is but let me give you an example of innovative tension at work, if you've been following the tech blogosphere recently you've probably heard about the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit, whether that is a good thing or not is to be discussed another day but the inner workings of how the iPhone was born is slowly becoming public knowledge and you can see innovative tension at play. The iPhone started it's life as a tablet... yes Apple's vision was to build a tablet (read - iPad), that was in 2003 that's four years before the first iPhone was announced! There was a vision to 'a beautiful tablet without a keyboard, without a hinge, where you have to fold it like a laptop.' but in 2004 Apple's top brass while discussing this tablet started to talk about how their cellphones suck and they decided to shelve the tablet and I am sure there were many people that disagreed with that decision and argued to keep the tablet but Apple successfully managed the innovative tension within the team and launched the iPhone project and the rest... well you know the story.

Whether you are a startup, a corporation working on creating a new product or a researcher developing something new you cannot truly innovate until you not only understand innovative tension but can also manage it. In the end, in order to challenge the status quo and innovate you have to go beyond your capabilities and comfort zone out of which truly extraordinary results can be achieved, but it comes at the risk of failure. Innovative tension is just a label so that conversations can start and we can all start thinking about how the different forces within our teams affect the success of a project and about how important they are to create revolutionary products, groundbreaking research and disruptive startups! So in the words of the wise... Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

This blog post evolved out of a conversation about Startups in the Hamilton area between Kevin Browne and Ash Ayyaswamy on Saturday, August 4, 2012.

Some key takeaways from the conference; new contacts at sister organizations around North America, new ideas on how to execute on meaningful events and programming for our clients, and some delicious chocolate and seafood from Seattle!

PICTURE THIS...It's two weeks until the Lion's Lair gala.

You heard raving reviews about Lion's Lair 2011 and were so upset to have missed it. But then...you didn't know about the big smoky reveal of chic gold decor, and those clutch top business execs you missed connecting with, and the impromptu fabulous after party at the luxurious C Hotel. You didn't know about the world-class antipasto bar, or the great company from a wide-variety of businesses at each table, or the heart-racing anticipation of watching a new startup company win $100,000 to get their company up and running in the Hamilton community...BUT NOW YOU DO!

And so you're out shopping for the perfect outfit. It's the end of Summer so there are sales everywhere you turn! You end up with a great deal off the clearance rack in the perfect shade of blue - it says 'I'm here to celebrate, but also to leave a lasting impression'. It goes impeccably with your Donald Trump tie at home (or your BCBG pumps for the ladies).

You're ready! Hair and makeup...check! Business cards...check! Pocket floss and Listerine strips...check! You're ready to take on the world as you participate in Hamilton's largest gathering of business professionals.

You hop into your 2001 rusting Honda (the one you keep telling yourself just doesn't go with your professional look and feel each time you roll up to a business meeting). And you're off! You stop and grab 3 friends that are going too and they cram in the back amongst your old coffee cups and all those files you keep meaning to take into the office. You pull into Carmen's just on time and rattle on past a few CEOs.

HOLD UP!!!!!!!!!

Wouldn't you rather arrive in style?

With that positive attitude and great new look, you (and your poor friends crammed in the back seat) deserve the absolute best!

Our generous partners at Hamilton Limo will be picking up one lucky guest and their 9 table mates on October 4th and escorting them to Lion's Lair 2012 in high fashion.

SO BUY YOUR EARLY BIRD TICKET BEFORE AUGUST 31ST FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN!

As a bonus...your ticket will be a whole lot cheaper too :)

$1000 Table of 10, $120 Single Tickets, and $60 for Young Professionals & Students

Five year-olds usually end up realizing pretty quickly that they need an adult's help. So, why is it so hard for 35 year olds to realize that they could benefit from the guidance and input from others?

The truth is, obviously, that none of us know everything and we can't possibly execute on our own all the steps necessary to be successful. Those of us that help entrepreneurs see often that the person that creates a business idea is not the right person to be leading the business behind that creation. Dual threats like our Board Chair Mark Chamberlain or our Executive Director Ron Neumann, who are both engineers and successful CEOs, are very rare. And, even Mark and Ron know that they need other people to shore up their weaknesses.

Upon Innovation Factory's founding, we embarked on an aggressive charm offensive to inaugurate relationships with any company, organization and institution in the region that could even tangentially be considered an iF stakeholder.

The first reason is that we don't have all the resources we need to optimally help every entrepreneur in Hamilton. So, we leveraged other resources in the region and concentrated on filling the preexisting gaps and focusing primarily on what we did best (which for the most part has been in helping tech start-ups commercialize their technologies).

The second reason is less quantifiable, but perhaps more impactful, and it has to do with the power of connectivity. If you are reluctant to share your ideas with the world, simply put, the world will never know about your ideas. No one will ever be able to figure out how your product will help them or how they could perhaps help improve your product.

Two years into our existence, I can say that one of things we've done very well is in collaborating with all the resources that exist in this community for innovators, entrepreneurs and anyone else who just wants to see Hamilton succeed. We have tremendously strong relationships with Mohawk, McMaster, the City of Hamilton, the Chamber of Commerce (with whom we produce Lion's Lair), scores of other non-profits and institutions, and dozens of companies in the private sector like law firms, accounting firms and financial institutions.

Now, instead of an organization with less than a million dollar operating budget acting independently with middling impact, we are at the center of an ever-expanding Innovation Community in Hamilton, with each member invested in the success of this city and understanding ways in which they can provide real value to the cause.

Innovation Factory is a tremendous resource for innovators and entrepreneurs in Hamilton. In fact, we are one of many. Depending on the nature of the company, in this city there is the City of Hamilton's Small Business Enterprise Centre, the Hamilton Chamber of Commerce, Cobalt Connects, a large private sector comprising thousands of professionals, a number of DeGroote business students looking for a project and 500,000 potential customers ready to provide you with their advice on how to make your company better.

I can't guarantee success if you do, but if you are an entrepreneur and you aren't accessing at least one of these resources, I can guarantee that you are likely going to be yet another small business casualty.

The night kicked off with mingling and networking while indulging in the most delicious southern BBQ Hamilton's ever seen! The pulled pork, chicken, and beef was piled high on fresh bakery buns accompanied by home-style baked beans and refreshing coleslaw. Guests were marvelling over the generous portions and delectable tastes of Rolly Rockets BBQ (470 King St W, Ham) as they chatted with new and old faces and prepared for the round-robin pitch tournament about to begin.

After a couple friendly hours of catching up with friends and meeting new contacts, everyone took their seat with a large piece of cardstock - blue on one side and orange on the other - ready to participate in our first ever INNOVATION NIGHT SHOWDOWN. Past Innovation Night winners gathered in front of a visual tournament board to determine their place in the competition and prepare for round one. Our featured companies included:

TOPIC SIMPLE
Steve Newberry
www.topicsimple.com
Twitter: @TopicSimple
Topic Simple creates short animated videos for the web that explain and promote your product, idea, business, or startup in a fun and interesting way.

AIR CONVEYANCE
Peter Simpson
At Air Conveyance Systems, we design, fabricate and install material separation and bi product recovery systems. Our patented Air Wash is the heart of our separation system. We are the leaders in plastic recycling systems specializing in converting carpet, tire, computer and automotive waste into re-useable products. Equipped with a full sized production testing lab we can demonstrate our separation technology eliminating any process surprises. Air Conveyance Systems have assisted our customers in diverting their waste streams from landfill to marketable products that can be re-used internally or out sourced to other companies. We have diverted millions of pounds of waste from local landfills, making our customers environmentally sound with increased profits.

