Strategie Québecoise de l'entreprenariat: what's in it for startups

I have finally took some time to look at the details of the announcement of the November 15 2012.

http://www.mdeie.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/contenu/publications/administratives/strategies/strategie_entrepreneuriat.pdf (page 14 &43)

If you look properly, its isn't very exiting...lot of noise for not much.

• access to line of credit of max 30K without interest nor warranty
• ability to delay payments of "Fond Local d'investisment"
• Investment with Anges-Quebec which means they might take a little more risk

Lot of the new money is invested in the entrepreneur support programs and to simplify access to money to help entrepreneur buying existing corporations (the boomer generation are starting to sell but few can buy).

Conclusion, lot of new money in the system but at the end, not much for entrepreneurs. Most of it is to sustain the existing system so don't wast to much time of this and focus and launching technology and sales.

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Why startups shouldn't wast time with Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program (CICP)

Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program (CICP) is an attractive program because as it is mentioned in its name, its goal is to help companies start commercialisation of their innovations. The idea is interesting, if your innovation can be beneficial to the Canadian government, they might take the risk to be the first client and will pay for it. If the government is a client, your commercialisation will most likely be way easier by eliminating the egg and chicken problem of getting the first real big client and real revenues faster.

Why this program?

The government is realizing that most product fail at the commercialisation phase. SR&ED is great support to develop innovations but their is little to support commercialisation (i.e: precarn program was closed).

But seriously why this program has been put in place?

There is a rumour that it is related to the Bombardier Aerospace and Embraer government subsidy controversy. Canadian was illegally subsidizing bombardier according to the WTO anti-subsidy policy.

CICP is a legal way to subsidize companies. If you look at the pre-qualified innovations of call 001, you will find bombardier and some other mature companies who might need less commercialisation help then other ones like startups as an example:

https://buyandsell.gc.ca/initiatives-and-programs/canadian-innovation-commercialization-program-cicp/pre-qualified-innovations

Why startups shouldn't waste their time with this program?

According to the selected companies, its seems that Startups shouldn't wast energy on this program and even less if they are from Québec and or have nothing to do with aerospace and military related projects and are startups. If they do so they will most likely be rejected by something like "The bidder’s company does not have the appropriate management team required to move the proposed innovation into commercial markets" which will bring you back the the chicken and egg problem. Freemium is definitely a way better alternative.

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MTL Salon BI quick summary

I went to MTL salon BI on November 8th.

Here is the my headlines:

• Elie Elia: 45% of people are overloaded with data; need actionable information
• Freddy Midi: BI = old decision support systems; reports shouldn't be the end of the process; it is a flow; The future of BI looks like www.netvibes.com;
• Before graphic was the end but now it is the begining (drill down).
• Philippe Nieuwbourg: Since big players have done acquisitions their is no more innovations and price have simply increases; it is a good timing for startups. Visualization is weak...we want minority report interface and it is coming
• Online Analytic Maturity Model: 6 levels by Stephane Hamel : http://immeria.net/oamm/; BI and Webanalytics are merging; diff, web analytics is real-time and accept higher error margin; future is agile & predictive
• For now BI mostly look at the past but the future of BI is finally moving slowly to predictive analysis
• BI clients priorities: Simplicity, cost, quality
• Best BI solutions: QLikView; PowerPivot, SPSS (IBM), Tableau Soft
• People want to bypass IT for BI answers
• Michelle Blanc: disruptive truth about internet marketing
• Wayne Knaggs (Adastra): cloud BI: we are moving from SaaS to IaaS and PaaS (Soft->Infrastructure-> plateform)
• Semantic web: linkedata.org; triple store (RDF) are becoming standards

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IP strategy for tech startups

Most VC & angels want IP in order to consider investing in your startups.

Why: seems a security illusion. If they were really thinking about it, they will ask for industrial secret most of the time. Let me explain:

First, look at some facts:

• 95% of patents are useless (lawyer expensive fees & precious time)
• Patents are most of the time weapons of litigation which result in licences exchanges agreements (why google bought Motorola mobility)
• 50% of patents are invalidated in litigation (thanks David)...so you need a portfolio of patents if you really want to play in that yard
• It takes on average 6 years after patent deposit before it is validated....which means your competitors can copy you easily for many years because your invention will be public ;)..
• You need deep pockets to enforce your patent rights, only big player can play that game

So, if you aren't thinking of been acquired by a very big player or founded by a very deep pocket VC, you are wasting your money, time and are helping your competitors by giving them all your secret recipes and even better, you are paying for it. Isn't that the most inefficient thing you can do?

Btw, you should know that filing is making a deal with government so don't expect efficiency. Last, lawyers are relevant in ambiguity which might explain the patent process.

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Speaking at confoo 2012: Empowering IT with Real Users Analytics

I have been selected to speak at the next confoo web conference about "Empowering IT with Real Users Analytic"




Webapps monitoring landscape is changing. As pointed out by Garnter, IT needs simplified monitoring and Google Analytics can now measure page load times.
As more and more businesses rely on them, techniques such as real time user monitoring, incident detection and root cause analysis have become critical. While been the Holy Grail to users, webapps are a nightmare for engineers as ensuring quality of service becomes more difficult.
More and more companies are starting to realize that they are losing significant revenue, growth and productivity due to down time, high latency and scaling issues with their web applications. Quality of Service guarantees with built-in penalties are becoming the norm, bringing a downside into the equation.
We will present these new problems in detail, followed by a short history of techniques used to measure and estimate the quality of web-based applications. We will review the most popular monitoring technologies, pointing out their pros and cons. Share on Reddit!!!

Startupfest best presentations July 2011

Here are the 5 best presentations that I saw at startupfestival:

1. Jeff Clavier - Founder and Managing Partner - SoftTech VC Starting by the numbers: (The 3 asses rules slides 14: Team/Product/Market)
2. Your first startup: slide 5 & 21: most startups fail because the founders give up
3. SUPER ANGELS, SUPER STARS, AND THE SUPER-SIZED STARTUP MYTH Chris Shipley Cofounder & CEO GuideWired Group
4. Succeeding-with-freemium (how to succeed in converting free subscribers to paying customers) Sean Ellis - Founder & CEO - CatchFree
5. Why not do a startup (basically, do you have the profile): Dave McClure - Investor - 500startups.com

http://www.startupfestival.com/en/speakers/

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appengine unittesting trick

I was looking for the ideal way to run all my unittests on my appengine projects.

Let's define what is ideal:

• http://project.appspot.com/test to run all unittests
• create unittest directly in file it is testing/no need to create unittest file for each file

Solution:

• install gaeunit
• create or move unittest classes directly in file that it is testing
• create /test/project_unittest.py
• import all file containing unittest class in project_unittest.py

What's great with python is that unittest.main() run all unittests that are in the scope which means you simply have to import them and no need to create multiple test files if unittests classes are directly integrated in each files.

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