other

The Sky Guys Ltd., Canada’s leader in drone and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) enabled services, announce today that the company is undertaking a non-brokered private placement of up to $1,200,000 through the issuance of up to 4,000,000 units.  The units are priced at 30 cents, and comprised of one common share and one-half common share purchase warrant exercisable at 45 cents for a 24 month period post closing.  The placement is expected to be completed by January 31, 2017.

“This is a major step forward in the growth of our company, and is further proof of our momentum in leading the industry” said Adam Sax, President and CEO of The Sky Guys,  “2016 was a big year for us, we announced our new technology division Defiant Labs alongside our newest product line The DX-3 and our commitment to developing revolutionary AI Deeper learning SaaS solutions. In addition, we hosted the first ever UAV show in Canada.” stated Sax.

“Kicking off 2017 with issuance is very exciting” said Sax, “our strong growth has brought us to this crossroads, and we are confident that between the operations of The Sky Guys and Defiant Labs, we are heading in the right direction.”

About The Sky Guys
The Sky Guys Ltd. is an early mover in the UAV / Drone business. Through its brilliant group of engineers, The Sky Guys deliver the newest and most advanced technology positioning the Company as a leader in the UAV business.  Unique to the UAV business, The Sky Guys have an integrated approach that encompasses sales, manufacturing and distribution, licensing and a soon to be launched UAV School. Since its founding in the Spring of 2015, the Company has established a large and loyal national customer base from varied industries including commercial and residential real estate, oil and gas, manufacturing, construction and engineering, infrastructure, travel and tourism, sports and events, mapping and surveying, golf courses, high rises and condos and weddings. Based in Ontario and with offices across the country, The Sky Guys serve national clients from coast to coast.

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SOURCE The Sky Guys

For further information: Media Enquiries: Michael Diamond, [email protected], 647 986 0477; For further information on The Sky Guys, visit www.theskyguys.ca; Adam Sax, President and CEO at 866 895 7466, x 101 or [email protected]; Denis Clement, Director at 647 295 7830 or [email protected]

©2017CNW Group Ltd.

Silent on hip-hop legacy as it targets audiophiles with latest SL-1200s

JONATHAN SOBLE
The Vancouver Sun

In the sofa-appointed listening room of a factory north of Tokyo, hi-fi fans can listen to vintage vinyl records on a sound system costing $45,000, including a sleek silver turntable. Musical choices include rock — the Eagles’ Hotel California, sounding warm and vivid through four-foot-tall speakers — jazz and classical. Not on the menu: hip-hop. Or disco. Or the thumping, floor-convulsing sounds of modern techno or house music, which helped make the record player at the centre of this audiophile’s paradise famous.

The turntable, the Technics SL-1200, may not enjoy the name recognition of, say, Fender electric guitars or Steinway pianos. But if you have watched a DJ scratching furiously behind a rapper in the last few decades, you have almost certainly seen one, or, more likely, a deftly manipulated pair.

That legacy seems like an easy sales hook for the Panasonic Corp. of Japan, which has reintroduced the turntable to great fanfare.

Panasonic has chosen mostly to ignore it.

“Our concept is analog records for hi-fi listening,” said Hiro Morishita, a creative director at Technics. “DJs are fine, too, but as a marketing target it’s problematic. We don’t want to sell the 1200 as the best tool for DJing. The 1200 is the 1200.”

It is a dilemma most marketers would long for: a product with a built-in fan base and perhaps too much cultural cachet. For all their passion, Panasonic calculated, the SL-1200’s core customers were not numerous enough, or rich enough, to make reviving the Tech ni cs brand financially worthwhile. It needed to reach wealthy, older audiophiles who would spend extravagantly on gear — not only the turntable, but also the amplifier, speakers and other equipment that the company markets alongside it.

And too few such people, it figured, appreciate the finer points of hip-hop.

Hence the absence of Dr. Dre and the Beastie Boys in the factory’s listening room. And hence a new, more rarefied price: 330,000 yen, or about $2,800, which is roughly four times its earlier cost. Bedroom DJs without trust funds will struggle to buy one, let alone the customary two.

Panasonic admits it struggled with how to acknowledge the SL1200’s history and fans.

“There was a lot of debate,” Morishita said. “Would we keep the name? Would we change the design?” In the end, he said, the company decided the turntable was too iconic to change drastically. The latest version, the SL-1200G, has an upgraded motor and a few other touches, but is otherwise the same as the players Technics made in decades past.

