Company profile

Tectorian of the Week: TinyMob Games

April 11, 2014 by Nevin Thompson

Our Tectorian of the Week for April 11 is TinyMob Games. …You may have heard of them in Tech Cruch.

TinyMob unveiled their first game earlier today at the massive PAX East Boston gaming conference. It’s hard to believe TinyMob, led by Tectorians Chris Hoefgen, Alex Mendelev and Jamie Toghill, opened their studio last fall, just a few months ago.

Besides getting critical home-town recognition in a glowing Times Colonist article today, TinyMob and its new game is also the subject of a longer Tech Crunch profile published just this morning.

Tiny Realms, a Unity-based real-time strategy game for iPad and iPhone, looks like it’s going to be awesome, and it’s very cool that a Victoria-based company is creating eye candy that appeals to millions of gamers around the world.

The game lets you build worlds, assemble armies, wage wars, and build empires.

Tiny Realms is also generating a lot of exciting in a mobile games industry always seeking innovative ways to remain competitive and profitable.

“We have content and features planned out for the next 12 months post launch that not only add content, but will also expose more of the underlying mythology we’ve created for our world,” Mendelev says in the Tech Crunch interview. “The way we bring this to life is through player events actually having an impact on the fabric of the Tiny Realms universe. Player actions will leave indelible marks on the game we’ve created that other players will get to experience, too.”

The team unveiled the name, images and a trailer of game play at the PAX East Boston gaming conference. The finished product will be released later this spring.

Tectorian(s) of the Week

February 28, 2014 by Tectoria

Tectorian of the Week

February 14, 2014 by Tectoria

Y-Combinator backs Sendwithus

Joining the likes of Reddit, Dropbox, and Songkick, sendwithus is now a member of “The most prestigious program for budding digital entrepreneurs”, Y-Combinator.

Twice a year, Y-Combinator invests a small amount of money ($14-20k + an $80k note) in a large number of startups (most recently 52). The startups move to Silicon Valley for 3 months, during which they work intensively with them to get the company into the best possible shape and refine their pitch to investors.

During their time in the Accelerate Tectoria program, Matt Harris and Brad Van Vugt found themselves repeatedly having to change a bunch of email templates and wanting to test different variants. What they found was that there was no real technology in place to do so, “Larger companies will usually build their own systems for this”, they explain.

What resulted was a mission to bring optimization and A/B testing to marketers and anyone else sending out targeted promotional emails which led to the birth of sendwithus.

Sendwithus created a website where customers can select from pre-made email templates or upload their own, log in to their preferred email provider, and then set up A/B tests and drip campaigns. Customers also have access to analytics showing how variants and campaigns are performing.

Harris said Sendwithus is focused on “transactional emails” (i.e., the emails that are sent to specific users at specific times, usually to accomplish a specific task) as opposed to newsletters or other broad campaigns. Just managing all the different templates and automatically sending the right one out at the right time is important to the company’s customers, he added.

Founded 11 months ago, Sendwithus already processes more than 1 million emails a day, he added, and its customers include 8tracks, uSell, SuperRewards and App.net. Pricing starts at $19 a month and there’s also a free version for emailing up to 100 customers.

Links

Tectorian of the Week

February 6, 2014 by Tectoria

On December 28th, fellow Tectorian and entrepreneur, Dylan Benson lost his wife to a sudden hemorrhage of blood to her brain. At the time, she was 22 weeks pregnant.

Physicians are attempting to keep Robyn’s body alive for up to 7 more weeks (potentially until she is at or near 34 weeks pregnant). The thought process behind this is that if they can keep her body alive, it will give their unborn son (his name will be Iver Cohen Benson) a good chance of surviving a c-section at that time. The doctors have said that he now has higher than an 80% of survival and that increases with every day that passes. There are roughly only 30 published medical records of this type of thing being attempted, but so far, amazingly, they have been successful.

Most of us know Dylan very well. He is one of the good guys that works hard and contributes his time and energy to the local tech community.   It was his idea to bring Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian to Victoria for his keynote speech at last year’s Thinklanida festival. HE has also stepped up an organizer for the popular Tectoria ‘Startup Meetup’ networking group. Since joining local e-commerce company RevenueWire in December 2011, Dylan has also gone on to co-found his own online gift-exchange company called somethinginthemail.com.

