Monthly Archive for October, 2009

Yes To A Stronger Venture Capital Foundation By Building On Success Stories

Published
by
Isabelle Poirier
on October 30, 2009
in Author-Isabelle Poirier, Economic Development and Metrics
. 1 Comment

No one will dispute the fact that in Canada, “small companies die due to lack of funding”.  In the article, “Canada needs a stronger venture capital foundation to build on” in yesterday’s edition of The Montreal Gazette, David Crane raises our attention on weaknesses identified in a recent study on venture capital conducted by The Impact Group. The study is based on a sample size of 18-high tech firms and it does raise a good question, “Do venture capital investors do enough to mentor the companies?  Do they do enough to help build the companies?”

It’s certainly a question that should be examined in the near future. Innovation is nothing that you can stop and it can take place when times are difficult.  It’s common wisdom that, when times are tough, innovative companies can continue to invest in new products or services, explore new market opportunities to break new ground and differentiate themselves from the competition when the good times return.

Nothing is always as bad as it looks :-). I would like to share with you some interesting information on the impact of the venture capital on the Canadian economy. Last year, E&B DATA conducted an impact study for Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association. To bring an optimistic outlook to your day on this issue, please note the following :

  • In 2007, venture capital-backed technology companies generate close to 150,000 jobs in Canada (1.3% of all private sector employees) and 1% of Canadian GDP.
  • Between 1996 and 2007, venture capital investors financed 2,175 technology companies in Canada. 1,740 of those were operating in Canada in 2008. In addition, prior to 1996, venture capital investors financed 15 companies that are still operating and have sales larger than $50 million in 2008.
  • On average, these 1,740 companies had sales of $10.5 million and employment of 47 direct jobs each. They are a mix of small, medium and large companies.

In aggregate, they generated sales of $18.3 billion.

  • $15.4 billion in ICT
  • $1.9 billion in Life Sciences
  • $1.0 billion in Other Technologies

It is good and it is a sample of performance indicators that the venture capital community (VC) can continue to improve on.

The lesson to be learned is that when times are difficult, it’s even more important for the VC community the be responsive to the needs of innovative companies (start-up and maturing companies).

Are Canadian venture capitalists proactively seeking new deals? In this unperfect world, well some actually do. Just last week, Celtic House Venture Partners and Ventures West led a financing round of $10 M for Fresco Microchip. Established in 2004 and active in Canada and in the US, Fresco’s manufactures mixed-signal and digital signal processing integrated circuits (ICs).

We certainly do need more good news to convey us that Canadian venture capitalists can secure sustainable development in the high tech sector and I hope to read more and more press releases in the near future. Can Canadian venture capitalists take on this challenge? Are you confident that they will ?

Site Selection Intelligence With Bing Maps

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 29, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Economic Intelligence, Internet tools and Investment Attraction
. 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, we introduced Google Street View as a means to collect information for site selectors in terms of location details of possible sites.  To provide a balance view of such mapping tools, here is a look at Bing Maps.

Using Bing Maps is pretty straight forward.  Simply plug in the address that you are interested in and let Bing Maps do the rest.  Bing Maps will first provide you with a general map overview with the specific location identified with arrow as seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1:A general map overview for 6100 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec

Bing Map gives you 5 different option in which to view the specific location on the map such as:

  • Road
  • Aerial
  • Bird’s Eye
  • Labels
  • Traffic

Figure 2 illustrates the bird’s eye view for 6100 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec.

Figure 2: Bird’s eye view for 6100 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec.

Similar to Google Street View, Bing Maps offers navigational control toolbox to move around the map.  The toolbox is located  in the top left hand corner of the page.

Tools such as Bing Maps and Google Street View are handy to have especially on a website that is dedicated for investment attraction.  This kind of functionality would allow site selectors to conduct online research regarding available locations to expand in a region with the surrounding infrastructure.

Bing Maps is available at http://www.bing.com/maps

Google Introduces Real-Time Search

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 28, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Internet tools, Web 2.0 and Web 2.0 Search
. 0 Comments

Google has entered the market of real-time search without making a big deal nor a fancy new search interface.  If you blink quickly, you may miss the search option for content on social media platforms or Web 2.0 applications.

As enter your keyword(s) in Google and see the first page of result, click on the “Show options”  link located below the search box.  The link is highlighted in yellow in Figure 1 posted below.