The main difference is in the marketing. Instead of sponsoring DJ contests, Technics has hired a German classical pianist, Alice Sara Ott, to be its “global brand ambassador” and provided an SL-1200G to Abbey Road Studios, of Beatles fame. Serene connoisseurship, not sweaty nightclubs, is the theme.

“It’s unusual in that you’ve had relatively positive associations and decided to disown that,” said Ravi Dhar, a professor of marketing at Yale. “When the brand already has an image that is associated with certain groups, if you try to move away from it, it’s risky,” he said. “But for them, the associations weren’t positive for the market they’re targeting.”

Some famous users have been harsher.

“They never really gave support to the DJ community,” Jeffrey Allen Townes, better known as DJ Jazzy Jeff, said in a Facebook post after the revival announcement, criticizing Panasonic for high prices and for ignoring the consumers who stuck by the SL-1200 during vinyl’s lean years.

The SL-1200 was first made in the 1970s, and while plenty of other record players have come and gone, none are as central to the global culture of hip-hop and dance music.

“If you wanted to be taken seriously, you saved up and you bought a pair,” said Barrington Oakley, a veteran British DJ who performs under the name Cutmaster Swift and won a world DJ ing championship in 1989. Part of the prize: a gold-plated SL-1200. “The life of this turntable has beaten all the odds.”

In 2008, Panasonic said it was closing its Technics audio division and would discontinue most of the division’s products.

Two years ago, Panasonic swerved again, saying it was reviving the Technics brand to target the premium end of the audio market.

Vinyl records were making a comeback, too. In a modest backlash against digitization, record sales in the last couple of years have crept up to their highest levels since the format’s heyday. By early 2016, the SL-1200 was back in production.

Panasonic emphasizes the effort that goes into making the turntables, which are now produced at a different factory about two hours from Tokyo. Only 20 are assembled a day, with most of the work done by hand.

The company does not disclose sales numbers, but said an initial set of 300 special-edition SL-1200Gs, made available online when sales restarted this year, sold out in 30 minutes. Even at nearly $3,000, the turntable may not make any money for Panasonic, instead serving as a loss leader for other Technics products.

“I understand why they’ve done it, even if it’s disappointing,” Oakley said of Technics’ marketing strategy. “At least I’ve learned how to repair my old ones.”

© 2017 Postmedia Network Inc

PayByPhone app to help automaker compete with the likes of Uber

ARMINA LIGAYA
The Vancouver Sun

Vancouver-based mobile parking payment company PayByPhone has been acquired by Volkswagen AG’s financial services arm as the German auto giant races to get a foothold in the future transport economy.

PayByPhone, which said it processes more than US$250 million in payments each year, allows its users to securely pay for certain parking spaces with their phones and be alerted when their time expires. The app has 12.5 million registered users and can be used in several cities in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and France, the company said. PayByPhone has about 100 employees worldwide.

The deal — the terms of which were not disclosed — came after discussions with Volkswagen during the past six months, said PayByPhone chief executive Kush Parikh.

“Now, being part of the overall Volkswagen family, we will probably help drive some strategic initiatives internally across their organization,” he said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “But, fundamentally, we will continue to operate independently and push our payments and smart parking agenda as quickly as possible, and (Volkswagen) will, of course, help accelerate that.”

The purchase of PayByPhone comes less than a month after Volkswagen made a massive push into mobility services such as ride-sharing and commuter pooling apps through a standalone company, MOIA, to compete with the likes of Uber Technologies Inc.

Many of the European carmaker’s competitors including General Motors Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. have also been heavily investing in mobility solutions, said Mark Boyadjis, senior automotive technology analyst at IHS.

GM in January invested US$500 million in ridesharing app Lyft, and said it planned to develop an on-demand network of self-driving cars with the service. Toyota in October announced it plans to establish a Mobility Services Platform that will support car sharing among other things.

Boyadjis sees Volkswagen’s purchase of PayByPhone as a play to address a future where fewer consumers may want to own a car.

He cites slowing car sales in urban areas such as San Francisco and the growing number of consumers who view ride-sharing or car-sharing as preferable alternatives to paying the roughly US$34,000 average price tag of a car plus insurance and upkeep costs.

“Mobility services is very, very much a big opportunity for automakers, and it’s a defensive opportunity,” Boyadjis said on Wednesday. “They’ve seen, frankly, Uber be a giant disrupter to their future sustainability.”

The purchase of PayByPhone also comes a year after Volkswagen Financial Services AG acquired a 92-per-cent stake in Sunhill Technologies GmbH, which offers cashless payment solutions for parking operations in 90 German cities.