NERVU
Mohamed El Mahallawy
Nervu.ca
Twitter: @nervuninja
Don't you hate missing savings on your favorite vendors? Or how about receiving irrelevant promotions that may not be suitable to you? Nervu changes that. Simply go online, select your favorite vendors, sit back and relax. Whenever they have a saving, sale or promotion, we will text message you to let you know. The beauty about this is you select what suits your lifestyle, we eliminate irrelevant spam and it doesn't cost you a dime.
Nervu.ca - Always on the lookout.

O2 OXYGEN BAR
Craig P Denby
www.refreshingo2.ca
Twitter: @refreshingo2bar
We make 94.7 % pure oxygen with sixteen flavours of aromatherapy. Our customers have told us about their experience with headache and fatigue relief from using our product. We use an Oxygen Concentrator to take room air to almost 95% pure oxygen.

SPECTERGY
Jeff Cole
www.spectergy.ca
We specialize in renewable energy systems and energy efficiency services providing considerable savings throughout Southern Ontario with the highest value in today's best technologies including : Solar PV (Ontario microFIT program), Thermal Video Audits, LED Lighting Retrofits, Nano Insulation, and High Efficiency Windows.

COOL CANUCK
Dan Dexel
www.coolcanuck.com
Twitter: @coolcanuckcorp
Canuck Corp. has exclusive distribution rights for a new chemical-free fabric called CoolCore that can cool to about 65F just by adding water to it. Our company makes various cooling products including scarves, towels, neck wraps and apparel. All of our apparel is made in Canada and the majority of our towels are too.

Snappay
Jim Rudnick
www.snap-pay.com
Twitter: @jvrudnick
The ability to accept credit card payments through a Point of Sale machine today is completely out of reach for small merchants around the world. Snappay instantly turns any smartphone into a POS machine, no crazy fees, no additional hardware, sign up and immediately begin accepting payment.

HAMILTON CITY ROLLER GIRLS
Marissa Fogel
http://hammercityrollergirls.ca
Twitter: @HammerCityRG
Established in 2006 the Hammer City Roller Girls (HCRG) are trailblazers for modern flat track roller derby in Canada. As a women only, grassroots, volunteer organization they are focused on promoting a healthy avenue for women to grow athletically while getting involved in the community. As members of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association, they promote the highest level of competitive international game play while fostering an attitude of sportswomanship amongst league members and in Hamilton. With local and international bouts HCRG always put their best skate forward to promote their hometown pride of 'Real Sport. Real City. Real Women.

Crowds were engaged round by round as we dwindled from 8 competitors down to 4 after the 2 minute round on problem/solution: Topic Simple, Nervu, Cool Canuck, Snappay. Involving the audience in the voting aspect was amazing! There was a sea of orange and blue after each individual showdown, determining who would move on the following round. Naturally, as these were the best of the best of our Innovation Night participants, each round was neck in neck. At points, Ron Neumann, iF's Executive Director who was doubling as the night's MC, even had to ask the audience to vote colour by colour to get a more accurate result - that's how close they were!! In round 2, the 4 remaining companies pitched their best 2 minutes on market opportunity. Between Nervu stripping down some articles of clothing and Cool Canuck taking a different approach to the meaning of 'market opportunity', it was a nail-biter to the end. In the closest of competitions the final showdown featured Nervu's Mo El Mahallawy and Snappay's Jim Rudnick spewing their best executive summary in 2 minutes or less.

I'm sure it came as no surprise to many that our very own Difizen of the Year, a crowd pleaser, a swift businessman, and a flourishing Hamilton advocate, JIM RUDNICK of SNAPPAY brought the house down as our final winner! Snappay took home a fantastic prize package featuring a brand new iPad 3, an hour meeting with accomplished entrepreneur executive, Mark Chamberlain, and a Mabel's Labels bundle featuring their new Write-Away labels. He delivered a polished speech in appreciation and lead the way to the Sweet Ice Cones, our delightful dessert.

The night concluded with the ever crowd-pleasing girls from Sweet Ice Cones serving up mouth-watering warm-weather treats. 300 clients, business partners, and Hamilton professionals lined up like schoolyard students to get their hands on one (or many) of 5 amazing unlimited flavours. The flavours of the evening were each attributed to our incredible Showdown sponsors: SB Partners Apple Cider, kitestring Pink Lemonade, MIP Raspberry Green Tea, and iF Strawberry Lime (plus of course Sweet Ice Cones signature Sweet Espresso flavour!)! The night wouldn't have been possible or nearly as successful without the generous support of all these partners. On behalf of all the attendees and iF staff, THANK YOU!

Another great big thank-you goes out to all the attendees that brought along non-perishable food items. In response to Hamilton's food bank's recent desperate call out for supplies, iF raised the challenge to all our summer BBQ guests. We were extremely overwhelmed and humbled at the support of the Hamilton community! The following morning we delivered 3 large boxes and $150 to those in need in our own backyard. Way to go HamOnt!!!

Lastly, a note on one challenge we faced at one of our biggest events to date. Despite a few dark clouds and giant gusts of wind threatening our orange and blue balloon invasion in MIP's newly updated courtyard, we had a record-breaking turnout. In the days leading up to the Showdown - which we combined with our annual Summer Sizzle Barbeque with a new twist on Innovation Night - we actually had to advertise that we were SOLD OUT to those still inquiring from the community. This was a tough message for Hamilton's last-minute lollygaggers. However, when confirming catering numbers and liquor license capacities, we simply cannot expand our attendance numbers at the last minute. This was a hard lesson to learn as some our most valuable long-time supporters showed up unregistered and had to wait in a waiting-list line as we conducted up-to-the-minute headcounts. We encourage all of HamOnt to come out to iF events and see the great things going on around innovation, but you MUST REGISTER in advance! We look forward to hosting even bigger and more outstanding events in the future.

See you there!

Startoff is a new, hip, local contest presented by iF and disguised as a retro videogame. The adventure begins when new innovative entrepreneurs campaign for buzzing online community votes to win packages filled with the type of prizes beta businesses need to take control of the joystick and get in the game!

Throughout the month of August, iF Clients can submit their entry to play along by filling out the entry form here. Not an iF Client? That's okay, you can come in and meet with us to determine if you're eligible to be an iF Client and join STARTOFF - just click here to get started! You can only enter until August 31, 2012 so sign up today!

In September, we'll roll out our campaign in the Hamilton community with some special surprises. Be sure to visit us at SUPERCRAWL to find out more and win awesome prizes!

October is when it all comes together - from October 9-31, everyone in Hamilton (and beyond!) can go online to startoff.ca to find out about all of the participating iF Clients, and vote on their favorites!

Teams will go head to head and compete for a spot in the Top Ten to win one of 10 prize packages each valued at $16,700!

So, what's in the package each of these lucky 10 winners will recieve?

-FirstOntario Small Business Innovation Loan

-Free Business Diagnostic and Consultation with Ideacia ONE

-Trademark Application from Ballagh & Edward LLP

-appBuilder and Consultation from Weever Apps

-Preparation of a Performance Profile from Express Employment Professionals

-Online Marketing Seminar from KKT Interactive

-Accounting Services from KPMG

-Telecom Services from Net@ccess

-Meeting Room Space at McMaster Innovation Park

-3-Month Membership to FACTORY FLOOR

Don't miss your chance to be a part of the action! iF Clients can sign up to participate starting today, and Hamilton hold on to your hats - STARTOFF Hamilton is coming this fall!

