Join a networking crowd of investors, community start-ups and entrepreneurial students for the first Canadian screening of Ctrl Alt Compete – a Microsoft movie documentary on what it takes to be a start-up: Passion. Fortitude. Insanity.
There are lots of tech startups out there taking their shot at changing the world. There”s no shortage of ideas. The infrastructure to build quickly is cheaper and more accessible than it”s ever been…there”s lots of capital floating around for the right idea. If only it were that simple! Building a startup from nothing to something is hard—REALLY hard. There is a “story behind the story” of just how hard it is to go from inception to reality and become the products and services that we use every day.
It”s a story of the power of people pouring their passion, drive and dedication into building something that changes the world—no matter how hard. We believe that is a story worth telling and sharing.
At this premier screening event, you”ll hear insights from industry executives, Start-Ups from the cast and local leaders in the Start-Up community.
FounderFuel (http://founderfuel.com), the Montreal based startup accelerator focused on web, saas, mobile and gaming, is recruiting the teams of its spring 2012 cohort.
If you’re selected by FounderFuel, you get instant access to a network and an ecosystem to accelerate the success of your business. During the 12 week program, you’ll be placed at the center of a high-octane environment supported by 100+ mentors and over 30 inspiring master classes. The program culminates on Demo Day, the grand finale event where you will present to an audience of over 500 people including investors from Canada, the US and Europe. Have a look at the video below, next time it could be you!
Click to see the video:
Applications for the spring 2012 FounderFuel session are currently open. Apply before December 16, 2011 to get additional consideration, but you can apply until January 7, 2012. Applications are open to teams worldwide. Click here to apply: http://founderfuel.com/en/apply/
Still not convinced? If you happen to be in eastern Canada next week, you should join us for an informal jam session about the program in one of the following cities: Ottawa | December 5, 2011 Waterloo | December 6, 2011 Quebec City | December 7, 2011 Montréal | December 8, 2011 Toronto | December 12, 2011 Click to know more about the information sessions: http://founderfuelroadshow.eventbrite.com/
We hope to see you apply to FounderFuel, and perhaps also meet them in person next week. Good luck!
Ian Jeffrey | GM FounderFuel & Venture Partner at Real Ventures
Claim to fame Grew the Radar user base to over 1MM in less than 12 months.
It’s a wrap! What an incredible weekend. I had the pleasure to observe the creation of over 22 new startups and see some amazing pitches on Sunday afternoon.
Day 3 was all about getting ready for the big pitch session and making sure proof of concept demos worked, that slides were tight and that the delivery was on point. I had the great pleasure of still sitting with the Daycare SIMPLIFY team, seen on the left, while they were reviewing their slides.
At 3:30, everybody moved to the main room to get ready for the pitches and at 4:15PM Chris Eben, kicked things off. Each team was given 5 min. but with the transition and some small technical glitches we ended up wrapping up at 7:15PM. 22 teams laid it all on the table and 3 emerged as winners.
Everyone moved to the Drake Hotel for some finger food, drinks and the final announcements. Here are the winners:
You can see what they won on the Startup Weekend web site.
I want to conclude by thanking the organizers of Startup Weekend and also let you know that the movie made by Eighteen Eighty, I mentioned in my last post, has been released to the web right here.
This is day 2 of Startup Weekend. Beautiful and sunny fall day in Toronto. Last night was the really exciting kick off to what promise to be another very successful Startup Weekend. It was packed to the rafters with eager developers, designers, marketers and future business entrepreneurs as well as mentors and sponsors.
The activities got started with a viewing of a documentary movie filmed during the last Startup Weekend in June. It was produced by Eighteen Eighty and featured two of the startups that were picked at random. The winner of the last camp, Vizualize.me was one of them. You can watch the trailer here.
After this a panel of major VC’s in Canada answered questions about the availability of funding and what they are looking for when it comes to investments. Then it was on to the pitches. And let me tell you the crowd was into it. There were over 85 pitches that were made beating the June number of 70. The organizers decided to allow 22 competitors based on the voting and you can find the list right here, thanks for EventMobi.com.
This morning I had the pleasure of being invited to sit with the DayCareSimplify.com team led by Alison Gibbins (sitting on the right hand side), mother and entrepreneur, who finished second at the last camp with BabySimplify.com. Alison is very passionate and uses her experience as a parent to come up with great companies to simplify the lives of other parents. She even came prepared to the camp by scheduling a group of parents for a focus group on Saturday.
All in all, this event is on track to surpass the June event and to become one of the best Startup Weekend worldwide.
