Consultants to leaders
Posts tagged ‘VC’
It was with some happiness that we saw that BlackBerry Partners Fund has joined BDC Venture Capital and Vertex Venture Capital in adding a $3M top up to what will be a &10M Round B investment in Neuralitic Systems Inc. This is great news for OSS and BSS in OHANL.
Continue reading ‘Finally The Pursestrings Open’ »
A recent story by The Alternative Assets Network highlighted just how bad it is for both VC’s and their potential investments. Canadian venture investment in companies is falling to very low levels. With a 26% year over year drop in Q3 as measured against 2007 (a very low investment year also) it has to be concerning to fund managers and start ups in general. With about $1B raised to date this year it is off last year by 33%.
Bert Hill over at the Ottawa Citizen reiterated the bleakness of the situation in an article he wrote.
Continue reading ‘No VC $ For You’ »
So
me of you may remember a company called Eftia OSS Solutions (order provisioning & fulfillment, problem management, telecom circuit & asset inventory management, and telephone number tracking) which operated from 1997 through about 2006. The company was the investment darling of a number of high power VC firms who funded it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company had a meteoric rise to fame prior to 2000 and then the orders “fell off a cliff” as James Bagnall said in his January 2006 article in the Ottawa Citizen.
Old news I know, but the remarkable thing I discovered recently is how someone from Estonia has commandeered the whole website that Eftia operated and is now running it as an advert. We were adding domains to our Telecom Search Engine and the domain popped up in a search as a live link. Being too curious for my own good I followed it.
Continue reading ‘Invasion Of The OSS Domain Body Snatchers’ »
I love the proposed business model of wireless upstart BMV Holdings who recently bagged some of the G block spectrum at the recent Industry Canada spectrum yard sale. For just $52M they bought spectrum that most players did not want (few handset manufacturers build for this frequency) and plan to run flat rate service.
Having lost most of my hair in trying to figure out how to control the cost of network build-out I am patiently anticipating their numbers (estimates put it in the C$125-170M range, which in my experience is low). Overall the business plan seems at least plausible. They are backed by a number of VC firms with deep communications experience, some of whom I have personally worked with. From the business perspective these VCs are not patient for a long time so BMV better have its ducks in a row and deliver on its investor expectations.