Rarely do entrepreneurs think about employee termination when they start a company. These are times of enthusiasm, positivity and high expectations. We don't discuss handling failure, hoping maybe that we won't jinx ourselves, but the reality is that attracting, retaining and terminating people is the most important part of a leader's job.

For whatever reason, most, if not all, leaders struggle with the decision to fire an employee. Often, they believe they have failed as a leader to make the employee successful. They are caring human beings and worry about the impact that their actions will have on that employee and their family. They are worried that they are being unfair; that they have not given the employee a chance; and that they may be wrong with their decision. They often have an overriding feeling in their gut that the employee is the victim.

While they struggle with their decision, it impacts others in the organization. Peers of the employee see (often more clearly than anyone else) that the employee is failing. They resent the negative impact that the failing employee has on the organization, on their team's performance and even on themselves. To those other employees, often the decision is obvious and they wonder why their leader isn't acting. They begin to lose confidence in their leader.

Reality is that the failing employee is NOT the victim. They have failed to perform to the expectations of the job. Many times, the company is culpable in the failing because they did not clearly set expectations and quantifiable metric driven goals nor did they provide direct and candid feedback to the employee on their failure to consistently meet these goals. It is often this culpability that is the cause of all the angst outlined above.

Sometimes the employee has failed because they have failed to meet an expectation that is critical but not quantifiable. These are often binary measurements such as the Trust and Confidence. These are words with big and complex connotations. They involve the employee exhibiting behaviours consistent with the company's culture and the leader's values. They encompass reliability, judgement and integrity. They are binary; you have trust and confidence or you don't.

A leader either trusts an employee or they don't. They either have confidence in an employee or they don't. If you don't have trust and confidence, these are reasons for terminating employment that override all the analysis of employee's performance based on the quantifiable metrics. It doesn't mean you avoid paying severance but it does mean that you have to remove the employee from your team.

If you are a leader, especially a new entrepreneur in your first major leadership role, here are some steps you can take to avoid the pitfalls of being bad at firing.

1. Start off with solid, bulletproof termination provisions in every employees 'employment agreement. Firing is an emotional time. Don't add to it by not having clear direction around the economic terms of letting someone go.
2. Set clear expectations of what is success and what is failure in each employee's role. Where you can, ensure you have quantifiable metrics that allow you to have an unemotional discussion about failure to achieve a goal.
3. Ensure these goals and metrics are aligned to the company goals. Don't let an employee claim success in their job if the job isn't contributing to the company's success.
4. Talk about the big, qualitative, binary expectations that are demanded from every employee: Trust, Integrity, Values, Confidence, Ethics, and Judgement. Employees need to know these are more than just posters on the wall but are conditions of employment.
5. Change your view on firing. Firing is not about failure; it is more often about lack of fit. A poor employee in your organization may be a great employee in another because of differences in expectation, culture, values and so on.
6. Don't forget the old adage: Hire Slowly, Fire Fast

The training season has begun and all of the wonderful LiON'S LAIR qualifiers are on their way to be polished and ready for battle. This past week, participants were coached by Mindy Tweedle and Matt Pomeroy. Both of these amazing professionals taught the finalists how to shine in front of the Lions (and in front of the cameras!). If you want to know exactly what the finalists were taught this week and do some of your own at home battle training, take a look here!

Every two weeks, our finalist will participate in workshops that will sharpen their skills and teach them how to present their amazing ideas to our fierce Lions. The training is intensive but will teach some amazing skills to our finalists. They are all on their way to being full fledge fighters, ready to take on the Lions! Don't forget to check out our finalists!

Check out the articles from CBC about LiON'S LAIR and our finalists! Thanks to CBC, we're hoping LiON'S LAIR will be an even bigger success than it was last year!

- The Lions descend on Hamilton
- Hamilton's Lion's Lair finalists go to media boot-camp

We're running a round-robin pitch tournament on a bracket similar to what you'd see in NCAA basketball, featuring 8 of our past Innovation Night Winners who will compete for the title of Ultimate Innovation Night Champion! The winner will recieve an ipad 3 and a meeting with Mark Chamberlain!

You're sure to remember our finalists from past Innovation Night events! At Innovation Night SHOWDOWN we'll see who reigns supreme! Will the winner be Topic Simple, Air Conveyance, Cool Canuck, sPECTERGY, nERVU, O2 Oxygen Bar, Mocial.Me or Hamilton Roller Girls?

Here's the twist - YOU GET TO DECIDE!

Each of our finalists will be paired up to face off (one will be on the 'blue' side of the stage and the other will be on the 'orange' side). They'll each have 2 minutes to pitch their market pain and solution. Then, the AUDIENCE will vote on blue vs. orange! The winner will advance to round 2 and face off with a new partner with a 2 minute pitch on their market opportunity, then the audience will vote again. The two finalists who make it to the final round will compete against one final partner with a 2 minute executive summary, and the winner (as voted on by the audience) will be the ultimate innovation night champion!

If that wasn't enough, we're inviting everyone attending to join us for dinner before the Showdown! Rolly Rockets BBQ will be catering a souther BBQ buffet, complete with their famous smoked chicken, pulled pork, and beef brisket rockets, tangy sauces, slaw, beans, and cornbread! There will be a cash bar serving up ice cold beer and summery sangria. And to top it all off, Sweet Ice Snow Cones will be providing all-you-can-eat all natural snowcones for dessert so you can beat the heat and try as many of their mouthwatering flavours as you like!

Tickets to this can't-miss summer event are FREE, but you need to sign up by July 20 if you'd like to join us, so get yours today!

http://inshowdown.eventbrite.com

Of course, this NEVER happens here at Innovation Factory - we are constantly working to bring you the highest quality events and programs to build the innovation community and help lift up our local entrepreneurs (hides copy of InStyle July issue under desk and cleans up popcorn crumbs).

Even the most diligent and engaged staff might find the summer months challenging; it's difficult to meet deadlines and make progress on projects when your teammates are off, the Boss is on vacation, the glorious sunshine is beaming in every window and the nearest patio beckons.

A well run business prepares well ahead of time to avoid any type of summer slow-down resulting from skeletal staff and overall ennui. With good planning, projects can still evolve during July & August:
1. Be sure to delegate accordingly and clearly communicate timelines; let everyone know how crucial it is for them to complete their key accountabilities before they go off to Muskoka for a week or take they day off to hit the front nine.
2. Keep a shared calendar; the entire team needs to know exactly who is in and when they are off.
3. Utilize the quiet time; take advantage of the opportunity to work with fewer interruptions. A minimally staffed workplace will allow you to focus.

Have a great summer!

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! We have a pair of tickets to a Ti-Cats game and want to give them to you! On July 14th the Ti-Cats and Argos will fight it out once again at Hamilton's Ivor Wynne Stadium at 7pm, and to give our LiON'S LAIR ticket holders a taste of the battle they will be seeing at this year's competition, Innovation Factory has a pair of gold seat tickets for the July 14th game!

We encourage you to buy your LiON'S LAIR tickets or tables between July 3rd 2012 and noon on July 13th and you could be on your way to see the Ti-Cats and the Argos on July 14th. The battle is on, so buy soon and you could see two great battles this year!

You can head over to our LiON'S LAIR microsite at pitch-it.ca for all the details about the 2012 event (and to get your tickets at earlybird prices!) but I'll share the must-know rundown with you here! Drumroll please.....

This year, our event will feature celebrity master of ceremonies Connie Smith (our 2011 'LiONess'!).