Dylan and his family are enduring the unthinkable and we encourage you all to read his story in his own words and please support Baby Iver by donating to the trust fund in his name. This story has now touched the hearts of thousands and recently been widely covered in the media but please consider sharing with your contacts and social circles.

Tectorian of the Week

January 31, 2014 by Tectoria

United Engineering has been around a long time – 93 years. They started out as a small repair shop, eventually grew to serve local industry and became heavily involved with forestry. As the economy changed so did their focus as they started working on structural steel projects. United has always distinguished themselves from the competition by being leaders in technology. In 1991 they added two state of the art machines that distinguished them from other steel and machine shops locally and abroad. They were just getting warmed up for a major capital purchase 10 years later in 2001 when they acquired a CNC burning table and started stocking their own steel. Today Victoria based United Engineering excels in steel fabrication and machining.

What do they fabricate?
United does a lot of work on marine related projects (barge abutments, steel stairs, floating leads for BC Ferries) but recently they made the news for their role in helping Vancouver-based Flyzone Bodyflight become so successful. While Bodyflight is based out of Vancouver – virtually all of their manufacturing happens right here in Victoria. Their product, Flyzone, gives extreme sports enthusiasts the opportunity to experience human flight. That’s right: human flight. They do this by using a patented mobile vertical wind tunnel that gives a person the sensation of sky diving without the flight–or the parachute. The wind tunnels are 10 feet in diameter and channel winds of up to 200 kph that virtually lift a person off of the ground. The “Vancouver Sun” calls it “skydiving without the terror.” As you can imagine putting together this type of machinery and making it safe, is a complicated engineering problem.

Local Benefits
United Engineering currently employs 30 people in full time positions. The FlyZone project by itself involves the manufacturing of a semi stationary multi-level units that are suitable for military applications, family fun and corporate team building. These units, which can be outfitted to be open air or closed chamber, cost about $1M each with 80% of the components being sourced from Canadian suppliers. All of those components have to be assembled and fortunately, the majority of assembly happens right here in Victoria. United Engineering and other local engineering firms have been signaled out for their role in making Flyzone a success.

To learn more about FlyZone BodyFlight, visit their website or Facebook page. To learn more about United Engineering check out their webpage.

Local Start-Up Whips Their Tech Into Shape

January 10, 2014 by thestevehof

Eco-Fit was one of the first Start-Ups to enter our accelerator program.. They build a custom hardware and software solution that is sold all over the world and employ people right here in Victoria. Their modules combine with the cardio fitness equipment at your local gym to make your workouts fun, social and competitive with people across the globe.

Their first major hurdle was simple; how do they demonstrate that their fitness modules, which attach to things like treadmills and stationary bikes, can work on a large scale in a massive gym? The challenge – the interference caused by so many wireless transmitters & receivers all in one place operating at the same time. The solution – building a custom wireless protocol designed to eliminate the wireless interference issue.

What you are seeing in the above picture is their testing boards that prove, unequivocally, that their modules operate at 100% efficiency even when in extremely close proximity to one another. All together you are looking at 149 modules, all powered and all sending and receiving data effortlessly. Admittedly the VIATeC Accelerator community wasn’t entirely pleased with this solution. We wanted to see a ‘testing facility’ with 149 pieces of exercise equipment, sauna, steam room, roman bath, massage room, etc.

While we didn’t quite get what we wanted, Eco-Fit did set up a gym of sorts that is being enthusiastically used by ‘beta-testers’.

Want Some Tectorian Support?

December 6, 2013 by thestevehof

Even Spartacus Needed a Little Help from his Friends

Searching for ways to have your story heard throughout the Tectoria community and beyond?

Having trouble making a dent on Twitter, Facebook, and other channels?

Your friends at VIATeC are here to help. We want to scream your story from the top of Mt. Finlayson, but we can’t do that until we hear the story ourselves.

