The third annual California Cleantech Open business plan compeition kicked-off in San Jose on April 9th, and the next event takes place May 1 at SRI International in Menlo Park.
The May Technology and Entrepreneur Matching Event aims to bring research institutions together with entrepreneurs with a view to productize and market renewable and sustainable technologies.
Kayte Fischer, president of the University of California at Berkeley Nanotechnology Club says that the industry is on the cusp of mass commercialization of various nanotechnologies, after 10 to 20 years of laboratory work. The Nanotechnology Club’s 2008 forum focused on technologies about to released to the mass market.
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The Alberta California Venture Channel opened up registration for it’s 2008 Silicon Valley Entrepreneur School & Technology Investment Road Show.
AC Venture partners expertise and pools of capital with investors and entrepreneurs across California and Alberta. Sponsors include Ernst & Young, Price Waterhouse Coopers, the Angel Capital Network and the Keiretsu Forum.
Not for thirty years has the Canadian dollar traded so strongly against the U.S. dollar. The appreciation of the Canadian dollar signifies a robust economy, and unlike the U.S. dollar, the Canadian dollar has maintained stability with the Euro in the past 7 years.
Consultiq stopped by at AdTech in San Francisco yesterday, and spent time chatting with, among many other companies, Ted Murphy, Founder and CEO of Izea, the parent company of SocialSpark, a new sponsored post blog advertising platform.
We’ve added a paper to the new publications page. This paper discusses options for young companies that wish to penetrate the Chinese market.
At the eBig.org Venture/Startup SIG meeting last night, Phill Cullen of Acqua Consulting explained the importance of managing and measuring customer satisfaction as a means to increase customer loyalty and drive revenue. Drawing on his Peoplesoft experience, Cullen outline a nine point framework for tracking customer satisfaction. Even young firms that can’t afford a customer sat. consultant can use tools like Net Promoter to start tracking and improving customer satisfaction.
We caught up with Rose Riskind, organizer of Startup Talent Match, at her health club, where a very competitive game of racquetball provided an auditory metaphor for the challenge that young tech companies face in finding, recruiting and retaining top-quality talent.
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Riskind, a former executive recruiter and now founder of her own venture startup was uniquely placed to see the need for a monthly forum focused on connecting talent to early-stage companies. Her first forum meeting at a cafe on The Embarcadero in San Francisco drew a substantial crowd, many members of which stayed on discussing opportunities well after the meeting was officially closed. Rose is currently scheduling a new meeting in April at a new location.
You can connect to the Startup Talent Match here: http://juststart.meetup.com/16/
Step number one in getting your cleantech innovation adopted by producers in the booming Alberta, Canada oil and natural gas industry: Introduce it to one of the many Engineering Procurement and Construction (EPC) firms supplying Alberta producers. Step two: Go to Edmonton.
So says Amanda Babichuk, Investment Attraction Manager for the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Babichuk spoke at the Canadian Consulate office in San Francisco at an “Insider’s Breakfast – Opportunities in Canada.” Alberta’s economy is booming with crude oil trading at near record highs, and oil producers there are keen on clean technologies to minimize the environmental impacts of the production of synthetic crude from Alberta tar sands oil while maintaining Canada’s place as the number one supplier of oil to the United States.
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Cleantech startups should identify EPC firms specializing in Geologic and Petroleum Engineering that are supplying the Canadian producers such as SunCor Energy and Syncrude Canada and then reach out to them directly or through the EEDC and then ultimately make one or several trips up to Alberta to demonstrate commitment.
Startups should also contact TEC Edmonton, a not-for-profit joint venture of the University of Alberta and the Edmonton Economic Development Corporation (EEDC) that helps inventors and entrepreneurs access expertise, management and financing for their technology venture. Entrepreneurs can also contact the Alberta California Venture Channel which is aimed at matching investors and entrepreneurs from Alberta and California.
A brochure produced by the Bay Area Economic Forum and part of the handouts at the event noted that from 2002 to 2006, “approximately 20 Canadian venture firms invested in Silicon Valley, in deals totaling nearly $230 million.” And Barbara Giacomin, Canadian Consul and Trade Commissioner in the San Francisco office, noted that Canadian Direct Investment Abroad (CDIA) – over CAN$500 billion in 2006 – is on the increase, with the United States receiving the biggest share, at 43%.
Bentzel’s staccato writing style and flippant attitude is a little tough to get used to at first, but this is excellent reading for anyone selling software these days. Bentzel dismisses chasm theory, but his ‘body armour’ of compound services around the software sounds a lot like Whole Product Theory. Nice that he also recognizes that Cisco Systems is a software vendor – not a hardware vendor – at its core, and groups them with Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle etc.
ISBN-10: 1419649809
ISBN-13: 978-1419649806
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