Figure 1: Google Search Query For “Economic Development” For Real-Time Results
Please Click On Image To Enlarge

Once the link is clicked on, Google provides the option to access results by:

  • Source (ie, video, blogs, reviews, forums)
  • Time period (ie, Any time, Past hour, Past 24 hours, Past week, Past year, Specific date range)
  • Relevancy or date
  • Visited pages or Not yet visited

These options are available on the lefthand side of the result page.  The image below highlights the links to the options.

Figure 2: Google Search Real-Time Search Options
Please Click On Image To Enlarge

To access the real-time results, click on one of the links related to a time period.  In the case of the search query for “economic development”, clicking on “Past Hour” will provide hits from news sites and blogs as seen in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Google Search Real-Time Search Results For Keyword Search, “Economic Development”
Please Click On Image To Enlarge

If the Past 24 hours option was selected, chances are that you will see relevant hits from Twitter.

Google is available at www.google.com

Economic Development 2.0 With SlideShare

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 26, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Investment Attraction, Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 Strategy
. 1 Comment

E&B DATA’s benchmark study, Web 2.0 And Business Attraction: Canadian Cities Online Marketing Index examined what large Canadian cities were doing in terms of the different social media tools for economic development, precisely to promote their cities for investment attraction.  Best practices of the use of tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr were presented.

One tool that was omitted by the cities was SlideShare which is a pretty useful Web 2.0 or economic development 2.0 tool.

SlideShare allows individuals to upload presentations and documents with the intent of sharing the content with others.  You may consider it to be the “YouTube for Powerpoint presentations”.

Conducting search on SlideShare with the keyword, “economic development”, you can discover an informative presentation by The Chesterfield County Department of Economic Development in Virgina, USA.

The presentation can serve as an effective and efficient information package for site selectors and potential investors in the region.  Slides # 34 to #38 are quite powerful when it comes to promoting Chesterfield.

To view the complete presentation, please click here

SlideShare is available at http://www.slideshare.net,

Twitter Search With CrowdEYE

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 23, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Internet tools and Web 2.0 Search
. 0 Comments

Many wonder the benefits of searching Twitter for economic development purposes.  For some, Twitter is an example of a platform to search for news articles that may not be indexed by search engines.  In addition, queries on Twitter allows individuals to get a sense of opinions on a variety of topics.  Of course, using the internal search tool on Twitter is advised however; there is an option available.

CrowdEYE permits online researchers to submit queries to obtain results in real-time.

Figure 1 presents the results from CrowdEYE for the keyword search, “economic development”

Figure 1: Results for “economic development” on CrowdEYE
Please click on image to enlarge

The result page is structured along the lines of :

  • Time Span - The tool will supply results from 12 hour, 1-day, 2-day and 3-day time periods
  • Most Popular Links - Links that were posted on Twitter along with the keywords
  • Tweets - The actual tweets or “messages” that were posted containing the keywords
  • Related Queries - Access to any similar searches that were done by others on CrowdEYE

These four elements are highlighted in blue in the image above.

CrowdEYE is another web 2.0 search tool similar to Collecta, OneRiot and Addictomatic that might be on Google’s and Microsoft’s acquisition list as the market for social media search tools beginnings to heat up in a hurry.

CrowdEYE is available at http://www.crowdeye.com/

Converting Your PDF Files To MS-Word Files

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 21, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith and Internet tools
. 0 Comments

Here is a quick tip for individuals that are always looking for a way to turn a .pdf file into a MS-Word file or a RTF document.

PDF to Word is an online service which permits you to submit a .pdf document and within a few hours, receive a Microsoft Word document.

Transferring a PDF into a MS-Word document be done in three steps:

1) Upload the .pdf document to the PDF to Word website
2) Select the format in which you would like the document to be converting into - .doc or .rtf
3) Enter an email address that the document will be sent to

The service is free.

nitro PDF, the creator of PDF to Word, also offers PDF to Excel for those who wish to go from a PDF to a MS-Excel sheet.

PDF to Word is available at http://www.pdftoword.com/

Conversation Search With BackType

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 19, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Economic Intelligence, Web 2.0 and Web 2.0 Search
. 0 Comments

Search engines such as Google and Bing have been late arriving to the party when it comes to real time search capabilities.  Time will only time on whether or not these big players will buy up little niche players such as Samepoint or itpints when it comes to web 2.0 search applications.

In the meanwhile, online researchers can be content with another conversational search tool called BackType.