So, how do you go about making this happen?

Help us Help You

Between this tectoria.wordpress blog, our This Week in Tectoria Newsletter, the VIATeC E-Bulletin, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Flickr, we have thousands upon thousands of people to tell your story to. That doesn’t even include all of our offline channels.

So Send us your Stories Already

Keep in mind, however, that what may be a story to you, could sound like a sales pitch to someone else; and the quickest way to lose an audience is to continuously scream sales pitches at them.

So How do you Know if you Have a Story or Not?

We’re going to keep this very simple. Especially at first, just err on the side of sending us too much stuff. We’ll wade through everything each week and determine what we feel will work the best.

Lets be clear about something though, by writing this post the way I have, I’m setting myself up for a great deal more work, haha. Now that’s fine, and could actually be quite wonderful, as long as it serves a purpose.

While we’re here to ensure that all your great Tectoria stories are given the audience they deserve, behaving like the startup who cried wolf by repeatedly sending us SELL SELL SELL material, is a sure fire way to get your stories to the bottom of the pile.

A Few Key Points to Remember

Starting this very second, send any stories / ideas to me, Steve Hof, at shof@viatec.ca
For blog posts, the stories need to be especially compelling, or motivated by a clear intention to help the Tectoria cause.
If you’re on Twitter, mention @VIATeC in a post and include the hashtag #I_AM_TECTORIAN
If you’re on Facebook, post to the VIATeC wall so we know you’re there.
Don’t want to do either of those things? Fine, be difficult. At the very least, however, send me an email listing the channels you’re on and the best ways we can support you.
There’s no ‘h’ in Tectoria. It’s the little things people.

Is there something I’ve missed? Do you have a mind blowing, or even slightly above average idea for helping us help you?

Post your ideas, questions, and concerns to the comments below. Lets hash it out.

Okay Tectorians, the ball’s in your court.

I mean, even Rod Tidwell figured it out eventually.

Help me……… Help you.

by Steve ‘Soon to be Very Busy‘ Hof

It’s the Thoughtful Gifts that Count

November 7, 2013 by thestevehof

Ever tried to meet your hero? No? Well how hard did you really try? Local entrepreneur and proud Tectorian, Dylan Benson, decided he wanted to meet his hero. His hero just happens to be Alexis Ohanian, and for those of you living under a rock this past decade, Alexis is the co-founder of reddit, one of the most successful and notorious websites in the world. Dylan, however, managed to combine just the right amount of moxie, skill and random acts of kindness to make the meeting a reality.

Roughly 3 ½ years ago Dylan started spending time on reddit, quickly becoming involved enough to create subreddits with his friend Aaron to showcase their favourite content. As Dylan got more and more into the site, he realized its potential for social and community minded interactions.

Perhaps the most compelling of these social interactions came during Dylan’s first Reddit Secret Santa Experience. What’s a reddit Secret Santa Experience you ask? Well, Dylan was given a name, an address to send the gift to, and nothing else. Most people would have simply chosen a generic gift, and while he soon realized the difficulties involved with buying a gift for a complete stranger, he decided to press on. Dylan spent an inordinate amount of time combing through years of posts this anonymous user had made. Eventually, he came across one of this man’s posts detailing the childhood memory of losing his beloved Casey Jones action figure while out one day with his mom. Perfect. Dylan found the action figure online and quickly sent it along to his Secret Santa recipient. He was proud to have found a somewhat relevant gift, but had no idea what was about to happen.

Not too many days later, Dylan received a phone call describing a tearful conversation the recipient had just had with his sister. It turns out there was far more to this story than Dylan had been made aware of….. The man’s mother had since passed away, but that day still held a strong memory for him, not as the afternoon he lost his toy, but rather as a testament of his mother’s love for him. He could barely put into words how touched he was, and how much the small gift would forever mean to him. That day, two people who had never met in person, sealed a lasting friendship.

