One of Rick Segal’s favourite examples about new business ideas is a Blackberry app that would know when you’re in a meeting and silence the alerts and such.  No wonder then that he’d be involved in a startup fund for new Blackberry software:
VentureBeat decided to jump the gun this weekend and post some news that has been floating around lately about a new Blackberry fund. They deleted the post from their blog, but it was still available in Google Reader and in other places and TechCrunch got to it late on Saturday. The new fund is being managed by RBC …read more

Rick Segal of JLA Ventures (JLA Ventures is one of the founders of b5media) is starting his Canadian tour of VC Roundtables starting in Eastern Canada:
April 14th Morning – Halifax NS
April 14th Evening – Moncton NB
April 15th Evening – St John’s NF

Here are the ground rules/information for entrepreneurs who would like to present ideas:

About 2 1/2- 3 hours in length
Informal/Free (super important!)
Small Groups (super important!)
Information on VC/Angels and the process.
Sample Term sheets, documents, business plans, PowerPoints
Example Pitch or Pitches to show what’s interesting/good/bad
Open questions for a good chunk of time. Source: The Post Money Value: VC Roundtable – Block One

Can’t …read more

What’s hot in Canadian tech?  Yeah, a lot, but how can you learn about all the great stuff going on?  At the end of April I think you’ll have your chance to see what’s hot now and what will be hot soon at the Canadian Innovation Exchange in Toronto:
The inaugural Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) is on the calender for April 29 & 30th at the Carlu in Toronto and promises to focus on innovation. The two-day event will feature an innovation marketplace, flash-forward presentations on the state of technology, and facilitated networking opportunities. Key participants from the US and across …read more

You should know, of course, that JLA Ventures is one of b5media’s VC backers (the other is Brightspark).  Now I read Rick Segal not just cause he’s our VC, I was reading him long before that, I read him to get insight into venture capital and entrepreneurship.
This recent post, which I don’t think Rick’s mind is spooky at all–messy, well, who am I to talk, Rick outlines some insights that I think entrepreneurs who are looking for VC funding should read:
There are two ways to answer this. First, is the obvious answer: All things coming in the door are evaluated …read more