The LiONS will roar from each corner of our city with 2012 LiONS:

Sophia Aggelonitis (former Liberal MPP, founder of Sauces by Sophia)

Nick Bontis (McMaster University, Bontis on Business)

PJ Mercanti (Carmen's Inc., Rat Pack Records)

Mike Morreale (Hamilton Ti-Cats, CFL Players Association)

Rami Reda (CanGlobal Traders Inc.).

And last but not least, our 2012 Finalists:

Dinnerlicious

Dunlea Farms Pet Hay - Tidy Feeder

Enthuzr

Hamilton Medical Marijuana Centre

New Attitude

Ontario Bamboo

Project Synapse by Orbital

REfficient

Snappay

Weongozi

I'll be back throughout the summer with stories from the LAIR but 'till then stay tuned at pitch-it.ca for breaking LiON'S LAIR news, interactive elements, and more!

A common question I get from entrepreneurs is how should they present their financial projections when they are pitching for investment. We have all seen charts like this appear around slide 8 or 9 in the pitch deck, but what value are they? Most entrepreneurs privately admit that their projections are at best, aspirational goals that they are striving to hit or at worst, they are wild-ass guesses of what the future may hold. Most investors ignore or scale back these projections in making their decision. So why does every pitch deck include a chart like this?

There is a better way. I was recently in an informal pitch meeting with an investor. The company will be fundraising in the fall so was meeting with a possible investor to introduce the company, gauge interest and set the stage to for a presentation later this year. When they presented their financials, they started with their assumptions. They discussed metrics in terms of how marketing drives prospects to their eCommerce site, the ratios of impressions to click-thrus, the conversion rates to first time buyers, the frequency that one-time buyers convert to repeat buyers, how often they buy and average transaction size. They also discussed cost metrics in terms of their marketing and labour costs in relation to generating impressions and conversions. From this, they had built a model which produced chart similar to the one above. The metrics used were either based on their experience so far or were assumptions of what the metric would be once they hit a critical mass. Most importantly, they acknowledged that the current values used would be proven wrong over time.

The investor was impressed. The entrepreneur had demonstrated that they understood their business model, understood their costs and had a dashboard that they could use to run the company and learn from.

No one expects these early key assumptions to be correct. What investors look for is entrepreneurs who understand their business well enough that they can measure and adjust their business plan as they gather more data and proof points about the metrics. Having this model allows entrepreneurs to measure monthly, make changes, adjust metrics, throttle back or throttle ahead, and then rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, until they get the model right.

If you need a spreadsheet template that will help you build this type of model, my colleague Robin Hopper has built one that uses fundamental metrics to project your costs and revenue. Feel free to reach out to either of us to get a copy.

See you for iced tea and cool coffee 2-4pm on the following Wednesdays:

JUNE 6^TH

Employee Engagement in Startup Companies

By examining intrinsic motivators, Express Employment Professional's Doug Ward will lead us through practical tips for increasing employee engagement and decreasing turnover rates for better overall team performance.

JUNE 20^TH Lean Startup isn't just for Startups

As more and more startup companies create innovative solutions, established companies are looking to refine and refresh their products and services as well. Product Development enthusiast, Jason Little will walk us through lean startup techniques that work for companies, big and small alike.

JULY 4^TH

Making 'Cents' of Accounting

Beyond just taxes and payroll, Don Forbes of Grant Thornton will facilitate an active Q & A about the wide range of things an accounting firm actually does to benefit growing businesses.

JULY 18^TH

Structuring a Business That's Right for You

The difference between sole proprietorship, partnerships, boards of directors, etc. can be confusing. Join Simpson & Wigle's Serena Lee to chat about what's best for your business and practical points of consideration for solo owners, partners, and shareholders.

AUGUST 1^ST

Social Media Engagement Without the Hard Sell

Does all your tweeting sound like a broken record sales pitch? McMaster University's professor of communications, Jared Lenover will share strategies to transform your social media campaigns into engaging interaction to enhance your brand.

AUGUST 15^TH

Free and Almost Free Must-Have Sales Resources

Sales strategist and guru, Mark Elliott is ready to reveal his toolbox of the best of the best resources related to tactical sales strategies and solutions. In addition, Mark will champion the launch of iF's newest peer-to-peer group: sales! Join in the discussion on future topics, location, etc.

For more information, I'd recommend checking out the MaRS Startup Library located here.

There have been many great stories coming out of iF in our short existence, but in my estimation the best one so far is the generous support that we have received from 24 public and private institutions in this city and beyond. That's two dozen organizations that have stepped up to provide financial support for an organization that is less than two years old!

We've had our first ever Platinum Partner in the City of Hamilton, when Council granted iF's request for $50,000 (many thanks to the City's first-class Economic Development Department for helping us secure the funds), and our first ever Gold Partner in KPMG, which has come up huge in sponsoring our monthly Lunch 'n Learn series and in remaining this year's premier Lion's Lair sponsor.

In addition, we recieve support from Gowlings, Grant Thorton, McMaster Innovation Park, McMaster University, Mohawk College, Ridout & Maybee, RBC, SB Partners, Trivaris, Banko Media, BDC, CareGo, Dan Lawrie Insurance Brokers, Deloitte, Express Employment Professionals, First Ontario Credit Union, Hamilton International Airport, Horizon Utilities, kitestring creative branding studio, Net@ccess, Simpson Wigle, and The Printing House.

The contributions of all of our partners also go beyond just contributing money. Most are heavily involved in helping us grow Hamilton's Innovation Community and are always at the ready to help out our clients whenever they need certain expertise or a key introduction.

At this point in our existence, our partners know that they cannot expect an immediate return on their investment, which makes their contributions all the more appreciated. As I keep promising that a rising tide will lift all boats, right now they can take pride only in knowing that, as a collective, we are building a foundation that is creating a better business environment in Hamilton.

We would not exist without the generous contributions of all of our partners. Thank you.

This Wednesday, June 6^th, we kick off the summer schedule with:

Employee Engagement in Startup Companies
By examining intrinsic motivators, Express Employment Professional'sDoug Wardwill lead us through practical tips for increasing employee engagement and decreasing turnover rates for better overall team performance.

Drop in from 2-4pm to enjoy some refreshing iced tea and iced coffee during this interactive discussion about human resources.

Full summer schedule coming SOON!

Here are insights from that morning that every start-up CEO needs to take to heart as they develop and pursue their funding strategy.

Unless you are a multi-time, serial, successful entrepreneur that VC's just want to 'throw some coin at', you have an uphill battle. There is one-tenth of the capital available today as compared to ten years ago yet with the cost of starting a company dropping, many, many more companies competing for this capital.

One of the recommendations from the VC panel was to start early, before you need to raise money. Raising capital is about building relationships. In your first meeting, present a series of milestones that you plan to achieve. Have a follow-up meeting in six months to show how you have progressed against these milestones, discuss what you have learned about your market and what your next milestones are. Then, Rinse and Repeat. Over time, you and your company will build interest and credibility.

Consider the VC relationship like a CEO and your Board. Boards don't like surprises. Neither do VC's. Update them when something positive happens or when you pivot. Keep them periodically informed to keep them interested. Remember, your objective is to show positive momentum and traction.

Another way to build interest is to build your team. If you are not a multi-time founder, then surround yourself with people who are. Their credibility will rub off on you. They aren't easy people to attract because you are going to have to prove to them that your start-up has potential; your momentum and proof-points are building; and you and your team are coachable. VC's know this is what it takes to attract these people as advisors so the fact you have them separates your company from most.

Solve a massive problem with a disruptive solution. VC's love large outcomes. If you can't show this potential and back it up with results that are following a hockey stick trajectory, then you are likely not VC-fundable.