“With our acquisition of PayByPhone, we are now the leading provider for the processing and mobile payment of parking procedures,” said Christian Dahlheim, the management board member responsible for sales and marketing at Volkswagen Financial Services, in a statement on Wednesday. “In the future we will be bundling this know-how in a separate business field around the theme of parking.”

In May, Volkswagen invested US$300 million in ride-hailing provider and Uber rival Gett, which is available in 60 cities including Moscow and New York City. MOIA, based in Berlin with an initial team of 50 people, also aims to set up an on-demand connected commuting app, the company added. The first pilot projects are scheduled to begin in 2017.

Buying up technologies such as PayByPhone allows car companies to speed up the integration of mobile service capabilities into their existing vehicles, and better position themselves for a dramatically different transportation market 10 or more years down the road, Boyadjis said.

“Most innovative automakers looking at their 10-year scenario are saying we need to invest in mobility,” he said. “Ford, General Motors, BMW, Daimler, they’re all getting very, very active in investing in ways that their business model can seamlessly change as we evolve into a more shared mobility platform globally.”

© 2017 National Post

MORGAN LOWRIE
The Vancouver Sun

Artificial intelligence, once relegated to the realm of science fiction, is now found in everything from translation services to virtual assistants to video games.

And as companies race to develop self-driving cars and offer increasingly personalized online experiences, they’re building on research that was largely pioneered by a group of Canadian researchers who are still attracting plenty of attention and investment dollars. Montreal, in particular, has developed a concentration of expertise in the area of AI, largely thanks to the efforts of Université de Montréal professor Yoshua Bengio, head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA).

“(AI) will affect pretty much every economic sector; right now is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bengio told The Canadian Press. “One of the things we are going to see more of is how these technologies affect how we interact with computers.”

As a result of its research, Bengio says the institute has attracted interest from “most of the major IT companies,” some of which have also provided funding.

Now, tech giant Google is jumping in, investing $4.5 million over three years to support the institute’s research, as well as opening an AI research group at its Montreal office.

This comes on the heels of the Canadian government announcing an investment of more than $200 million in three Montreal universities — including Bengio’s — to create a learning hub to explore artificial intelligence and big data.

Shibl Mourad, the head of engineering for Google’s Montreal office, says the company hopes to help turn the city into a “supercluster” of AI knowledge that will attract corporate investors, burgeoning startups and researchers.

He said much of the credit goes to Bengio and his colleagues, whose research over the last decade has put the city ahead of its competitors.

“Their contribution was foundational,” he said.

Had these researchers not invested that decade of their lives, “we would not be where we are,” Mourad said.

The lab Bengio leads is one of the largest in the world dedicated to studying Deep Learning, one of the underpinnings of AI.

Over the past decade, they learned that by layering several “neural networks” that mimic how the brain works, computer programs could “learn” to solve complex problems on their own instead of needing to be programmed step-by-step.

By analyzing a large number of examples, the program could eventually learn to identify patterns — such as recognizing objects in photos or language patterns.

This fundamental research has led to breakthroughs in translation programs, personal assistance, “smart” cameras and self-driving cars, among others, Bengio says.

“At some point you’ll just talk to computers and they’ll understand what you want and what you need,” he said. “It may take years, but we’re clearly going in that direction.”

Bengio says AI knowledge also has broad applications in the medical field, and could be used to help doctors read scans, research and diagnose conditions, or sift through the massive amount of information contained in the human genome.

In the short term, he’s hoping the new investments will help Montreal “capitalize on its advance” by attracting corporations and startups to set up in the city — hopefully reversing the brain drain that has seen many of the brightest researchers leave to find employment elsewhere. He says it’s a hopeful sign that former Montrealer Hugo Larochelle will be returning to the city to head up Google’s new research group.

“We’d like to see more of that, and we’d like to attract people who aren’t Canadians to Montreal,” he said.

© 2016 Postmedia Network Inc

GERRIT DE VYNCK AND SCOTT DEVEAU
The Vancouver Sun

Canada is set for a parade of initial public offerings by technology firms next year — this time for real.

Real-estate data company Real Matters Inc. and marketing-software firm Vision Critical Communications Inc. are likely to lead the advance in the first half of 2017, according to people familiar with the matter. Hootsuite Media Inc. and D2L Inc., are also said to be considering IPOs in the second half, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The head of PointClickCare Corp. said the health care-software provider will look at going public in 2017.