The Secret Santa Story doesn’t end there, however. During his quest to find a meaningful gift, Dylan came across numerous users who were frustrated with online gift giving sites. The sites seemed to offer very little assistance in finding gifts appropriate and meaningful to those they were purchased for. Dylan, an entrepreneur at heart, recognized the opportunity at hand. That moment sparked the creation of SomethingInTheMail.com, a successful Tectoria based website owned by Dylan and his two partners that strives to produce ‘The Ultimate Secret Santa Experience – Year Round.’

Shortly after the Secret Santa experience, Dylan joined the Alexis Ohanian Fan Club. And while he realizes how goofy it sounds for a grown man to join a fan club, Dylan did so because of how engaging an online presence Alexis was. (Often responding to fans, and involving himself in their conversations) Dylan received his Welcome to the Fan Club email, and responded in a unique way, mentioning a past blog post of Alexis’ surrounding a grilled cheese sandwich. Sure enough, Alexis responded to Dylan’s email personally.

Inspired, Dylan approached Alexis’ agent and began negotiating terms regarding a possible speaking engagement here in Victoria. Dylan also reached out to VIATeC’s own Dan Gunn for assistance. Dan was excited about the opportunity of bringing Alexis to Victoria for the Thinklandia festival, and swiftly stepped in to help. Together they were able to secure Alexis as a speaker, and to top it all off, Dylan was given the honour of introducing him.

Never one to miss an opportunity, Dylan used the ten or so minutes he had with Alexis to pitch the Startup community here in Tectoria as an ideal extension of ‘Small Empires’ (the name of a show Alexis hosts.) Needless to say, Alexis liked the idea and agreed to keep a dialogue going. (Dylan continues to work with Brandon Gains on making this project a reality, and we’ll keep you posted with any new information.)

Dylan’s story showcases the benefits of perseverance, creativity, and ingenuity. Thankfully, however, the Tectoria community is chalk full of similar tales, so we encourage you to swing by this blog whenever your day calls for a little extra inspiration.

By Steve Hof

Your Free PR Opportunity Awaits

November 7, 2013 by thestevehof

Hello People of Tectoria!

Your friends at VIATeC have decided to start sharing all of the great stories that Tectoria has to offer. Whether you’re a startup entrepreneur, an Accelerator program mentor, a college student with a grand idea, a teacher with an inspirational tale, or simply a Victoria resident who’s been positively influenced by our number 1 sector, LET US KNOW!!!!

How do you let us know? Great question. In a perfect world you’d type up a 150 – 650 word article, attach it and a few pictures to an email and send it to us. From time to time, however, we will have time to interview people and write the articles for them. Did I emphasize ‘from time to time’ enough? But seriously folks, we want to promote you, your business, and how you fit into the Tectoria story. YOU, however, have to take the first step.

So, if you’d like some free PR, please send your stories and pics to me, Steve Hof, at steve@pikomarketing.com. PIKO does a lot of marketing work for VIATeC and our offices are actually here in VIATeC’s Accelerator Building at 2659 Douglas St. So next time you’re in the neighbourhood, feel free to come introduce yourself and ask us any further questions you may have.

Cheers! Now let the storytelling begin!

by Steve Hof

MediaCore keeps it simple …on a global scale

May 14, 2013 by richardd

In the latest of her series of Victoria company profiles, MaryLou Wakefield meets MediaCore – a media library that provides schools, higher education institutions and businesses with an easy way to share and manage educational content.

There’s no doubt about it, the company that wants to transform education through video and mobile technology is on a roll. MediaCore launched in 2009 and since then has grown from four staff to 20. In the next two years they plan to double or triple that. Add to that, new investors, global clients, and a number of exciting projects on the horizon, not to mention winning 10 awards in 10 months.

But MediaCore’s young CEO, Stuart Bowness, seems unfazed by the attention. “The awards are great, but what we’re really focused on are student outcomes. That’s what really matters to us,” he says. “Getting feedback like this from Royal Veterinary College in the UK is really exciting.”

We regularly upload videos of technical procedures that we do with animals on farms, and this enables the viewer to gain a real personalized experience. One of the RVC’s courses includes a lambing placement and students can review what they have learned by playing back the video. Students can also access this material before going to help with lambing, to give them an idea of the procedure in advance. Hundreds of people have used this video and it is available for anyone to access.

