Hey Entrepreneurs: Win a golden boot!

What do Erin Blaskie and I have in common?  Well, we’re both very good looking, modest, shy, reserved… and we both have a golden boot!  We won them last year at the OCRI Bootstrap awards.  It was a great event hosted by OCRI and local celebrity Entrepreneur Bruce Firestone.

Last year recognized a lot of recognizable, and fast-growing startups including:

Network Hippo (just awesome)
Steward Supreme Vending
Wedding Republic
CrowdWave Games
UCreate Media
BSETC
MartSmart Shopping Network
Social Mention
Shopify

The Bootstrap awards are a great way to celebrate local entrepreneurs who battle it out daily to build their businesses.  If you know an entrepreneur, you would be doing a great honour to them by nominating them for an award.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you should nominate yourself.  It’s a great event and you’ll likely get some of the great benefits that I received by being a part of the event.  Here’s some of the benefits that I received from the event:

• A golden boot!
• Free legal advice that helped us get a cool office space (thanks to Steve Sheppard from Brazeau Seller!)
• A new CFO (met at the event)
• Some great leads (and a couple of new clients)
• Press and social media shout outs
• Helped develop relationships with some great leaders in Ottawa
• Breakfast with Erin Blaskie and Trina Lamarche (no guarantee that you’ll have this opportunity!)

It’s hard running a startup and you deserve to get some recognition.  So take 5 minutes to nominate yourself (or another startup).  It’s worth it.

(Photo credit to Trina Lamarche’s iPhone!)

Travelpod creates another hit with TripWow

Local startup (well, former startup before tripadvisor acquired them) TravelPod founder Luc Levesque has launched another awesome travel app called TripWow – and its pretty awesome!

Tripwow makes video publishing ridiculously easy by taking images and captions from facebook, your computer, Picasa, Flickr or (of course) your Travelpod blog and publishes them in high-quality videos with captions, flags, music, and more.

Luc has demonstrated a knack for seeing the “next big thing” on the web (Travelpod, Traveler IQ) and I think his focus on personal viral videos is no different.  Congrats to Luc and the whole Travelpod team on creating an awesome app!

Check out the quality of the video below and then visit TripWow to create your own.

Showcase: Enhansoft

What is your app?
We have a suite of tools called Enhanced Asset Management (EAM), comprised of:
Warranty Information Reporting (WIR)
Monitor Information Reporting (MIR)
Enhanced Web Reporting (EWR)

Why is it important?
EAM is important to clients to help them better understand their asset management, for example you would think that it would be easy within a Windows environment to know the make, model and serial number of each monitor but there is no easy way to do this. Or how do you determine the warranty status of a group of PCs? This is where Warranty Information Reporting comes into play.

Who are your intended customers
Most of our customers have 1500+ PC/Servers and are using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 ( ConfigMgr / SCCM ) or System Management Server 2003 ( SMS ), many with over 10k PCs and want to understand more in-depth the assets that they manage.

How many people are you?
Currently we are 4 staff and growing.

What makes you happy?
We like working with our customers to help them understand their environment.

Startup Showcase: Mobedia

What is your app?

Mobedia Specializes in developing and deploying, innovative mobile messaging, presence and location based services solutions that empower consumers to stay connected with the most popular services e.g. IM, Email and Social Networks that they are already using on the Internet – but on their mobile phones.

Our first application is All-in-One Mobile Messenger which can be downloaded from our website www.we-buzz.com.  The application allows you to chat with your buddies on MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk, facebook in addition to many services e.g. online translation, news, stock quotes and many others from one application.

Why is it important?

Better management of multiple IM clients from one application. One of the salient features of the application is that it incorporates a translation system, which lets you send messages in different languages. Furthermore, supports e-mail notification (Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail) and can run in the background and notify of new messages.
Being Multi allows us to log on different messaging networks and view all of our contacts in one list, in addition to sending and receiving messages in offline (invisible).

Who are your intended customers?

While our main target is the end user, we also have few solutions that targets operators, content provides and portals.

How many people are you?

The company currently employes 5 individuals and we are hoping to expand to 10 by end of 2010.

What makes you happy?

What really makes us happy as a team is the continuos positive feedback from our end users.

Contact Info:

Mohamed Fouda
www.mobedia.ca
mohamed [dot] fouda [at] mobedia [dot] ca

Startup Ottawa Showcases

If you look down, you’ll see that yesterday I did a showcase on Hello Referrals.  Over the past few months, I’ve notice a lot more companies coming out of the woodwork around town and thought it would be great to give them some exposure into our amazing startup scene. 

So to make that happen, I’d like to start promoting local software startup companies on Startup Ottawa. To do that I "invented" the showcase.  Its really just a short interview so that people can let us know who they are and what they are working on. 

To get showcased, you need to do the following: 

1) Answer the five questions below and provide basic contact info. 

• What is your app?
• Why is it important?
• Who are your intended customers
• How many people are you?
• What makes you happy?

2) Be a software startup in Ottawa.

3) Make your responses informative and not just marketing speak.

4) Have an actual product or beta product that people can try out.

I’ll do my best to post all the showcases that fit the bill.  If you’re not sure if you fit the bill, you don’t – but you can still email me.