This month, TechPORTFOLIO is looking at issues around women in tech – whether the rhetoric of equality is meeting action, how far women are broaching the glass ceiling, and profiling important role models in the sector.
As part of our coverage, we’re polling women in the tech and startup industry about workplace treatment and opportunities. All your answers will be anonymous. Watch for discussion of results later this month.
Cognitive solutions have developed beyond traditional AI capabilities into machine thinking, and startups can now leverage cognitive technologies like IBM Watson through the cloud to offer better solutions to their customers.
IBM’s Watson can digest and reason through information, and come up with solutions. This allows startups to offer their customers APIs like natural language processing without the obstacles that prevent easy, robust and responsive user experiences.
Placing this advanced technology in the cloud provides the resources that cognitive needs to function smoothly, and for it to be accessible through platforms including IBM Bluemix.
For more on this, here’s part of our recent interview with IBM’s Nevil Knupp, Vice President of Cloud, IBM Canada.
This post was originally published on The Macro and is reprinted with permission. You can read the original here.
Reading applications to Y Combinator is like having access to a crystal ball.
Twice per year — once in the winter and once in the spring — thousands of men and women apply to Y Combinator. Each of these bright minds has his or her own vision of the future of technology. They pitch ideas related to Bitcoin, drones, new drugs, virtual reality, and nearly every other topic you could imagine.
Since 2008, we’ve received tens of thousands of these applications. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas smart people are working on and how it’s changed over time. We’ve never talked about these publicly before.
But recently, we commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of our anonymized application data. After breaking the applications down into keywords, they calculated the percentage of applicants that mentioned any given term.
So let’s review the data, starting with a simple example.
There’s a question on the Y Combinator application “Who are your competitors? Who are you most afraid of?”. Looking at the answers to this question, we can see what companies founders have on their minds.
When Twitter was new and rapidly growing in 2010, there were many startups doing Twitter-like apps and tools for Twitter users, who were appropriately concerned that Twitter might compete with them. Very few applications mention Microsoft – Paul Graham has written about why that may be before.
Some startups are now making the top lists of competitors too. Uber and Airbnb are more than halfway to Google by number of mentions.
Other companies have completely dropped off the grid. Remember MySpace?
The rest of these graphs are based on the answer to the question “What is your company going to make?”. Let’s look at what this can tell about the platform shift from websites to apps.
While the trend in this graph is old news, it’s not obvious that it would take until 2016 for apps to overtake websites.
Within mobile devices, the iPad was mentioned specifically very often after it first came out. Now it’s mentioned rarely—probably not because people don’t build apps for iPads anymore, but instead because it’s simply so obvious that you will support iPads that people don’t even mention it. Interest in the Kindle was never very strong.
In the early days of Y Combinator, founders often pitched free and ad-supported business models. Throughout the startup world, that business model has become less common, replaced with companies charging customers directly. We always suspected this, and you can see it in this graph.
The term “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service, aka, people pay for it) has increased in usage by 400% since 2008, while “Advertising” has decreased by more than 60%.
Startups related to blogging used to be very fashionable — many applications suggested tools for bloggers, better blogging sites, or search engines for blogs. This space is no longer popular.
There are still a lot of ideas aimed at improving or disrupting email, but not as many as there used to be. Messaging is now more popular.
Buried in the above chart is the exploding popularity of the messaging service, Slack.
Let’s take a closer look at Slack’s ascension by comparing it to the number of applications that mention other popular enterprise terms like “GitHub” and “Docker”:
Many startups believe that Slack has created an unmatched distribution opportunity. The interest in Slack-related concepts, mostly bots and concierge services, has exploded in the last year.
Next, let’s take a look at how has Bitcoin fared over the years.
Bitcoin-related ideas were briefly very popular, but fell off rapidly. These days, building things on top of the underlying blockchain is on the rise, and seems set to surpass bitcoin itself.
Hardware and biotech are all increasingly popular. Some of this reflects changes in the mix of startups applying to Y Combinator. Y Combinator originally focused on software companies but in the last few years has expanded to fund companies in every space. The rest of it reflects the overall hardware renaissance, and the surge of interest in biotech now that lab work is so much more accessible to startups.
Within hardware, smartwatches and other wearables remain popular, though they have plateaued now.