BackType allows users to find relevant content on blog applications and others social networking websites in real time.

Figure 1 presents the simple search interface of BackType.

Figure 1: Index page of BackType

Using the keywords, “foreign direct investment” to test BackType provides the results as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Results for “foreign direct investment”
Please click on image to enlarge

Highlighted in yellow are the number of relevant tweets that BackType has found on Twitter.

As of October 13th, 2009, the advanced search function for the tool was not online.

BackType is available at http://www.backtype.com

The Importance Of Monitoring Capital Investments in Your Industry? – Case 1

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 16, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence and Economic Intelligence
. Closed

Last week, the notion of tracking capital investments in your industry was introduced.  An abundance of details can be collected about the sector, competitors and various investment projects.  To demonstrate this, consider the following case scenario.

As one of several competitors in the energy sector, you are interested in knowing the level of foreign direct investment flowing into Canada from specific countries in 2008 and 2009.

Using information from E&B DATA’s Information Observatory, the following details are available:

Within the past 22 months, foreign direct investment in the energy sector in Canada originated from the following top five countries.

  • France
  • Germany
  • Spain
  • United Kingdom
  • United States

Figure 1 presents that the majority of the investments in the sector came from the United Kingdom with 46%.


Figure 1: Source of FDI in Canada for energy sector in 2008-2009 by percentage

Drilling down further into the data reveals that some of the investments from the United Kingdom were made by TCI Renewables Ltd. and REG Ltd. (Renewable Energy Generation) via their Canadian subsidiaries - Air Energy TCI, Venterre and AIM PowerGen Corporation. Below is a sample of the announcements made by these investors.

These companies were contacted to validate the amount of the investment that was made and the number of jobs that were created.

Next week’s case:  As a major competitor to Xstrata, you would like to investigate the number and the type of investments (ie, new facility, expansion, modernization) that the company has made during the past three years.

Site Selection Intelligence With Google Street View

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 15, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Economic Intelligence and Investment Attraction
. 0 Comments

Here is a practical tip for site selection professionals and key decision makers for finding a location a new facility when it comes to investment attraction.

Google Street View is a neat tool that allows you to see images at specific address and the surrounding area from a street level view.  The images provided by Google are fairly recent.

The application is very easy to use and can be done in 4 steps.

1. Log onto Google Maps
2. Enter the address of the location that is under investigation. (Be sure to add the city along with the address)
3. When Google provides a general map of the area, place your mouse on the orange stick figure located in the top left hand corner and drag the mouse to the point on the map indicated by the red balloon labeled with an “A”.  Figure 1 and Figure 2 illustrates this process for the address 6200 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec.

Figure 1: Stick figure highlighted in yellow to be dragged to Point A on the map, highlighted in green.
Please click on image to enlarge

Figure 2: A street view of 6200 St. Jacques in Montreal, Quebec
Please click on image to enlarge

4. Once you have accessed the image, you are able to zoom in and out to have 360 degree view the existing infrastructure around the specific location.  This is done by using the navigation tool highlight in blue in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Illustration of the navigation toolbar of Google Street View

The idea of using Google Street View for site selection purposes will no doubt provide professionals with a time saving tool and a key resource to gather location information without stepping outside whether it to go across the street or around the world.

To begin using Google Street View, please click here

itpints…Another Real-Time Search Engine

Published
by
Ian Smith
on October 13, 2009
in Author-Ian Smith, Competitive & Internet Intelligence, Internet tools, Web 2.0 and Web 2.0 Search
. 0 Comments

Another day, another real-time search tool to add to your competitive intelligence research toolkit.

itpints allows you to submit keyword(s) to search for relevant content on social networking platforms and blogs.  Figure 1 below illustrates a test for a query using the keywords, “Gourmet Magazine“, the very popular cuisine magazine that has ceased publication two weeks ago by Condé Nast.

Figure  1: Results of search for “Gourmet Magazine” on itpints
Please click on image to enlarge

By browsing through the results, one can see that the tool pulls content from such Web 2.0 applications as:

  • Twitter
  • Plurk
  • Facebook
  • Friendfeed

Any relevant content found by itpints on Digg and blogs will be presented as an abstract as seen in Figure 2.

Figure  2: Abstracts from Digg and a blog for keyword search, “Gourmet Magazine”
Please click on image to enlarge

The beta version of itpints can found at www.itpints.com

Tell us how itpints compares with Samepoint, OneRiot and Collecta.