After a flood of venture capital funding and increasing hype about Canada’s burgeoning tech industry in recent years, investors and industry experts had been expecting a rush of IPOs. Yet few materialized. Next year will be different for one key reason: the companies are on firmer financial footings.

“The private market was overvaluing growth at all costs where the public market really wasn’t doing that,” said John Ruffolo, head OMERS Ventures, a unit of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System fund, which has investments in Vision Critical, Hootsuite and D 2 L. Companies that have stopped burning cash can now focus on sustainable growth and be ready to go public when the market conditions are ripe, he said.

A spokesman for Markham, Ont.-based Real Matters declined to comment on its plans for an IPO. Vancouver-based Vision Critical and Hoot suite also declined to comment through their representatives. D2L chief executive officer John Baker declined to speak about his timeline for going public. He said in a phone interview that the Canadian tech companies often tapped as possible IPOs were reaching maturity.

It’s been a long and rocky road for the companies to get this far. There’s only been two Canadian technology companies to go public with an offering of more than $100 million (US$74 million) in recent years: Shopify Inc. in May 2015 and Kinaxis Inc. in May 2014. Shares of Ottawa-based Shopify have surged by about 135 per cent in the U.S. since their IPO while Kinaxis has risen about 375 per cent, whetting investor appetite for more.

Some of the delay has been due to unfavourable market conditions, including volatile equity markets, Brexit and the U.S. election. There have only been two Canadian IPOs in the past 12 months larger than $100 million. In the U.S., several tech companies have been waiting in the wings during the election. Now that markets have stabilized, big-name companies such as Snap Inc ., parent of Snap chat, Blue Apr on Inc., and MuleSoft Inc. are expected to pursue share sales next year.

Snapchat filed papers with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before last week’s U.S. election, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company is targeting a valuation of about US$20 billion to US$25 billion in a listing that could come as early as March.

Getting the Canadian companies fit for public markets has perhaps been a bigger reason for the delays.

Real Matters, which is expected to go public in the first quarter of 2017 according to the people familiar with its plans, has been growing through acquisitions, raising private capital and using it to buy smaller firms that can help it expand. Going public would help them to further that strategy.

Social media marketing company Hootsuite and education softwaremaker D2L have been in the IPO pipeline for so long some began to speculate they may have missed their window. In recent years, both companies have focused on being cash-flow positive rather than demonstrating growth over profitability. In Hootsuite’s case, that meant laying off almost a 10th of its 1,000 employees.

D2L built out its San Francisco office and hired new executives who’d worked at large tech companies in the past, CEO Baker said. “The company’s really humming on all cylinders right now,’’ he said. “It’s going to be a good year.”

Several late-stage private technology companies are evaluating public-market options both in Canada and the U.S., said Sanjiv Samant, group head of technology, media and telecommunications investment banking at National Bank Financial.

“With the U.S. election behind us and hopefully some increased clarity on the international front, we’re becoming more optimistic about where 2017 might lead,” he said.

© 2016 Postmedia Network Inc.

ANNABELLE LIANG
Metro

Autonomous vehicle software startup nuTonomy has made rides on its self-driving taxis available to the general public in Singapore for free, expanding a first-in-the world run that was initially invitation-only.

While multiple companies, including Google and Volvo, have been testing self-driving cars on public roads for several years, nuTonomy announced in August that was the first to offer autonomous taxi rides. It beat Uber, which started offering rides in autonomous cars in Pittsburgh last week.

The Singapore trial was limited to a 2.5-square-mile (6. 5-square-kilometre ) business and residential district called “one north.” NuTonomy CEO Karl Iagnemma said Friday that the test area has since been doubled by the government. The approved route does not include any highways.

NuTonomy, a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced Friday that the public can now book self-driving taxis through an app by Grab, the biggest ride-hailing company in Southeast Asia. The two companies announced a year-long partnership.

To book a ride, passengers will have to select the ‘robo-car’ option on Grab’s app, which has been downloaded more than 20 million times. Passengers have to be older than 18, book in advance and sign a liability waiver. Rides will be free for at least two months.

“We will be combining nuTonomy’s self-driving car software with Grab’s app, with their proven fleet routing technology and their mapping capabilities,” said nuTonomy CEO Karl Iagnemma.

The cars — modified Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV electrics — have a safety driver in front who is prepared to take the wheel and a researcher in back who watches the car’s computers.

If a pick-up or drop-off point is out of approved testing perimeters, the driver will take over for the rest of the journey, Iagnemma said.

“It’s an evolution to identify where are the easy parts, where are the trickier parts where we need to spend more time,” he said.