Tell your story like a business person. If you are a tech entrepreneur, get a domain expert who can contextualize the business aspect so it is easy to understand. Technical complexity doesn't impress as much as being able to tell the story in a straight-forward, simple manner that makes sense to any business person. It is a bad sign if the VC needs to call in their tech experts to figure out if your company is the real deal. So tell a non technical story about a big problem, with a disruptive solution, showing massive traction and proof points, delivered by a team with strong domain knowledge.

And if you get a chance to watch an experienced, multi-time successful founder pitch their business, pay attention. You will be impressed.

I often hear excuses about how during the summer, it's okay to do less in the marketing and communications department. The people you need to do business with, both internally and externally, all have different vacation dates booked off and it feels like there are less people to do business with. True, it might take a little longer in the summer to get approvals or move forward on projects, but that doesn't mean it's time to give up!

If anything, summer is an ideal time of year to reach out and develop your personal and professional networks as well as key partners and your client base. With everyone else busy running off to the cottage, the beach, or the baseball field you'll find a lot less competition in getting the attention of the people you're targeting. You'll have more opportunities for engagement with the benefit of relaxed schedules, and you'll be able to demonstrate your commitment by developing relationships when everyone else is off having fun in the sun (and on that note, who wouldn't love a casual business lunch on a summery patio?).

If you're a company that does a lot of public outreach, summer is not the time to roll over and let people forget about you! While it may not be feasible to run the same campaigns and events that you do the rest of the year, make sure you don't simply disappear! Hold smaller events in the middle of the week to keep your audience engaged, or throw one big, memorable, festive event to keep your name top of mind and build positive memories.

You might want to consider newsletters, contests, or special promotions to keep your communications fresh and intriguing throughout the summer. Anything you can do to think outside the box and use innovative approaches to connect will only strengthen your brand when September hits and your competition is back in town.
It's easier to retain loyalty (and build upon it) by putting in a little more thought throughout the summer than heading into fall trying to recapture focus on your company.

All that being said - it's summer! Make sure you recharge yourself, your staff, and your brand. But don't ignore your business relationships - just have fun in maintaining and growing them!

You might have a great business idea, you may have recently launched a start up or maybe you are an expert developer. Maybe you are a marketing guru or a wizard at web design. But, and this is a big one, all of these skills do not necessarily go hand in hand with being an expert at small business administration.

For some entrepreneurs preparing to send your paperwork to the accountant can be a daunting task, especially if you haven't kept up to date with accurate expense & revenue tracking, data entry and the organization of it all. If you are minimizing costs by being a DIY bookkeeper, this can be exponentially frustrating. Let's face it, we live in a digital world and many tech savvy people don't want to deal with the massive amounts of paper that relate to running a business, but it is a necessary evil. Believe me; the last thing that your bookkeeper or accounting firm wants to see is a cookie tin or plastic bag full of mismatched receipts and unopened mail.

Here are a few tips I have used to make the bookkeeping process cost effective and cause fewer headaches for people that would rather spend their time on something else:
1. Be organized - this means all year long, not just at year end. Create a process or system for recording and filing that works best for you, and use it! Track revenue and expenses from day 1 of your company. This is really important because in the early stages many entrepreneurs co-mingle personal and business expenses. Keep a spreadsheet or if it is easier to keep an accordion file and file receipts by month or maybe you want to track expenses by vendor/supplier - just do it! Your bank statement is your friend. Keep all the bank statements together and reconcile monthly. There are even really cool tools available to convert all your documents to digital copies (visit www.neat.com) and QuickBooks (go to www.quickbooks.ca) is a very affordable option for start-up businesses. Keep all records organized and save everything for 7 years.
2. Plan time to keep up on the unpleasant stuff - build it into your calendar to spend 30+ minutes a week documenting and filing your paperwork. It beats saving it all up until year end and spending an entire weekend trying to remember who you took to Rolly Rockets for a business lunch last December, scrounging around looking for lost receipts or trying to figure out if all your payables came in. Use this time to open all your mail, especially if it is from the government. Designate a place too! Don't let your business pile up on your dining room table. You may want to buy a plastic tote and store all business paperwork in your 'office in a box' which allows you to open it up once a week and stay focused on the task at hand until it's completed.
3. Know your limits - you are your company's best asset. Attach a dollar value to your time and determine if it is worth the cost for you to be wading through the minutia of detailed calculations, HST remittances & bill payments. As a business owner, you do need to know everything that goes on, but you may be better off paying someone else to come in once a month to work on the 'boring stuff' and then provide you with a detailed summary - while you spend time growing the business.

In short, stay on top of the little things so that you can focus on your passion!

I've spoken to a number of our SWH2 participants since the event, and their exciting response to the event - whether they were first timers or had attended previous Startup Weekend events - has been wonderful to hear:

'Thank you so much ... It was a great event and I really appreciate the opportunity that startup weekend Hamilton gave me as a young entrepreneur.' -Niles

'The mentors we very approachable and open... I learned a lot and made good friends. Look forward to the next one.' - William

'Thank you for an amazing experience.' -Jonathan

'I had a blast at Startup Weekend Hamilton. I'm incredibly proud to be part of StartupsN team. We will continue working on our MVP to make it into a product.' - Andrei

As an organizer, I didn't have the same experience as the participants who really dug in and worked to launch their companies in the span of a weekend. But I had the privilege of being able to observe all of the amazing work being done, the connections being made, and the camaraderie that developed.

By the end of the weeked I was certainly exhausted, but also refreshed and invigorated - ready to plan Startup Weekend Hamilton 3!

Stay tuned...

Factory Floor is now open daily with optional 24/7 access for full-time users. It operates out of McMaster's Don Pether Business Incubation Centre in collaboration with the Xerox Centre on the third floor at McMaster Innovation Park. Factory Floor offers free coffee, copying and collaborating with 16 unique seats and meeting room availability.

Even better news is that the month of May is free! Innovation Factory is offering a 30day free trial to all those who reserve space early. Users who aren't sure if an open, fluid environment is for them can experience the collaboration and convenience of MIP with no commitment. We're sure you'll be back!

Drop by any Wednesday afternoon in May to chat with our clubhouse coordinator and check out the space! See what Innovation Factory and McMaster innovation Park might have to offer you and your growing business. We're serving treats and bevys between 1pm and 4pm May 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 in suite 305.

Contact Leah MacCharles at leah.maccharles@innovationfactory.ca for more details!

So I get it, you've all bought in to lean startup, market validation/customer development. But now what.... once you actually 'get outside the building' to talk to customers on the quest for product market fit, what do you do? How do you test all these great hypothesis you've put forward in your business model?

It starts with talking to customers, aka, conducting customer development interviews. You need to arrange meetings with people in your target customer segments (you should have a list of 'friendly's' that you can start with but watch for a follow up post on how to get these meetings). For now let's talk about how to structure these customer development meetings to maximize the learnings and avoid having happy ears.

Customer development meetings
I like to structure customer development sessions around three broad topics - the person/role, the problems and solution. While I ask for 20-30 minutes of someone's time I find they typically run 30-45 minutes if the person is engaged.

1. The Person/Role
First you need to learn as much as you can about the person you are actually talking to before you get into anything about their problems or your solution. You want the flow to be interactive and non-salesy so it's as much about building rapport initially.

Questions to ask include:

• What is your role at your company?
• How do you fit into your company's department structure? Overall in the company?
• What is your budget like? Who has to approve your purchases? (for example, you want to know do they use their credit card for a purchase similar to what you'll offer or do they have to get someone elses)
• How do you discover new products to help you in your role? (web searching, go to websites, trusted advisors?)
• Do you need any approval to try stuff out?
• Have you tried anything new recently?
• What is a typical day like on your job?
• How much time do you spend doing <insert anything from their typical day that jumped out at you>?