I am very excited to be attending Startup Weekend Toronto for the second time in a row. The energy of seeing some new startups develop from scratch is amazing. Last June, the results were very impressive. Check out Chris Eben’spost, the event organizer, on were the class of June is currently.
The event is already sold out and promise some great time again. There is a great line up of speaker and mentors to help all weekend long. I’ll post again on Saturday to give you an idea of the event so far.
Myself and Rob Kent are there to talk about the Microsoft BizSpark program that helps new entrepreneur get started by providing them with tools for free and we’ll be chatting with folks about the Azure cloud platform as well. If you plan to attend, drop us a note in the comments or send me a tweet.
It’s increasingly difficult to produce examples of software or services companies that will escape a shift to — or at least a major embrace of — cloud computing. With this shift comes new business models, new channels, new products and services; in short, change and lots of it. How you navigate this change will define the future of your business.
Who owns the strategy? Who owns the P&L? Who wakes up every morning thinking about how to tackle the tough problems and transform your business?
Who’s motivated, financially and otherwise, to truly care?
It’s not enough to take these issues on as a management team. This diffuses accountability and effectiveness.
So, who owns your future? If your answer is anything but a single name of a senior executive, then the answer is no one.
Shawn Yeager is founder and principal of SHAWNYEAGER + CO., a professional services firm serving early stage to mid-sized software, SaaS and IT services companies seeking break-through growth opportunities.
In Application Strategy and Training as Pre-requisites to Cloud Development, I discussed needing to have a strategy in place to move applications to the Cloud, as well as ensuring that your development, architecture, and IT teams have, and complete, training plans in order ensure a successful transition to the Cloud. I then went into further detail around training. Now let’s dive deeper on application strategy.
The first task to complete as part of the strategy is to determine which of your applications would be good candidates for moving to the Cloud.
The Microsoft application platform is built of products and technologies that provide a continuum of targeting choices as you think about where your solution would be best deployed:
all of which use the development and same management tools.
However, though they are close to being 100% symmetrical, meaning you can run the same code without modification in each of the environments, you wouldn’t necessarily want such parity. Applications are built to solve specific business and technical needs, and as part of good architecture practices, the environment to which they are deployed must be built to meet those different needs. As such, not all application workloads are great candidates for a Cloud – private or public. Further, not all applications can be moved to the Cloud while maintaining the exact design and code as on-premise. The close symmetry of the target environments tends to encourage many to take a “forklift” approach – to move applications to the Cloud as-is without considering the subtle, but present, differences of the different technologies. This type of approach usually lends itself to surprises down the road, from performance degradation of function limitation, or unexpected costs. In order to truly take advantage of a Cloud platform (scale, reduced infrastructure and management costs, elastic storage, etc), portions of the application may need to be rewritten.
Through the exercise of creating your strategy, you’ll determine:
Which applications are candidates to move to the Cloud
Which ‘Cloud’ is the right ‘Cloud’ for the application
What is the optimal architecture of the application in the Cloud
Which areas of the application may need to be refactored and rewritten
To make those determinations:
Consider where and how your application stores durable state. How it handles state will have a large effect on the suitability of the cloud as a target environment.
Consider how (and even if) your application intends to scale. How your application is designed to scale determines whether your application should target specialized hardware (in a scale-up fashion), or whether commodity hardware is a better environment for your application (to scale out). In addition to the hardware capability question, how loosely coupled your application is and the demand patterns your application typically encounters also play large factors in evaluating applications for the cloud.
Consider application latency and SLA requirements. Shared cloud systems may or may not guarantee uniform/low latency among components, and placing some parts of your solution in the cloud (say, the data layer or some services that extend your line of business application) may introduce new bottlenecks, and should be considered. On the flip side, the cloud may also allow you to reduce latency in a move, being able to geo-distribute your application closer to your customers – as opposed to all having to come into your data center.
Consider legal implications around your application – which has to do with evaluating the sensitivity of the data that your application handles, whether there is any legal or compliance concerns around the data and the location (or locations) that the data centers are located in. Particularly if you are handling personally identifiable information (PII), you may need to pay close attention to how and where that data is stored – you may need to encrypt some data before storing it, or you may need to segment out the data, storing sensitive data on-premises and only storing transactional information in the cloud. Additionally, you may also need to consider broader regulatory impacts on the application and infrastructure, seeing if the geography of execution brings any additional legal restrictions or tax implications on your organization.