Iagnemma would not say how many rides nuTonomy provided in the trial period but said thousands signed up for the invited trial within the first 48 hours. The company said there have been no problems.

The company expects its six-car fleet to grow to a dozen by the end of the year. It plans to make its Singapore taxi fleet fully self-driving by 2018.

© Copyright Free Daily News Group Inc. 2001-2016

News of 2014 attack comes just as Verizon plans to buy web portal

BRIAN WOMACK AND JORDAN ROBERTSON
The Vancouver Sun

Yahoo Inc. said the personal information of at least 500 million users was stolen in an attack on its accounts in 2014, exposing a wide swath of its roughly 1 billion users ahead of Verizon Communications Inc.’s planned acquisition of the web portal’s assets.

The attacker was a “state-sponsored actor,” and stolen information may include names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, un-encrypted security questions and answers, Yahoo said Thursday in a statement. The continuing investigation doesn’t indicate theft of payment card data or bank account information, or unprotected passwords, the company said. Affected users are being notified, accounts are being secured, and there’s no evidence the attacker is still in Yahoo’s network, it also said.

“Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter,” the company said in the statement. “Online intrusions and thefts by state-sponsored actors have become increasingly common across the technology industry.”

The disclosure of the data theft comes at a particularly sensitive time for chief executive Marissa Mayer, as she navigates the company toward a planned US$4.8 billion acquisition by Verizon, set to close by early next year. Mayer, who has dealt with difficulties and complaints about Yahoo’s email service in the past, needs to keep users logging in to drive traffic and draw the advertising that fuels the company’s revenue growth, which has been sluggish under her leadership.

Verizon was notified of the incident within the last two days, the company said in an emailed statement. “We understand that Yahoo is conducting an active investigation of this matter, but we otherwise have limited information and understanding of the impact,” Verizon said in an email. “We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders and related communities.”

The confirmation that accounts were compromised came almost two months after the company said it was investigating claims that a hacker was offering to sell user account details stolen in a data breach. The same hacker, who previously sold data taken from LinkedIn and MySpace, posted information from 200 million Yahoo accounts on a dark web marketplace, Motherboard reported in early August. The stolen information being offered was most likely from 2012, Motherboard reported, citing the hacker, who uses the name Peace.

“All of this compromised information is very useful for criminals in order to hijack user identities and use them for fraudulent purposes,” Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner, said. “Identity impersonation has become a global criminal epidemic and there are no simple solutions.”

Yahoo is encouraging users to review their accounts for suspicious activity and to change their password and security questions — along with answers for other online accounts where they use the same or similar information. The company also recommends users avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.

Many of the stolen accounts in a sample of data obtained by Motherboard were no longer in use and had been cancelled. The sale of all of the data for just under US$2,000 suggested much of the information was obsolete, made up, or useless because the hackers had already attacked legitimate accounts and exhausted their need for the material.

While the breach is a blow to Yahoo, more broadly it underscores the danger of large data sets spilling into the hacker underground and being used for criminal purposes for years without the breached companies knowing, or with them only taking minimal action based on whatever data hackers tell them was taken.

© 2016 National Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc

Finding new talent, connecting with clients among the benefits, writes Rick Spence

Rick Spence
The Vancouver Sun

In the startup world, it’s not all foosball and beer fridges.

The next generation of business leaders is incubating in gritty thirdfloor walk-ups, 19th-century offices with worn wooden floors and the wind whistling through bare brick, or glossy pens with rows of tables where T-shirted workers stare at their laptops and dream of cubicles. For the lucky few that make it big, there will be modern offices with open kitchens, PlayStations, rooftop patios and possibly nap rooms.

Who cares what goes inside Canada’s startups? Let’s see: jobseekers, disaffected employees from other companies, starry-eyed students, curious competitors, potential partners and investors, and forward-thinking customers looking for the next new thing.

All these types of people have fuelled the success of Startup Open House, a growing national movement designed to bring new people face-to-face with the startup world. Founded in Montreal in 2013, Open Houses will take place in six cities this year, with plans for more in future.

The action starts Thursday, Sept. 22 in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Startups in Waterloo, Ont., will open their doors Oct. 4, and Ottawa and Quebec City are looking at dates in November. Some 400 companies, incubators and co-working spaces have already signed up to participate this year, says Kara Sheppard-Jones, a project manager with Montreal-based Credo Productions, a startup that runs Open House and other innovative startup/social projects. She says companies are still signing up, and expects activity this year to easily beat 2015, when 500 startups in five cities welcomed 8,000 visitors.