Other hardware items have not fared as well. Mentions of tablets and e-readers have sharply declined in YC applications in recent years.
Not surprisingly, VR is hot and getting hotter. We recently tweeted a call for more VR applications and got a great response.
But the biggest trend in the last couple of batches has been the surge in interest in applying AI to everything. Even these graphs understate the extent to which AI is now playing a role in many companies’ ideas.
To conclude, we’ve compiled many of the more popular terms mentioned in this post on one table, where you can compare them with one another. This list ranks terms by the percentage of applications that mention them. All companies mentioned have been highlighted in orange for reference.
Though on the decline, Facebook (4.2%) and Google (4%) are still the most-cited companies in YC applications. Newcomers — particularly Uber (2.6%) and Airbnb (2.1%), and Slack (1.1%) — are rapidly on the rise.
What this table doesn’t show us is which terms are on the rise or declining. So lastly, we’ve broken down the technologies and companies that are losing favor with applicants, as well as those which are ascending the fastest. We limited this list to terms that were mentioned in at least 0.5% of all 2016 applications (and rounded each figure to the nearest tenth of a percent).
As we touched on, the term Bitcoin has not fared well in YC application mentions over the past year — to the tune of a 61% decline in mentions. Also of note, Bluetooth, Crowdfunding, and Websites are in similar decline.
Of every term we included in this article, one stood far above the rest in terms of popularity: Slack. Over the past year, the company has experienced an 850% increase in YC application mentions.
Tags: Comment, Y Combinator Posted in Funding | Comments Off on Past and Future Trends of Startups in Y Combinator’s Data
Transitioning to a scale-up is proving difficult for startups within Canada’s tech ecosystem. There are many questions about how to better support startups in order to maintain competitiveness and longevity. The transition can be so difficult that Patrick Horgan, VP, Manufacturing, Development & Operations at IBM Canada refers to it as the ‘Valley of Death’.
Bridges are being built over the Valley, though. Initiatives like IBM’s Bluemix Garage – which provides technology support, shares growth experience, and offers mentorship – aims to foster scale up success in the long-run.
To learn more about the challenges startups face in scaling up, and about initiatives that offer support, watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGVlvcO3pn0
Tags: Video Posted in Funding, IBM, Technology | Comments Off on VIDEO: Expertise and Mentorship Help Startups Exit the ‘Valley of Death’
Not all startups can afford artificial intelligence and the associated infrastructure, but thanks to IBM’s Bluemix platform, the cognitive capabilities of IBM Watson can be a ‘call’ away. Apps developed on the platform will be able to make requests from Watson.
This will give startups access to functions that analyze data streams or translate text into language that either a machine or another person can understand.
For more on this, here’s part of our recent interview with IBM’s Nevil Knupp, Vice President of Cloud, IBM Canada.
Patient empowerment has become central to health innovation initiatives. As Fitbits, Apple Watches, tablets and smartphones become commonplace, many stakeholders – including policymakers, administrators, and entrepreneurs – agree that technology is the key to patient power.
Dr. John Semple, the surgeon-in-chief of Toronto’s Women’s College Hospital, can attest that giving power to patients will also give more power to doctors. A few years ago, Semple was entrusted with turning Women’s College Hospital into an ambulatory hospital with day surgery procedures only. He realized that post-op patient monitoring, particularly after discharge, was practically non-existent.
Just before smartphones became ubiquitous, Semple and entrepreneur Chancellor Crawford had the low-tech idea of using text messages to improve post-surgical recovery communication. It may seem obvious, but try sending your doctor a text message about your most recent checkup.
Semple and Crawford’s idea eventually turned into a startup, QoC Health. Working as a business-to-business service provider, the company has built a powerful application programming interface (API) platform that can scale digital health ideas, including patient monitoring, analytics, educational materials, secure communications, decision aids, planning tools, and turnkey integration with existing medical records.
Handling the Technology
Counting many of Ontario’s top hospitals among its clients—as well as clients in the United States, the United Kingdom and across Canada—QoC’s own history is a tale of digital health ideation, development, deployment and scaling.
“The people inside health care—the clinicians, the academics, private healthcare givers—they are the ones who come up with the best ideas because they are the ones dealing with the problems all of the time,” says Raymond Shih, the co-founder and president of QoC. “But from a technology perspective, they are not equipped to execute them.”