Don't take shortcuts here... the more you know about their daily life the better. It will give you insights on how and when to market to them, what motivates them, etc., etc. All of this will help you later pattern match who the user type that is most receptive to the problem you're solving and the solution you offer.

2) Problems
Next you want to find out what challenges they really have in their job and figure out whether the person has the problem you think you're solving. It's important to again not sell or lead here - you don't want to guide them to your problem. The less you lead them while still hearing your problem being mentioned the more validation you have.

Questions to ask include:

• What are your top 3 challenges you face in your job? Or, maybe digging deeper, what are your top 3 challenges you face in your job related to <insert your industry/market>
• If you could wave a magic wand and instantly have a solution to any of those problems...what would they be?
• Dig deeper into their typical day on anything that sounds painful or expensive.
• How have you tired to deal with or solved <problems they've outlined>? Basically your trying to find out if they have any problems big enough that they've tried to coble something together themselves - if they have, ask to see it...

I've found that it's not usually difficult to get people to talk about their issues so let them rant, in fact encourage teh rant... the deeper they go the better. You also want to get them to share what they envision as solutions.
Again, try to avoid mentioning your solution or problem yet - hopefully they call it out themselves. If they don't, then as you'll you need to broach it so ask them if what you think is a problem is a problem for them. Whether they agree it's a problem or not, you want to then probe why it wasn't one of their top problems.

3) Solution
Hopefully the problems you think you are going to solve come up organincally so you know you're on the right track. Even better, if when they wave the magic wand, they describe something along the lines of what you plan to do...

However, whether they call it out or not, you need to get into a discussion about what you thought the problem was and how you solve. Remember getting a quick 'no, wouldn't be interested' here is just as good as getting a 'Love it'.

Questions to include:

• Walk them through the problems you believe your solution solves. Take them through how you solve.... Do they agree?
• Do you solve any of the other problems they might have called out?
• Would you be willing to pay for our solution? How much?
• How would they typically acquire your type of solution - try to understand what your sales cycle might look like, who might be involved in this kind of solution, how do they budget for this type of thing, etc...
• What model would you like it delivered in - do you have a great supplier that you could model after?
• If they like it, how would their org purchase something like this solution?
• How would we need to market effectively to people like you?

If all goes well and you really are solving a pain then you probably have someone that wants to be a beta customer or case study customer at a minimum. Remember that most product plans don't survive the first customer interaction so the more likely outcome though is that your going to learn a ton about your ideal customer, what they do, how they work, etc. and you can start to iterate (and plug this insight into your product development plan).

You need to do a number of these customer development meetings - I like to do at least 10 so you have enough data points to get a sense of trends...

Fight the natural entrepenuer urge to skip this step because you already know what the market wants...
To build a business that can really scale (yes I'm biting my tongue and fighting the urge to type 'nail it before you scale it') what you need to find and solve is the 'big pain in the ass, saves me a ton of money by solving' problem not the 'nice to have problem' and this structure can get you along way down that path.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about market validation... got any tips that work for you when talking to customers or other tactics for testing product market fit? Throw them in the comments below....

I am catching up on my summer reading and just re-read Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople. This is an article worth reading if you are hiring sales reps.

Based on thousands of interviews with top salespeople, Steve W. Martin identified seven personality traits that directly influence top performers' selling style and set them above the average.

1. Modesty - Bravado alienates far more customers
2. Conscientiousness - They consistently display high levels of duty, responsibility and reliability
3. Achievement Orientation - They are fixated on achieving goals
4. Curiosity - Their hunger for knowledge and information causes them to ask the difficult questions to fill the information gap
5. Lack of Gregariousness - By not getting too close to the customer they are able to establish dominance
6. Lack of Discouragement - Tenacious, never give up and able to handle disappointment and bounce back from losses
7. Lack of Self-Consciousness - They display lower levels of bashfulness and inhibition and are comfortable fighting for their cause

As Martin points out, these traits are counter-intuitive to stereotypes of aggressive sales reps.

Over the past 30 years, I have worked with or managed hundreds of sales people of all abilities. As I compare Martin's conclusions to my experience, I see high correlations. More interestingly, I also see strong alignment to Jim Collins' definition of a Level 5 Leader in his book Good to Great. Collin's describes a Level 5 Leader as someone who 'builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical combination of personal humility plus professional will'. He portrays them as a study in duality; both modest but willful and shy but fearless. These characteristics echo throughout Martin's description of a top salesperson.

I have always believed that 'People buy from People' and establishing these personal buying relationships involves building trust and confidence in the other person. Martin's traits 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 all speak to this ability to bond with a customer to build trust and confidence, while traits 3 and 6 describe the unwavering commitment to be successful which often attracts others to follow this leader.

I occasionally joke that I was a better Sales Manager than I was a Sales Rep. I was even better a Sales VP than I was a Sales Manager. I am sure that the some of the explanation for this improvement was that over time as I gained experience and perspective in the craft of selling. That said, I know I lacked the drive (sometimes described as the sales killer instinct) to be great sales rep. I was better at sales strategy then execution, and while I was good at building trust and relationships, I was not a complete package.

So next time you are assessing sales candidates, test them for all the attributes you would expect from a good sales rep (product knowledge, technical skills, industry knowledge, domain expertise, sales experience, and so on). Then ask yourself the following questions:

If you were the customer, could this person earn your trust?
Would their core commitment to be successful attract others to follow them?
Do you like this person?
Is their drive to succeed equal or greater to yours?
Is their customers' and their team's success more important to them than theirs?
Do you sense that giving up has never been an option in their mind?

If the answers are 'Yes', you may have a winner. If you answer 'No' or you are left wondering, then move on to the next resume.

I love working with Robin Hopper, my co-EIR at the Innovation Factory, for the simple fact that the guy has more catchy cool acronyms and phrases that make me sound so smart when I repeat them. 'Nail it before you Scale it' is one of his latest.

Put simply, too many start-ups try to scale their marketing and sales organization before they have nailed their value proposition and the sales story that goes along with it. The consequences can be disastrous. Over a beer, ask Robin about the story of how he blew through $3,000,000 in investment capital on one of his early start-ups because he expanded too early without really having the customer-compelling value proposition figured out.

Howard Gwin talks about the need for first time founders to create momentum and velocity in order to overcome the investor bias against funding first-time teams. (The Three P's of a Technology Company). If you haven't read his blog, do so now. He offers sage advice to wait before seeking VC funding until you have 'proof points and a traction story that is damn near breathtaking'. Beyond that, don't fall into the trap of trying to create that momentum before you fully understand why the market wants your technology and how you package it for consistent, reliable and predictable sales.

At the Innovation Factory, we work with many start-ups. Most go through one or more 'Pivots' before they find the kernel at the core of their product or idea that will really sell. Unfortunately, some will never find it because even though the idea or technology was interesting or cool, the product will never be compelling to an intensely competitive marketplace. Good entrepreneurs figure this out fast and kill the idea but then move on to another.