Sheppard-Jones says the first open house started as the brainchild of a few founders looking for talent, as a kind of reverse career fair. But it’s grown since as a way for all kinds of companies to meet their communities and demonstrate what they do.

“We have the biggest names in the startup space, as well as smaller startups looking for visibility and exposure,” she says.

The website StartupOpenHouse. com identifies participating companies in each city and the timing (usually 3 p.m. to 8 p.m.). You can also use its PathFinder tool to plan your itinerary. Attendance is free, thanks to the event sponsors, but you need to reserve a ticket online.

Open House exemplifies the inclusive values of tech startups, so the founders in Montreal weren’t surprised to learn Silicon Valley has held similar events for years. But Credo may be the first to export the notion. In April, it helped a Canadian entrepreneur in London launch the U.K.’s first startup open house. With 35 companies attracting 800 visitors, SheppardJones believes this too will become an annual event.

Are open houses worth the effort for companies putting out welcome mats? Sheppard-Jones says the evidence is anecdotal, but positive. Last year, the Open Houses generated at least 700 applications for jobs the participating startups were hiring for. A professor at Humber College who took his class to Toronto’s open houses says three students found jobs, and others got project work that helped advance their studies. In London, an entrepreneur signed one of his biggest clients after the head of business development for Britain’s largest grocery chain poked his head through the open door.

Credo encourages companies to put on a good show, by offering tours, presentations, demos and/ or food and drink. But each startup runs its own event, so standards will vary. Sheppard-Jones’s efforts to upgrade the program are complicated by startups’ tendency to do everything last-minute. Participation is usually free, but this year Credo imposed a $50 fee for applications submitted in the last month.

“When everyone registers late, it’s difficult for visitors to get a sense of who’s participating,” Sheppard-Jones says, adding that the incentive fee worked. “We’ve never had so many startups register so early.”

(If your company is interested in registering this month in Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver, tell them you read about it in the Financial Post. They’ll waive your fee.)

Project Spaces, a five-year-old Toronto company that rents coworking spaces, will participate this month in its third Open House. Co-founder Neil Martin says it’s a way to stay in touch with old friends as well as meet new ones.

“As the company grows, it’s interesting to bring people back each year to see how things have changed,” he says.

With 140 member companies, Martin says a dozen firms in each of their two spaces usually participate in open house, actively wooing developers and designers, or new users for their apps. He says Project Spaces itself will likely offer one-week free trials to visitors — in addition to bringing in snacks and two kegs of beer for entertaining drop-ins at each location.

Martin sees Open House as costeffective promotion. Five new members joined last year. And one member who signed up as a lone founder after Open House 2014 now has five employees working alongside him.

© 2016 Postmedia Network Inc

QUENTIN CASEY
The Vancouver Sun

Alex Kolicich has spent the eight years since he graduated from the University of Waterloo working in California, first for Google and Palantir Technologies, and later with billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel at Mithril Capital Management.

Those eight years, Kolicich says, have delivered a “new renaissance” in the Waterloo and Toronto startup scenes — with students, graduates and dropouts pursuing new companies with a vigour not previously seen.

Now a partner with San Francisco venture capital firm 8VC, Kolicich hopes to capitalize on the startup activity in his home country. Last year, 8VC — which focuses largely on enterprise software, data and software-as-a-service companies — invested in five Canadian startups. Kolicich, who grew up in Hamilton, Ont., says the firm is hunting for more Canadian investments, particularly in the Waterloo-Toronto area.

“We want to be more active in the region,” he said in an interview from California. “We don’t (predetermine) what percentage of the fund is going to Canada, but there’s no limit to it. It could be all of it. It could be none of it. It really depends on what opportunities we find.”

Though bullish on the potential for Canadian investments, Kolicich argues there are two deficiencies in the Canadian startup scene.

The Waterloo-Toronto corridor has a density of “technical talent” — including software engineers — that trails only San Francisco and Boston, he says. But there’s less executive talent, and local entrepreneurs often lack aggression in recruiting executives from outside the region and outside Canada.

“There’s a lack of understanding that recruiting is the second priority of a startup (behind business development),” he said. “It might even be the No. 1 priority.”

Many Canadian startups simply seek the best local candidates, Kolicich says, but they should be recruiting the best global candidates.

“Find the best person and convince them to work with you. Don’t just give up and say ‘Oh he’s not going to move to Toronto.’ Try and make it work,” he said, suggesting reaching out to senior Canadian executives in Silicon Valley. “A lot of Canadians would be open to the idea of moving back, and executive roles don’t come up very often.”