In contrast to a lot of technology in the education space, MediaCore wants to assure customers they’ll get a product that does exactly what it’s supposed to do. He acknowledges that it’s significantly more challenging to build something simple because that takes a lot more decision-making. With the philosophy that ‘people who use software are real people’ to guide their decision-making, “we focus on what our customer’s core needs are and what our product needs to do, and stick to that,” he says.

VIATeC: What problem are you solving for people?

MediaCore: There are a few things happening right now that are very challenging. Education on a global scale is undergoing huge change and we’re at a crossroads. Governments don’t have money to spend on education, and, huge numbers of people in developing countries such as India and Africa want access to education. The system as it is now just doesn’t scale well. There’s been a big move over the past few years to provide education online because it gives more people access, the cost per student is lower, and, research shows that when online education is combined with video, the education is significantly more effective. That’s where MediaCore comes in. We provide a simple, reliable platform for institutions and businesses to harness the power of video for their education and training needs. We provide a platform for any school or university to create an online media library that’s private, secure and enables a great learning experience. The pedagogy models that teachers regularly use alongside our software include peer-to-peer learning, blended learning, flipped learning and inquiry-based learning — all of which offer different ways of teaching in new an innovative ways that make better use of instructor time while increasing student outcomes.

VIATeC: What are you excited about right now?
MediaCore: A few things actually. I’m really passionate about a project we’re working on to create Africa’s first online university. It will give people across that country access to education for a fraction of the cost of a traditional education ($500/yr. as opposed to $5000/yr.) and, it will deliver programs designed to specifically meet employment needs in various regions of the country. We’ve also been invited to make a presentation about a pilot program for up to 500 schools in Hong Kong. We’re excited about our progress in China with the first schools there starting to adopt our platform, and we’re generally excited about the response we’re getting from Australia, the Middle East and a few other countries. At the end of the day, you want to spend your life working on really interesting things you feel are making a significant difference in society and that’s really what we’re trying to do.

VIATeC: Who works at MediaCore?  
MediaCore: We’ve got 2 offices and 20 people who work at MediaCore. At our London (UK) office we’ve built a great sales, marketing, and business development team (headed by Allan Greenberg, previously with Apple Education’s Higher Education business in Europe and Asia) and we also have two engineers there as well. In our Victoria (Canada) office we’ve located the majority of our product team who are led by Nathan Wright (CTO) and Anthony Theocharis (Chief of Engineering). Overall, we’ve got some brilliant minds who are really passionate about solving big problems in education and making a difference on a day-to-day basis.

VIATeC: What’s the best thing about working at MediaCore?

MediaCore: We have terrific talent here and insanely smart people love working with other insanely smart people. They also love solving really interesting problems and we’ve got both of those. After that, we have great policies around flex hours and working from home, a really lovely office space with comfortable couches and a kitchen, and we keep company with a very friendly dog named Tucker. We also do events as a team a number of times a year which include sailing and ski trips – we just all really enjoy spending time together.

VIATeC: What’s the value of being part of the high tech community in Victoria?

MediaCore: Being part of the VIATeC community is a great way to meet other CEOs and take advantage of some mentorship opportunities. It’s a good way to build awareness of your organization in the ecosystem. The VIATeC Job Board is terrific in terms of spreading the word about job opportunities in the community as well.

VIATeC: Where do you see the community going in 2 -5 years?

MediaCore: I feel we all need to look beyond just creating amazing companies. It’s not enough to have a few standout successes if there’s no broader engagement. We need to look at building an amazing ecosystem here in Victoria. In San Francisco for example, large companies mentor mid-sized ones, and they in turn mentor smaller ones. They have accelerators, incubators, co-working spaces and other programs. Granted, that all takes time to build and a lot more than just one group of people moving it forward. We also have to think about becoming global players. The fact is, that it’s faster to fly to the Valley, than it is to take the ferry to Vancouver. That should be on every CEO’s mind.

Update June, 2013: Stuart Bowness was named Executive of the Year at the 2013 VIATeC Awards. Congratulations Stuart!

MaryLou Wakefield