I recently met one of these entrepreneurs. He built and sold his first company when he was 19 for $100,000. (It may not sound like much but I wish I had a hundred grand when I was 19). His second company was a professional services company. He built it, had success and then killed it because he realized he could never scale it fast enough to fulfill his dream. His third company was a software company and dealt with project management infrastructure. The idea and technology were good but the market was crowded and more importantly, the sales process would be long. There also were too many factors out of his company's control in the value chain of customers getting value from his product. He had arranged Angel funding and was ready to launch but instead he listened to advice and killed the company before taking the investment. His fourth company looks like a winner. It is in a hot space, has uniqueness, has the ability to scale quickly around a solid value proposition and he has surrounded himself with a good team. He has also already pivoted at least once on his value prop in order to get ready for traction.
So, if you are early in your game, my advice to you is simple:
1. Figure out your value prop
2. Keep pivoting it and your company until you have proof points that you can create massive momentum and traction quickly
3. Use Friends & Family and Angel funding to keep you going through these phases
4. Then go talk to VC's.

In other words, 'Nail it before you Scale it.'

My legal advice for start-ups : GET SOME.

I am a layman so that is the summation of the legal advice contained in this blog. The rest of it is stories of encounters with legal matters as well as some tips I have learned on when and how to effectively use legal counsel.

One of the perpetual challenges of early stage start-ups is lack of money. What precious little funds are available is used for developing product, acquiring customers and occasionally, paying staff. The idea of paying a lawyer thousands of dollars often falls to the bottom of the priority list. As a result, a number of legal short-cuts are made, often with unintended effects. Here are a few situations that I have seen:

Internet self service. Three founders incorporated their own company. To save money, they did it themselves. They found a shareholder agreement on the Internet and modified it. Unfortunately, the agreement didn't contain a dispute resolution clause. After a number of months, the founders are having a major disagreement. What could have been straight-forward may now become ugly, lengthy and expensive to resolve.

Incorporating a business does not have to be grossly expensive. Many lawyers have fixed price packages available for straight-forward situations.

Employment Contracts is another favourite for fans of downloading legal agreements from the internet. One of my daughters received a job offer from a small business owner. This company had experienced a former employee leaving and starting a competitive business so they decided to make all employees sign an employment contract. Their contract came from the internet (with a simple Google search, we found it). Unfortunately, the contract was from the US and was an 'at will' contract. 'At will' is not recognized under Canadian law and usually invalidates the contract. Furthermore, the contract contained a Non-Compete clause that was very restrictive, lasted three years and covered a wide geographic area for a company that was essentially a local business. Courts have frowned on companies whose Non-Compete clauses unreasonably restrict a former employee from earning a living so it is highly unlikely that this clause would be enforceable even if the rest of the agreement had been okay. Finally, for the existing employees, employment contracts that are unilaterally imposed on employees without a contract are generally found to be unenforceable. The net is that the owner saved a few bucks in legal expenses, and got exactly what they paid for, ZERO.

Employment law is one area that every founder must have a working knowledge of the law. Dealing with employees can be a minefield if you don't set up your business correctly in the beginning and don't comply with employment standard acts, human rights legislation, health and safety legislation and a myriad of other statues.

Partner Contracts. In their early years, many start-ups will sign up a sales partner to re-sell their products into geographies or industries where the start-up does not have the skills or capacity. These arrangements are always euphoric at the outset because the opportunity for both partners seems so easy to capitalize on. Eventually, it does not work out to be so lucrative and the two partners are stuck with a contract that was written through the lens of 'the venture will be successful' versus the 'reality of impeding failure'. By this point in the relationship, the two parties are disappointed with each other, often feel that promises have been broken, that the other party can't be trusted, and both feel that they are the aggrieved victim of the relationship. This occurred with a company who was selling to retailers. One large opportunity was a chain of franchisees. A former franchise owner was so excited about the company's product that he wanted the rights to sell to all the other franchises. The company thought this was a perfect situation. The partner would be creditable to the other owners because he used the product and understood their business. The deal was struck, without performance clauses or ability for the company to revoke the exclusive right of the new partner to sell their product into this large chain. Eighteen months later, the partner had only sold to a few other franchisees, all of which were customer satisfaction train wrecks, and were poisoning the company's reputation. In the end, buying the partner out was the only course available.

Good lawyers are trained to ask what happens when something bad occurs in the future. They cut through the sales euphoria and ask tough questions that you may not otherwise contemplate. Don't under-estimate this value.

Intellectual Property: An entrepreneur had an idea for a new product but did not have all the technical and scientific skills needed to create it. He hired a friend to help him develop the product. There was never intent for the friend to have any ownership stake and the contract clearly stated his work was for fee and that he waived his ownership rights. As the entrepreneur was telling me about his product, I asked about the background of his friend. He was reluctant to tell me because his friend was still employed by a company and had been moonlighting to help him. My spidey sense flared. This entrepreneur may have a major IP ownership issue on his hands. Generally, most employment contracts have a provision that anything invented while you work for a company is the property of that company. I asked if he had checked this regarding his friend's employment contract and he admitted that it had not occurred to him. His friend may have waived ownership of something that he didn't own.

Lawyers can't protect you if you don't tell them the whole story. This entrepreneur patented his product so clearly he engaged legal counsel for that. I found out about the friend's employment situation only by digging into the story. I may have uncovered important information that his lawyer did not know.

How I learned my law: I was fortunate at PeopleSoft to have worked with great external legal counsel. In 1996, PeopleSoft Canada was not big enough to employ our own lawyer so we used David Takenaka at Aird & Berlis. For the next 10 years, David was my lawyer. When he started, he was an associate. Along the way he became a partner. We taught David the software industry. David taught me law, or at least when I had to capitalize nouns in a contract. To be effective, David had to know our business as well as we did. He had a great approach of bucketing issues into 'legal issues' and 'business issues'. Legal issues were typically issues pertaining to liability, compliance to revenue recognition policy, protection of IP and many complex technical issues that generally a business leader should not have to deal with. His other bucket was business issues. These were the business terms of the agreement. David didn't try to impose himself into these decisions, but rather ensured we understood the decisions that we were making and the future possible implications of our decisions. He was a great second sober thought for a bunch of sales guys racing to get a deal done. His job was then to ensure that the language in the contract reflected our exact intent, without ambiguity.

My advice to a start-up is to find a lawyer like David and establish a long term relationship. Teach them your business and through osmosis, gain as much legal knowledge from them as you can. Using lawyers is a necessary business expense. Using them wisely and effectively only happens when you understand as much about the law as you can and they understand your company,

Last year's event was a labour of love for me, so I couldn't wait to share information about LiON'S LAIR 2012 with a room of bright, smiling, slightly nervous people. We kicked things off by viewing the video that Mindy at Tweedle Productions made in Feburary of the 2011 Finalists sharing their experience, then I led a discussion on the submission and selection process, as well as the committments for and expectations of the finalists. We launched into a Question & Answer segment where workshop participants could feel free to clear up any concerns, questions, or hesitations they had - and I was proud to introduce them to Gihan Fonseka (Athelink), Andrew Holden (Weever Apps) and Graeme Smith (Gorilla Cheese) who helped me to answer questions by sharing their experience as finalists last year and telling those at the workshop what it was really like, share their tips, and encourage them to apply this year!

After the Q&A we launched into the workshop portion of the evening, where Tammy led everyone through a workbook designed to help participants think about developing their executive summary, product/service description, market analysis, business planning and strategy, management team profiles, and financial plan. In addition to Tammy, we had a great team of advisers on hand to work one-on-one with workshop participants - Ron, Pete, Robin, and Jim!

If you missed last night, and want to know what LiON'S LAIR is all about, visit pitch-it.ca to find out more, and be sure to get your application by April 30, 2012 if you want a chance at $100,000 in cash and professional services to help get your business off the ground!

According to Wikipedia, YA stems from 'yet another...' which 'is an idiomatic qualifier in the name of a computer program, organization, or event that is confessedly unoriginal'. In this case, YASN is 'yet another social network' and is becoming a derogatory terms amongst Angel investors, VC's and those of us whom advise and mentor startup companies.

