Wavefront Presents Rogers Ventures Matchmaking Session

EVENT DETAILS

Date: Monday, August 23, 2010
Location: Wavefront Offices, 1055 W Hastings St, Suite 1450, Vancouver

SUMMARY

Wavefront is hosting a matchmaking session in Vancouver on August 23rd for Canadian entrepreneurs and innovators to meet one-on-one with representatives from Rogers Ventures. From cloud computing to next generation digital media to machine to machine (M2M), Rogers Ventures focuses on investing in companies that are enabled by broadband wireline and wireless technology.

This is a great opportunity for wireless and new media startups looking for Seed or Series A funding. On average, Rogers Ventures invests $250K-$1M in companies and investment can go larger or smaller depending on the company’s requirements and the opportunity.

Rogers Ventures will be pre-selecting companies to participate in this matchmaking session. Wavefront will notify selected companies on August 16th to coordinate meeting time and preparation details. Each participant company will have 10 minutes to pitch their idea and a 20-minute Q&A session afterwards.

 

Registration for this Rogers Ventures Pitching Opportunity is now closed.

 

Some of the things Rogers Ventures is looking for:

Your product/service should offer a substantially unique/novel solution that’s not currently in the market.

• We shy away from me-too products. Having a social game that is a variant on an existing theme is not unique or novel. Creating an enterprise social-networking application with a better GUI and a few more features is not unique or novel.
• If your value is generating cost savings, that’s great! But the costs savings need to be meaningful. We’re looking for companies that can reduce costs by an order of magnitude.
• We’re open to companies that address a future customer need or require a change in a customer’s behavior, but require some data to prove that this need will exist.
• We tend to avoid companies with the chicken-and-egg problem – companies that require a third-party to buy into your business before you can offer value to you customers. An example of this are advertising networks, which only have value to advertisers if it has inventory. But in order to get publishers to provide you with inventory, you need to have advertisers.
• Your product/company should be difficult to replicate. Maybe you have unique and defendable intellectual property. Or maybe you’re such an expert in the needs of your market segment, you have insights that allow you to continually innovate. Whatever the case, you need to prove that you can stay ahead of your competitors.
• We’re looking for businesses that have high operating leverage. In other words, we’re looking for businesses that can scale efficiently. If your goal is to increase you customer base by 10 times, it shouldn’t cost you 10 times as much to do it!
• We’re looking for businesses that can potentially have a global customer base

 

ABOUT WAVEFRONT

Wavefront is the community-based commercialization center accelerating the growth of Canada's wireless and new media development companies. Wavefront improves speed-to-market and delivery of mobile applications and devices by providing emerging companies with a suite of WaveGuide™ training, mobile industry advisory, incubation and testing services that facilitate market linkages and commercial engagement with mobile network operators and enterprise companies around the world.