Kolicich points to HootSuite and Shopify as examples of Canadian companies that have succeeded in recruiting strong executives, as well as Toronto-based Street Contxt. 8VC led Street Contxt’s US$8 million Series A funding round in 2015.

Blair Livingston, Street Contxt’s founder and CEO, said he has recruited experienced executives by emphasizing his company’s growth potential in the institutional finance sector. Street Contxt helps analysts track the reports their clients are reading. As well, brokerages that subscribe to Street Contxt can see what research is being most read, and get reports from small firms they might not otherwise have access to. Livingston calls it a “content ecosystem for Wall Street.”

“We’re attacking a massive industry. And we’re building something global,” he said. “People want to work on something big — something that could actually become a massive business one day. If you’re in Toronto and want to work on something big, your choices are pretty slim.”

Livingston said his recruitment push is also aided by Street Contxt’s link to 8VC. Many Canadian investors strive for billion-dollar exits, and yet prevent their investment companies from reaching that goal by insisting on short-term benchmarks, such as early revenue targets, he said.

“That forces companies to monetize very early and focus on the short term, which inherently prevents people from building massive companies. What would Facebook have looked like if, at 1,000 users, they started monetizing and putting ads in and driving users away?” Livingston said. “Canadian companies end up getting outpaced by companies elsewhere in the world, which is why there are no billion-dollar exits up here.”

8VC is not interested in small milestones. “They are here for big wins,” Livingston aid. “They’re not here to hit singles and doubles. They want a home run.”

The second issue Kolicich sees in Canada is low salaries in the Canadian tech industry.

“People view salary as an input to be minimized … but you’re competing with startups in the Valley,” he said. “The key to capturing people and retaining people is to pay people more.”

When Kolicich graduated from Waterloo in 2008 with a degree in software engineering, Google was offering salaries twice that of Waterloo-based BlackBerry. He left Canada to work on Google Checkout and Google Street View. Canadian technology workers can still earn significantly more by leaving Canada for Silicon Valley, Kolicich said. It’s a fact that hurts Canadian companies.

“Google doesn’t win because it pays the least for its engineers. It actually pays the most for its engineers,” he said. “That’s the mentality people have to shift toward. Startups can’t always pay high salaries, so they have to pay high equity. You’re talking about a full compensation package, not just salary.”

He disagrees with the positioning of Canada as a place to build a cheap development team.

“That is the way to drive a jobs program, but it’s not the way to build a multi-billion-dollar company in technology,” Kolicich said. “Cost is not a competitive advantage in startups. If engineering salaries go up in the Bay area, then we’re just going to give our companies more money.”

Recruiting and salary issues aside, Kolicich is encouraged by the potential of the Canadian startup culture that has emerged since he graduated.

“It’s hard to put into words how different it is,” he said.

“I see a lot more shots on goal and a lot of ambitious people who want to create really big companies. If you pair that with the talent in the region, it’s a unique situation that doesn’t exist in many places in the world.”

© 2016 Postmedia Network Inc

Search engine optimization can help purchase-ready customers find your website

Chris Johnstone
other

A 2015 study by Accenture found that 23 percent of U.S. consumers who applied for a mortgage in the previous year did so through the internet. These are local customers who researched rates and products, and decided which mortgage company or specific loan originator to work with almost entirely online.

Making a few changes to your company’s digital approach and boosting your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) can make your company stand out in the virtual landscape — and also help you tap into a significant amount of local mortgage volume.

Before we get into the step-by-step process for improving your online footprint, it is important to understand how dramatically SEO has changed in the last year and why this is such a fantastic opportunity for professionals in the mortgage industry. There are two main reasons why new opportunities exist right now.

• New focus on local customers. The Google search engine switched its local map rankings to feature only three local businesses instead of seven. This means that three loan originators will be put in front of most of the mortgage customers using Google in a particular area.
• Automated front-page listings. Google started using an artificial intelligence program called RankBrain to help determine which websites to show on the front page. More importantly, RankBrain has learned how to identify purchase intent, so it has the ability to determine when someone is ready to buy based on what they type into the search field.

So, when a local customer inputs a search that indicates purchase intent, Google returns a map showing the location of the top-three local businesses — the three-pack — along with online reviews for those companies.

A recent study by Bright Local shows that 80 percent of all consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 97 percent of consumers ages 18 to 34 read online reviews to judge local businesses. So, a top-three ranking coupled with positive online reviews can help you capture high-quality local leads who are ready to buy. It’s a simple concept, but one that requires significant effort. The return-on-investment once you get ranked, however, can be astounding.