Next, we’ll continue working on the strategy, by looking at additional considerations in the following seven key areas: application design application scale, application dependencies, latency requirements, data sensitivity, SLA requirements, and regulation and compliance.
The evolution of computing, and specifically software, as an industry can be seen as having moved through three major phases: first, a period dominated by industry giants like IBM, Honeywell and Burroughs, providing fully-integrated products to fully captive customers; second, the personal computer revolution of the 1980s, a time when discreet layers, or stacks, of hardware and software emerged, available from different vendors, yet tightly coupled to create end products; and third and presently, the emergence of technology ecosystems, like that of Microsoft — an entire community and constellations from which customers acquire solutions, in part or in whole, locally or in the cloud.
Now, from enterprise software to software powering mobile devices, rarely, if ever, does one company provide the whole product. Doing so has become a glaring sign of a monolithic, outmoded company. As a result, the long-standing industry term Independent Software Vendor (ISV) has become an oxymoron.
Software vendors no longer function as independent units, where all customers are end-users, where there are no suppliers, and where all software is built in-house. Instead, software vendors have become networked, i.e., software vendors are depending on (communities of) service and software component suppliers, value-added-resellers, and pro-active customers who build and share customizations. Software vendors now have to consider their strategic role in the software ecosystem to survive…
Missed Opportunity and Competitive Threats
As well as this may be understood, traditional software vendors often do too little to make the ecosystems in which they compete work to their advantage. While they wouldn’t dream of building their own operating system, they fail to scrutinize finer-grain decisions, such as an analytics or cloud backup capability. They haven’t internalized the question of ‘build, buy or ally?’ at the level of company and product strategy. This is a strategic error.
There are many reasons ISVs avoid the question altogether, from a “not invented here” culture that resists outside technology, to simply lacking a process by which to answer it. If you’re among them, rest assured your best competitors aren’t making the same mistake. They know it’s a question that must be answered and the importance of getting the answer right. Moreover, the current generation of SaaS application providers are software ecosystem natives. They build on and build their own platforms and APIs like breathing air. It’s their natural habitat.
The Upshot
The benefits of full participation in an ecosystem are numerous, from reducing (and sometimes eliminating) the cost of development, to externalizing the risk of building a specific capability, to increasing speed of response to a rapidly evolving market. While these benefits are worthwhile in their own right, one of the most pronounced is the opportunity to capitalize on ecosystem partners’ marketing, sales and distribution resources; namely, their channels, money and people. From the multi-thousand person global field sales teams and multi-hundred million dollar marketing budgets of Microsoft to ground-breaking new app stores, aligning your success with your platform partners—where it makes strategic sense—can act as a massive force multiplier.
Having a clear ecosystem strategy also accelerates opportunities for partnerships with others built on the same platforms. Whether you’ve developed an application on Microsoft SharePoint or a service in the Azure cloud, having a well-defined set of product integration points and go-to-market programs makes for ready and effective alignment with potential partners who’ve done the same.
Making the Shift
Of course, ecosystems are no panacea. As a new or established software vendor, deciding when and what to build versus where to partner is a measured process with significant ramifications for how you market, sell and deliver to existing and new customers. Establishing a decision-making framework is the first step. The following form a sound starting point:
Functionality — is it a core competency? Do customers expect you to deliver it?
Market-sizing — is a leadership position possible, and is the addressable market large enough to sustain you?
Time-to-market — is time-to-market important, and if so, can you achieve it on your own?
Resources — do you have the skill sets, time and budget to develop the functionality internally?
Addressing these questions fully and with real consensus, across product lines and feature sets, is the start of finding your place within a software ecosystem.
Shawn Yeager is founder and principal of SHAWNYEAGER + CO., a professional services firm serving early stage to mid-sized software, SaaS and IT services companies seeking break-through growth opportunities.
I’m always on the search for stories of Canadian developers who have either built new applications using Windows Azure services or have migrated existing applications to Windows Azure. The mission: To share how Canadian developers are using Windows Azure to create innovating and unique solutions.
This is one of their stories.
Large Scale, Highly Available Video and Chat Powered By Windows Azure
In this instalment of Canada Does Windows Azure, I sat down with Mark Hale from Toronto-based Ortsbo Inc. (Twitter, Facebook) who have made online history with their large scale, highly available, powered by Windows Azure video and chat platform, Live & Global.
Jonathan: Mark, can you tell us a little about the Ortsbo solution and what it does?