Most doctors and nurses are not experts in navigating the intricacies of multi-jurisdiction privacy rules. By simply “handling the technology,” as Shih puts it, QoC is helping healthcare providers and patients to communicate, solving part of a structural digital glut. In terms of revenue, QoC will jump to almost $1 million by the end of the year, up from $600,000 in 2015.
“What QoC does is provide the technology partnership to build and scale these types of digital health applications. It’s really what we do,” says Shih.
The company’s library of tools includes patient alerts, profile setup, data encryption, analytics, secure video conferencing and other common features, freeing up resources in the app development process on a per client basis.
Scaling Up
“If you’re building a hospital-grade application from scratch, it would cost $200,000 and would take 12 to 18 months to develop, assuming you know how to manage those developers,” says Shih. “We can turn that around in four to eight weeks at a fraction of that cost.”
On the other side of the equation is the scaling up problem. When testing a new therapy or device on 25 to 50 patients, a laptop and a spreadsheet are all that a clinician needs. However, when the therapy or device affects 10,000 to 20,000 patients, “you’re going to have to manage that product across iOS, Android and HTML5… You may have to roll it out to a Mandarin- or French-speaking population. The hospital may want to use it, but only if you can integrate it with their medical records management system or clinical lab system,” explains Shih.
Next up, Shih, Semple, Crawford and their team want to open up their toolbox in the form of a software kit for software developers to use QoC’s API to develop their own health apps.
For the time being, the company keeps collecting accolades, including winning the digital health stream of the 2015 MaRS HealthKick Innovation Challenge.
For startups trying to find funding in challenges like HealthKick or through conferences likeRESI on MaRS, which is taking place in June, Shih shares the following advice: “People are going to remember you based on a sound bite or two. You want to make sure you control what that sound bite is. Stay focused. Don’t assume the audience knows everything about, say, software as a service, but don’t start shooting out 100 things they’re not going to remember.”
IBM provided a $200+ million “sandbox” and access to the country’s biggest supercomputer, along with an abundance of analytical tools as the company’s contribution to Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP), a research and development consortium that now includes 14 universities and 2 colleges.
The result? The partnership has generated $2 billion in pipeline revenue by helping university researchers and startups get to market.
This innovation model, facilitating collaboration between IBM, academic institutions, Ontario Centre of Excellence, and SMEs aims to help establish Ontario as a leading global centre for driving innovation in information technology, health, and urban infrastructure (water, energy, transportation).
By partnering with private enterprise, academic institutions can leverage cutting-edge technology and experience. Learn more about SOSCIP and its economic impact:
To scale a tech startup, companies need to manage a complex set of variables: Finding product-market fit, getting funded, finding customers, hiring, being better than the competition, and a slew of little things in between that need to be managed to keep a company out of the deadpool.
To determine what’s currently on the minds of Canadian tech entrepreneurs, we looked at conversation and social media activity around one of the county’s most established tech publications, Techvibes.
A close look at the social media data shows employment (“help” & “hiring”) and funding (“million”) conversations standing out prominently.
Jobs/Talent
Techvibes hosts a semi-annual event called Techfest, which underscores the importance of hiring. The networking event attracts more than 1,000 attendees and culminates in a series of 2-minute pitches by CEOs, founders and tech executives meant to attract the best employees.
“Venture capital matters” dominate the Montreal tech startup scene, according to what the data shows around Twitter discussion from Canada’s second largest city:
Montreal is home to some of Canada’s largest VC firms, including Real Ventures, Rho Canada, BDC Capital and iNovia Capital. The city also made Compass’ list of top startup ecosystems globally:
Montreal, ranked at number 20 in Compass’ 2015 Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking https://t.co/fBURm4I5vd
After funding, physical accommodation for startup activity shows up prominently in the Montreal social media discussion in the last 90 days. Notman House – a startup campus providing office, event, and communal space for entrepreneurs, investors, technology partners and community groups – has attracted 3.3 million Twitter impressions from nearly 1,000 mentions in the last 3 months.
Notman House aims to contribute to Montreal’s startup ecosystem by “producing companies that contribute to the social, economic and cultural fabric of [Montreal] while shaping the future of our global society,” according to the organization’s website.