To show up in the three-pack, you first need to set up a Google My Business profile. Visit business.google.com to sign up for your account. It’s free and the initial setup takes less than 10 minutes. Google will send you a postcard to verify your location before your account connects to your website and goes live. A My Business profile is just the first step, however. To maximize your chances at ranking highly enough to generate quality local leads online, you also need to do some research and improve your website.

Keyword research

Many mortgage companies invest tremendous amounts of time and resources into how their websites look but miss the critical step of determining where their customers come from. Having a website is just one small step. You need targeted traffic to help you generate closed deals.

To get the quickest results, you need to determine which searches RankBrain identifies as having purchase intent. Most SEO tools and companies focus on finding search phrases that get the highest volume of searches. You want quality rather than quantity, so you receive fewer calls but convert more closed loans.

You actually can let Google tell you which search phrases will be the most profitable. Start by searching for “[area name] mortgage lender.” Put the three businesses that show up in the map listings into an SEO data tool such as Semrush. These tools can show you the search phrases that drive traffic to the sites you selected.

Make a list of those phrases and input them into Google searches. Save any that produce a three-pack map listing. Now, do the same thing for the terms “loan officer,” “best loan officer,” “top-rated loan officer” and those same variations on the phrase “mortgage broker.”

This simple research technique will quickly give you the 10 to 20 search phrases that generate the majority of high-quality online mortgage leads in your local market.

Strategic planning

To show up on the front page locally, you also must show Google that you are more deserving of a top ranking than your competition. To do this, you first need to figure out how much optimization your local competitors have already done to rank highly in searches.

To reverse engineer how much work it will take to get in front of quality local customers in your market, find a link-profiling tool that provides website ratings. One good option is the MOZ Open Site Explorer. Type in the URLs for your top three competitors and MOZ will show you how well their websites are rated by Google and how many back links they have.

If you then input the URL for your company’s website into the form as well, you can compare the data returned on your site to the information you got on your competitors. This will give you an exact plan showing how much work you need to do to catch up to your competition.

Website overhaul

Your website is the foundation that all your other online rankings stand on. It is almost impossible to show up in the three-pack or even on the front page of search results without a properly optimized website. There is no way to sugar coat this. Structuring your website to rank well is complicated. The results are certainly worth the effort, however.

You have to make the structure, content and html code on your website match the list of keywords that you want to rank highly on. When search engines crawl your site, they need to be told specifically what you want to rank for and why you deserve to be one of the top three businesses to get the traffic. Your content and website structure need to show Google that your business is a leader in the local market and that you are going to provide an excellent user experience to the customers they give you.

Describing the process for analyzing and properly coding your website to rank highly on search engines goes well beyond the scope of a single magazine article, however. If you are serious about overhauling your website to break into the three-pack, you most likely will need to work with a professional marketing company to get a website analysis and ranking consultation. A good marketing company should be able to review your website and give you a detailed report that shows where your website is broken and provide a step-by-step checklist to help you fix it.

Quality links

Optimizing your website isn’t enough to get you in front of your local customers. With hundreds of mortgage companies that can show up on the front page of a search, how does Google determine who appears there? Think of it as a popularity contest. Google wants to find popular local businesses that provide a good user experience and, ultimately, make the end customer happy.

Online links to your website are an incredibly strong signal to Google that your website is relevant, current and useful. A link is created when another website references your site with a link that people can click on to go visit your site. The theory is that the more quality links that point back at your site, the more reputable you are and the higher you rank.

There are three main types of links: location, relevance and quality. Every time you sign up for another website you create a type of back link. On an ongoing basis, you need to sign up for local business directories, review sites and mortgage-related websites. You also should make sure you are listed on sites like the Better Business Bureau, local chambers of commerce and other professional associations. Every link gets you one small step closer to your front-page ranking.

Online reviews

In today’s market, online reviews are crucial to your success. Online customers have been trained to look for reviews on almost every transaction they make. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Trip Advisor and many other large successful online companies focus on reviews to help consumers make purchase decisions.

Your online clients will be looking for online reviews about you. In addition, reviews will help you secure that top-three ranking. Toward this end, you should focus on getting reviews on your Google My Business page until you are the top-ranked mortgage professional in your market. Then, when you show up in the three-pack, you will be the top choice among the top three.

A simple flyer explaining how to leave a review on your Google My Business page tucked into customers’ closing documents is often enough to start producing an influx of five-star reviews.

© 2016 Scotsman Guide Media.