Social media and mobile applications are the hot. Ideas for new applications abound. At the same time, the cost to develop a product is relatively low and hosting the application in the cloud using service like Amazon or Microsoft is relatively cheap to start and scalable. Go-to-market vehicles like app stores and platforms like Force.com are viable strategies for sales and distribution for some companies.

As a result, in the last year, I have seen a landslide of young entrepreneurs presenting their vision for building their start-up venture around a social community or mobile applications for activities ranging from dating, to restaurant selection, to consumer retail communities, to event ticket selling, to meeting the needs to a specific community of like minded individuals and so on. Many of the ideas are innovative in that they include twists on current products by using near field communications, geolocation, mobile apps based on HTML5, or other emerging new technologies, some of which were novel twelve months ago but have already become mainstream.

The reality is that few, if any of these start-ups are going to make it and become a viable company. A great idea is not enough. A knock-off of another idea with some added competitively unsustainable innovation is certainly not enough. It is this phenomenon that drives people to roll their eyes when the next YASN walks through the door to present their company. To have even a hope of success, these entrepreneurs must be able to show a killer idea, a sustainable innovation and a marketing plan to create the volumes of users required to become financially viable.

I recently met with the CEO of a company that was started just after the Dot.com era of the early 2000's. While the company has struggled, it has established itself as one of a handful of viable competitors in its market. We were discussing his company's prospects, its plans for the next round of funding and its valuation. The CEO observed that the competitive landscape is pretty well fixed in his space. He doubted that any new entrants will appear, regardless of the next great tech innovation, because the complexity and sophistication of the business process they solve required over one million lines of code in their application. His point was solid. Why would anyone want to invest to build a new competitor to play in what is already a crowded marketplace when the level of investment is so significant. Yet so many YASN's base their company's value proposition on an unprotectable innovation that any large company like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Groupon, etc, could build from scratch in a couple of months.

Another company started their business two years ago as a hardware product. They have evolved their business to now offer a slick SaaS based content manager that not only feeds their box but also many other types of related devices used by their clients. Even though the hardware business is a pain in the ass to manage and requires more working capital than the software business but I like it because it provides an easier point of entry to sell to new customers and is sticky. On top of that, it is a huge differentiator against any competitor considering entering their space.

Whether your prospective customers are businesses or consumers, they need a Return of Investment (ROI) before they buy your product. While in Business-to-Business (B2B) transactions, the ROI is precise and quantified, in Business-to-Consumer (B2C) transactions, the consumer is still looking for a benefit. Even where applications are free, the consumer must justify to themselves the inconvenience of cluttering their mobile device with one more App, and the time to build and maintain another profile, manage another password and promote themselves in yet one more community. It is for this reason that I solely use LinkedIn and have rejected invitations from a number of other business social networks. The benefits of connection to a few people who don't use LinkedIn plus whatever other enhancements these networks have do not outweigh the time involved in using them. Most YASN's I meet don't have a 'killer' compelling differentiator that I believe will propel them ahead of their competition.

The other area that I continually see YASN start-ups underestimate is the cost of creating the buzz around what they are doing in order to generate sufficient traffic to build a viable community. Consider this; social media success is measured in millions of member and visitors, not thousands. If you are a startup and want to create market proof points for potential investors, you want to generate tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of 'Freeium' subscribers in your first few weeks and months after launch. Since conversion from awareness to subscription is generally measured in a few percentage points of click-through emails or paid and organic search, your early marketing plan is going to have to demonstrate how you are going to get the buzz going. Not only does your message need to be incredibly tight, focused and compelling, it also has to hit millions of potential targets. And that is just to get started in order to attract the notice of early round investors.

So if you are one of the start-ups pounding the pavement, the road ahead is crowded. Before you become just a YASN to the people you are meeting, make sure your product is competitively sustainable, that your marketing plan is in the right order of magnitude and your idea is totally unique and incredibly compelling. Otherwise, I would recommend that you pass and move on to your next opportunity.

The tech start up market is hot, so for many university grads the increasing preferred route to the job market is to start a company. Start-up Weekend in Toronto, June 3-5 attracted 200 tech'ies. They formed into 17 teams with the mission of taking a concept and building it into the embryo of a company in 54 hours. Last week, '48 Hours in the Valley' hosted 20 Canadian start-ups in Silicon Valley where they pitched their stuff to Valley VC's. Incubators like Ryerson University's DMZ are hosting two floors of entrepreneurs living the start-up dream. The Ministry of Research and Innovation through the Ontario Network of Excellence is supporting 14 Regional Innovation Centres, that are building innovation communities and mentoring hundreds of start-ups every week. Included in this network is the innovationFACTORY where I am an Executive-in-Residence.

I love this energy but are we deluding ourselves and especially our young, exceptionally bright but business-naive founders of these start-ups. Building a successful tech company is very hard and the journey is littered with road kill. For every Facebook, Twitter or Groupon, there are thousands that never made it to a successful exit of any degree. To illustrate the failure rate, according to Thomson-Reuters and PwC, Canadian VC's, who target a 5 to 10 times return on their money, posted -2.8% return on invested capital over the past 10 years.

So if you want to start your own company, in my opinion, here is what it takes to make it.

It starts with Capital. I wrote in an earlier blog that like humans, a company needs air in their tank to breathe and survive. When the air runs out, you and your company are dead. Investment money is air for start-ups and it is in very short supply, especially for companies seeking their first round of institutional money from VC's. Running the fundraising gauntlet for funding from 'Friends and Family' and then Angel funding is tough but it is nothing compared to competing for VC funds.

Most Angels back a mix of good ideas, big market opportunities and talented founders. Most VC's that I talk to say that they back teams. Good ideas, big addressable pull markets, unique & protected intellectual property and solid technology must be established before the VC will get into serious due diligence. Once these are demonstrated, unless you have invented something so unique and defensible, your company like most others will be viewed as an execution play and your investors will be evaluating based on your track record and ability to execute.

So consider again my beginning premise that we may be deluding young entrepreneurs who are just out of school and think they can start a company and build it into a success. Does it happen - yes. Do people win lotteries - yes but that doesn't mean that I would invest my retirement plan in lottery tickets.

Here is another approach. I know a young entrepreneur who is going a different route. His first job out of university was with a start-up that was led by an experienced CEO and management team. He used his three years there to learn everything he could from them. A few months ago he moved to a new job with greater responsibility. It is a bigger company but still early stage, with a more complex business model and more things for him to learn. Someday, I am confident that he will found his own start-up but when he does, he will have experience, a successful track record and a network of mentors and contracts.

But here is our challenge. Canada needs an ecosystem of successful start-up companies to employ and train (through the school of hard knocks) our next generation of start-up executives. We don't have enough today and many of the better ones are being sold or moved south. We also need a strong network of mentors. People who can invest their time and knowledge to bridge the gap between our young entrepreneurs and the experience that investors are seeking. The province is doing its part through sponsoring organizations like the Ontario Centres of Excellence and Ontario Network of Excellence. So are private sector organizations like BridgeScale and its Digital Puck community and Mentor Monday events. Is everything heading in the right direction? It would appear so but we have a long journey ahead.

So my advice to young entrepreneurs who have the start-up passion is start your company but be realistic about the road ahead of you. Find mentors and advisors who can help fill gaps in your experience. Don't have unrealistic expectations about obtaining investment. Learn about how an investor thinks and makes decisions. And also think about the other path of working for a couple or three start-ups or early stage companies before you start your own.