Opportunities to work at, or with, Notman House drive the social media discussion:
Notman House has a very international view to its place in the world, saying its vision is “predicated on the beliefs that not only do startups make cities great, but that great cities need great startups.”
Want a look inside Notman House? Here’s a 3D tour:
In addition to Notman driving Twitter discussion around the Montreal tech #startup scene, is one person: Sylvain Carle, a Partner at Real Ventures and General Manager of FounderFuel.
Known as “@froginthevalley” on Twitter, Carle has proven to be both a supporter of Notman House, and a driving force of Twitter discussion in Montreal recently.
Startups have ended the industrial era and have become the net job creators in many major markets across the globe.
To follow this disruptive change, /newsrooms has launched TechPORTFOLIO, a social media-driven destination that covers the economic value and financial benefit of startup ecosystems as they emerge locally, nationally and internationally.
“TechPORTFOLIO will explore the most important transformations impacting technology, business and economic growth,” says Robert Delaney, VP Managing Editor, TechPORTFOLIO. “We’re researching and writing about many layers of the ecosystems. TechPORTFOLIO will compare and contrast geographies, approaches, companies, and investment trends in order to understand and evaluate how startup ecosystems are changing.”
TechPORTFOLIO combines journalistic coverage and data analysis to profile startups, entrepreneurs, investors, academia and governments shaping startup ecosystems.
TechPORTFOLIO will use IBM Cloud and cognitive technologies, including data and machine learning, as part of its journalistic approach to deliver insights relevant to the companies, startups and governments involved in the global startup ecosystem.
“IBM Cloud is the leading platform for data-driven cloud and analytics that enables organizations to meet market demands and open doors to more responsive and innovative ways of doing business,”says Nevil Knupp, VP of Cloud, IBM Canada. “By providing the best cloud and cognitive technologies, we are helping TechPORTFOLIO connect to the developer and startup audience and transform the way news is delivered.”
“The Canadian startup space is thriving and supporting a culture of innovation with organizations, like TechPORTFOLIO, allows IBM to contribute to a thriving tech environment that can strengthen Canada’s position as an ideal place to research and develop new technologies,” says Lila Adamec, Program Director, Developer Ecosystem & Startups, IBM Canada.
“TechPORTFOLIO will be a new kind of publication that incorporates data, social media and technology into its operating model and ongoing publishing,” says Leigh Doyle, Managing Editor, TechPORTFOLIO. “Editorial instinct and subject matter expertise will take us a long way in our analysis and storytelling around tech and startup ecosystems. When we combine those with our data and social media expertise, we’re able to go deep into subjects in ways that were not possible before. That’s exciting.”
About TechPORTFOLIO:
TechPORTFOLIO covers the economic value and financial benefit of startup ecosystems as they emerge locally, nationally, and internationally. TechPORTFOLIO combines journalistic coverage, data analysis, and profiles startups, entrepreneurs, investors, academia and governments shaping startup ecosystems. The site is available at http://techportfolio.net/
TechPORTFOLIO is owned and published by /newsrooms, a network dedicated to providing continuous content marketing and social media coverage for brands. Our managing editors, writers, correspondents, creative producers and analysts draw from the insights and experience of the world’s best newsrooms to deliver content and coverage across a wide range of industry categories.
Tags: News Posted in Funding, Government, Technology | Comments Off on /newsrooms Launches TechPORTFOLIO to Cover Economic Value of Startup Ecosystems
/newsrooms
Past and Future Trends of Startups in Y Combinator’s Data
Friday, June 3rd, 2016This post was originally published on The Macro and is reprinted with permission. You can read the original here.
Reading applications to Y Combinator is like having access to a crystal ball.
Twice per year — once in the winter and once in the spring — thousands of men and women apply to Y Combinator. Each of these bright minds has his or her own vision of the future of technology. They pitch ideas related to Bitcoin, drones, new drugs, virtual reality, and nearly every other topic you could imagine.
Since 2008, we’ve received tens of thousands of these applications. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas smart people are working on and how it’s changed over time. We’ve never talked about these publicly before.
But recently, we commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of our anonymized application data. After breaking the applications down into keywords, they calculated the percentage of applicants that mentioned any given term.