Mark: As internet users become more global in nature, the number of English speaking users is decreasing dramatically. While there are many online translation tools available, all of them require a constant flipping of web pages, cutting, pasting and wasting of valuable time. Ortsbo”s primary product (FREE at Ortsbo.com) allows users to connect to any of 12 Instant messaging networks (MSN, GTalk, Facebook, AIM, ICQ, QQ, iChat, Gadu Gadu, LiveJournal, Ovi, Sametime) and Twitter simultaneously. In addition, Ortsbo breaks down the language barrier by allowing you to set your preferred language, and the language of your contacts/buddies. In this way, you will see all incoming instant messages instantly translated into your language, and your contacts (even if they do not use Ortsbo themselves) will see all instant messages (from you) in their native language. All real time, no cutting, no pasting. In addition, Ortsbo allows you to connect to Twitter and view any topic, translating all associated tweets to your language!
Ortsbo also has O4O, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook, offering the same real-time translation feature for your email contacts. Each email will also have an attachment of the original email in the language it was written to assist in confirming technical translations. Further, Ortsbo has a new product called O2O or One 2 One. O2O is a single device solution which allows you to have a conversation with someone standing in front of you (imagine, a foreign restaurant, hospital, or police officer!) You type in your language – tilt the tablet to the other person and the tilt action causes the translation to occur. Lastly, Ortsbo also has an API for third party software manufacturers to include real time translation in their own applications; social gaming is certainly a big target for this technology.
Jonathan: That’s quite the complex solution. When you were designing the Ortsbo platform, what was the rationale behind your decision to use Windows Azure as the platform’s backend?
Mark: Ortsbo has experienced an unprecedented level of viral growth, exceeding our 2 year projections in roughly 6 months. We quickly found our infrastructure lacked the bandwidth required to service the 16 million unique users month over month. We were not experiencing shortfalls in processing power, web services or storage, but it was just a matter of time. The move to [Windows] Azure allowed us to access virtually unlimited bandwidth, computer power, and scale. This allows us to pay for peak infrastructure only during peak hours! This is a huge savings when compared to traditional infrastructure limitations. Traditionally, one had to evaluate peak demand and build infrastructure to support that peak level (and beyond), even if the peak only occurred for an hour or two a day. With [Windows] Azure, you simple spin up new instances during your peak hours, and then spin them back down when traffic returns to normal. Only paying for the infrastructure you need is a big selling point for Microsoft [Windows] Azure.
We did our due diligence and explored other cloud solutions; however it was without question that [Windows] Azure was the most compatible and flexible platform for our Silverlight and ASP.NET technology. The ability to choose between [Windows] Azure Tables and SQL Azure was also an important component for us. The features and capabilities of AppFabric and embedded technologies for connecting to MSN, Yahoo and other IM networks is also attractive for us, although we are still using our own custom protocols without issue on the [Windows] Azure platform. We also found the options for upgrade distribution with zero downtime met our very difficult 100% uptime requirements. Further, the ability to deploy to multiple datacenters, creating complete redundancy in the very unlikely event of a catastrophic failure is outstanding.
Jonathan: That same 100% uptime requirement was required on May 20, 2011 when Ortsbo hosted KISS’ Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley in a Live & Global session, right?
Mark: Absolutely. That was our product called Ortsbo LIVE & GLOBAL, a platform which web-casts a chat with celebrities in over 50 languages; as well as accepting questions in those languages. These are generally large events with zero tolerance for downtime. We created complete redundancy on both Chicago and San Antonio datacenters and also had the package on hand, ready to be deployed to a European datacenter in the event aliens from another Galaxy decided to beam Chicago and Texas off the planet! Full redundancy, and the ability to deploy anywhere in the world in roughly 20 minutes is what helped us sleep during the nights leading up to the event. On June 22nd, Live and Global: Showdown in Chinatown – New York City – with STEVE NASH employed the same technology and the same fault tolerance protocols. We simply spun up X instances, monitored traffic, and spun up more as was required based on demand.
Jonathan: During that live chat, Ortsbo established a Guinness World Record for the most nationalities in an online chat when users from 92 countries logged on to live webcast with KISS, which was streamed from the Beverly Hills Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. You can watch the announcement in this YouTubevideo, as well as an interview with Paul Stanley about Ortsbo. Really cool stuff. What Windows Azure services support a platform like Live & Global? How are you using those services in unique ways?
Mark: We use [Windows] Azure Hosted Web Roles, Azure Tables, SQL Azure and AppFabric. Allowing users to connect to 12 instant message/social media networks and Twitter at the same time, and allowing conversations in over 50 languages across 13 networks is pretty interesting and unique in itself. Having those services deployed on Azure and not showing the slightest hint of performance degradation as millions of users pound on the service may not be unique, but it sure is cool! AppFabric is used to establish our chat network connections while the web roles are responsible for executing our translation algorithms. We store complex translation data in SQL Azure tables while we record usage metrics in standard Azure tables which don”t require complex table joins.
Jonathan: During development, did you run into anything that was not obvious and required you to do some research? What were your findings? Hopefully, other developers will be able to use your findings to solve similar issues.
Mark: I think the challenge we faced is the stateless session that are counter to real-time chat connections. A user cannot connect to Webserver #1, start a chat, and then have Webserver #12 responding to the next request. With the help of the Microsoft staff, we were able to employ a few different solutions (cookies/AppFabric features – storing session info in a database, etc.) to maintain a session and not lose chat connections with our custom protocols to non-standard IM networks and Ortsbo”s API services. We still face learning curve issues, but the Discovery Pack offered by Microsoft has been fantastic and cost effective for our company. The level of support and knowledge provided by the Microsoft team has been outstanding in a time when customer service in general, is lacking (in my opinion).
[For more information on the Windows Azure Discovery Pack, please contact us at cdnazure@microsoft.com]
Jonathan: Thanks for mentioning support. Many don’t know that Microsoft provides free platform and developer support for Windows Azure, SQL Azure, AppFabric, and DataMarket. Any developer can get help from the Windows Azure Support Site. Last but not least, what were some lessons you and your team learned during your migration to Windows Azure?
Mark: Deploying to Azure can sometimes be as simple as upload, tweak and go (Live and Global was this way), and at other times, there is indeed some real thought and work required to port your application. Done properly, utilizing Azure Roles and proper deployment strategies may take a little more time, but results in commercial grade applications which are virtually limitless in scalability without being too hard on the infrastructure budget! Cloud computing is definitely the future for all global reach, public and/or enterprise solutions.
Mark, thank you so much for sharing your story with us! From now on, never let languages get in the way of your communications with the world! Give Ortsbo a try at ortsbo.com! If you’re a Microsoft Outlook user, make sure to try the plugin Mark mentioned above, Ortsbo for Outlook.
Join The Conversation
What do you think of this solution’s use of Windows Azure? Has this story helped you better understand usage scenarios for Windows Azure? Join the Ignite Your Coding LinkedIn discussion to share your thoughts.
Previous Stories
Missed previous developer stories in the series? Check them out here.
There has been lots of buzz about the Windows Azure Marketplace since the announcements at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles that the Windows Azure Marketplace has been expanded to feature and sell not only data subscriptions, but application subscriptions. Effectively, you can now use the Marketplace to sell your Windows Azure applications, services, and building block components to a global online market. When your application is published to the Marketplace, you instantly get access to new customers, new markets, and new revenue opportunities all backed by Microsoft to ensure quality and service.
In order to get started selling subscriptions in the Marketplace to your Windows Azure-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) application, your application will need to know how to handle the events of the subscription lifecycle, such as subscribing, registering, accessing,using,and unsubscribing. With the August 2011 refresh of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit (Download, Online), a new hands-on-lab has been added to walk you through the changes you’ll need to make in order to be able to publish and interact with the Marketplace.
The lab takes an application through the full provisioning process through 5 exercises. First you’ll learn about SaaS subscription scenarios. You’ll then modify an existing application to support Windows Azure Marketplace subscriptions. Once that’s done, you’ll go through the registration of the application in the Marketplace and test it using the Marketplace’s Dev Playground. When your application can support new subscriptions, you’ll then modify it again to support unsubscribing the subscriptions. With those changes in place, the application is ready to be published to the Marketplace. You’ll walkthrough how to do that as well.
After completing the hands-on-lab, you’ll have everything you need in order to make the changes to your application. However, before you get started making changes to your application, head over to the Windows Azure Marketplace Publishing page to get the paperwork that you need to get involved with the Marketplace. Take care of that first and when everything is done on that end, go ahead and make the changes to your application, test them, and publish your application.
Join a networking crowd of investors, community start-ups and entrepreneurial students for the first Canadian screening of Ctrl Alt Compete – a Microsoft movie documentary on what it takes to be a start-up: Passion. Fortitude. Insanity.
![image_thumb3_thumb2_thumb2_thumb2_th[1]](http://bisvblog.blob.core.windows.net/wordpress-sync/2011/08/image_thumb3_thumb2_thumb2_thumb2_th1.png "image_thumb3_thumb2_thumb2_thumb2_th[1]")