So let’s review the data, starting with a simple example.
There’s a question on the Y Combinator application “Who are your competitors? Who are you most afraid of?”. Looking at the answers to this question, we can see what companies founders have on their minds.
When Twitter was new and rapidly growing in 2010, there were many startups doing Twitter-like apps and tools for Twitter users, who were appropriately concerned that Twitter might compete with them. Very few applications mention Microsoft – Paul Graham has written about why that may be before.
Some startups are now making the top lists of competitors too. Uber and Airbnb are more than halfway to Google by number of mentions.
Other companies have completely dropped off the grid. Remember MySpace?
The rest of these graphs are based on the answer to the question “What is your company going to make?”. Let’s look at what this can tell about the platform shift from websites to apps.
While the trend in this graph is old news, it’s not obvious that it would take until 2016 for apps to overtake websites.
Within mobile devices, the iPad was mentioned specifically very often after it first came out. Now it’s mentioned rarely—probably not because people don’t build apps for iPads anymore, but instead because it’s simply so obvious that you will support iPads that people don’t even mention it. Interest in the Kindle was never very strong.
In the early days of Y Combinator, founders often pitched free and ad-supported business models. Throughout the startup world, that business model has become less common, replaced with companies charging customers directly. We always suspected this, and you can see it in this graph.
The term “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service, aka, people pay for it) has increased in usage by 400% since 2008, while “Advertising” has decreased by more than 60%.
Startups related to blogging used to be very fashionable — many applications suggested tools for bloggers, better blogging sites, or search engines for blogs. This space is no longer popular.
There are still a lot of ideas aimed at improving or disrupting email, but not as many as there used to be. Messaging is now more popular.
Buried in the above chart is the exploding popularity of the messaging service, Slack.
Let’s take a closer look at Slack’s ascension by comparing it to the number of applications that mention other popular enterprise terms like “GitHub” and “Docker”:
Many startups believe that Slack has created an unmatched distribution opportunity. The interest in Slack-related concepts, mostly bots and concierge services, has exploded in the last year.
Next, let’s take a look at how has Bitcoin fared over the years.
Bitcoin-related ideas were briefly very popular, but fell off rapidly. These days, building things on top of the underlying blockchain is on the rise, and seems set to surpass bitcoin itself.
Hardware and biotech are all increasingly popular. Some of this reflects changes in the mix of startups applying to Y Combinator. Y Combinator originally focused on software companies but in the last few years has expanded to fund companies in every space. The rest of it reflects the overall hardware renaissance, and the surge of interest in biotech now that lab work is so much more accessible to startups.
Within hardware, smartwatches and other wearables remain popular, though they have plateaued now.
Other hardware items have not fared as well. Mentions of tablets and e-readers have sharply declined in YC applications in recent years.
Not surprisingly, VR is hot and getting hotter. We recently tweeted a call for more VR applications and got a great response.
But the biggest trend in the last couple of batches has been the surge in interest in applying AI to everything. Even these graphs understate the extent to which AI is now playing a role in many companies’ ideas.
To conclude, we’ve compiled many of the more popular terms mentioned in this post on one table, where you can compare them with one another. This list ranks terms by the percentage of applications that mention them. All companies mentioned have been highlighted in orange for reference.
Though on the decline, Facebook (4.2%) and Google (4%) are still the most-cited companies in YC applications. Newcomers — particularly Uber (2.6%) and Airbnb (2.1%), and Slack (1.1%) — are rapidly on the rise.
What this table doesn’t show us is which terms are on the rise or declining. So lastly, we’ve broken down the technologies and companies that are losing favor with applicants, as well as those which are ascending the fastest. We limited this list to terms that were mentioned in at least 0.5% of all 2016 applications (and rounded each figure to the nearest tenth of a percent).
As we touched on, the term Bitcoin has not fared well in YC application mentions over the past year — to the tune of a 61% decline in mentions. Also of note, Bluetooth, Crowdfunding, and Websites are in similar decline.
Of every term we included in this article, one stood far above the rest in terms of popularity: Slack. Over the past year, the company has experienced an 850% increase in YC application mentions.
Tags: Comment, Y Combinator
Posted in Funding | Comments Off on Past and Future Trends of Startups in Y Combinator’s Data