Silicon Peel’s Meetup season opener was on ''Business Innovation'' and showed attendees how to stay ahead of the commercialization curve. Speakers included Paul Smith, Vice President and Centre Manager of the Xerox Research Centre of Canada and Co-Founders Rohan Mahimker and Alex Peters of Prodigy Game. Meetup attendees also got to experience a live product demo from @Qriffic, a member of Silicon Peel’s own startup pool. If you are interested in demonstrating your product at the next Meetup, please apply here. As usual, the Meetup ended with a lively networking session where members caught up and met newcomers.
9. Xerox research global footprint
Xerox Research Centre Europe
Xerox Research
Centre of Canada
Fuji Xerox
Japan
Palo Alto Research
Center
9
Xerox Research Center
Webster
Xerox Research Centre India
10. Xerox Research Centre of Canada
Technical Highlights
• 35 year history of taking materials from lab to market
• 1000+ scientific publications
• 1500+ patents
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12. Capturing the Idea
Invention Disclosure
Problem to be solved
Abstract of the Invention
Reduction to Practice?
Protectable – Trade secret?
Is this already in the public domain?
How to profit from the invention?
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13. Evaluating the Idea
Define / Refine the product or concept
Customer Feedback
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they
would have said a faster horse” Henry Ford
Identify “Enabling Technology Advances”
(ETA’s)
-The showstoppers - critical aspects of the
technology that must be proven to ensure
success
-Need to be able to measure the ETA’s
-Once ETA’s are understood, required
resources are known
OVERALL GOAL :
unbiased decision
13
Generate enough information on the critical
parameters to enable an informed /
14. Evaluating the Idea - Resources
Resourcing
-Xerox Technology Incubator
Network (XTIN)
-CO-OP Student
-NSERC Postdoctoral Position
-University Interaction (fundamental
research)
-Skunk Works?
-The 10 – 15% time opportunity
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15. Evaluating the Idea – setting the ground rules
The Home Run – Avoiding the Approach!
Use design of experiments to ensure a
scientific approach (Design for Lean Six
Sigma)
Need to define the latitude of the idea
Single points are not enough to claim
success
Note: Joe Carter scored the home run, but
it was the people who got the singles onto
base that gave the winning runs. Just a
home run would have tied the game 6 - 6!
15
18. The Decision
“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure”
Sven Goran Eriksson
Team success is based on the team getting the data
needed to make a decision in the time period – NOT
on whether the project moves on or stops
Creates a different way of thinking about the project – a
decision to stop is not related to failure.
Celebrate the decision whether Go or No Go based
on the process taken and the team developing the
necessary data.
OVERALL – Make a fast, accurate, results based
decision
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28. The Challenge
Human Tutor
• Understands how child is
feeling
• Costs $45-$65/hour
Software Tutor
• Only responds to right or
wrong answers
• Costs $12/month
33. Building a Team
• Finding the right people is
CRITICAL
Stories:
• Founding Team
• Hiring our first employee
• 3 Hiring criteria
34. Gaining Traction
• Build strong relationships with your early
customers - they will refer you to others
Stories:
• First Principal in Hamilton
35. Focus
• Most startups only have the capacity to focus
on one primary objective at a time
Stories:
• Huge list of marketing activities
• Schools as a primary channel
36. Where we are now
• Over 35,000 students in Ontario
• $325K Gov. Grants + $90k Industry Support +
Friends and Family equity/debt
• Dragons Den, The Pitch, Globe and Mail, etc.
37. Why We’re Excited
• Next Steps – 150,000 kids by Jan 2014
• Potential to transform a generation
42. Funnel Master: Steven Cox
Many Hats
Many Sectors
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Electrical Engineer
Project Leader
Entrepreneur
Business Consultant
Investor
Many Countries
•
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Australia
USA
Canada
Japan, Germany, UK, Israel
Automotive
Mining
Firmware/Software
Biotechnology
Video Production
Clean Tech
Food & Catering
Real Estate
My focus: Results and Growth
Startup Success Funnel
44. How do they drive results?
Process
• Milestones
• Schedule
• Visibility
Oversight
•
•
•
•
Goals
Sense of Urgency
Support
Celebrate Progress
Results
Startup Success Funnel
45. But what can emerging companies do?
Scarce resources!
Isolated!
Small!
Invisible!
Limited bandwidth!
Startup Success Funnel
46. Use the Si Peel Startup Funnel!
For Investment
Make your success visible
Create a visible track record
For Progress
Peer support
Public goals
To Share
Best practices
Challenges
Wins
Results
Startup Success Funnel
49. Startup Success Funnel
1 Discovery
2 Validation
3 Efficiency
4 Scale
3mo
Start
1mo
Graduation!!!
0 Ideas
1mo
1mo
1mo
a b
10/18/13 c
d
a
b
c
d
e
f
a
3mo
3mo
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
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b
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f
a
b
c
d
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50. Next Steps
• Sign up!
• Next month:
– Introduce new participants
– New Venture Phases and Milestones
– Funnel time!
Startup Success Funnel
55. Mentoring Program
MENTORS
• Raise your profile as a
respected leader.
• Develop advisory skills.
• Expand your business
network.
• Contribute to the business
community.
• Make a difference.
MENTEES
• Get guidance and support.
• Develop skills.
• Expand your business
network.
• Increase your chances of
success.
• Gain confidence and
experience.
56. Mentoring Program
Be a Mentor or
Be a Mentee
Contact:
Cathleen MacDonald
cjmdon@yahoo.ca
Silicon Peel is a Grass roots community creating a platform, on-line and in-person to help our members connect with the high tech community in Peel.
We are passionate about technology and how it can make our lives better.
We are creating a social network of strong relationships for IT professionals, hi-tech entrepreneurs and executives, educators, students and companies.
Our main goal is focused on helping people and companies create opportunities for business, growth and partnerships in the hi tech industry in Peel.
Silicon Peel – ICT focused, Broad to accommodate members in all stages – concept or idea to established businesses looking to grow
RIC Centre – Requires clients to be a start-up with a technical innovation looking to commercialize.
Both organizations can refer members / clients to each other to help leverage the connections within the ICT sector.
Paul joined Xerox in 1995 and has held a variety of managerial positions at XRCC including Laboratory Manager of Materials Synthesis & Characterization Lab and process owner of XIG Direct Marking Thrust and, more recently, the Champion of XIG Consumables Thrust. He has managed teams that developed materials for Xerox products including solid ink components, and new inks for Xerox Phaser, Xerox ColorQube and the CiPress platforms.
Paul received his PhD in the field of Chemistry from the University of Bath, England in 1991, was an NSERC Fellow from 1995 to 1997, and in 2001 received an MBA from the Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto. He is a named inventor on 56 U.S, patents and has 16 publications.
Rohan started his first website at age 10, trading stocks at 15, and at 19 was the 2nd youngest person on Barclays Capital’s trading floor on Wall Street. After working in various engineering firms and developing statistical trading models and strategies on Wall St. and Bay St., Rohan found his passion for education and co-founded ProdigyGame.com.
Rohan graduated from the highly coveted Honors Mechatronics Engineering program from the University of Waterloo, where he was ranked 3rd and won several scholarships/awards.
Alex was also ranked in the top 3 students in Mechatronics Engineering at the University of Waterloo, where he won the prestigious Professor T. Prasad Award, among other awards. Alex had founded his high school’s First Robotics team, and has helped to build out an IT company’s consulting arm, where he was the youngest team member by over 25 years. He has a background in Agile Development, IT Consulting, and Artificial Intelligence.
Richard:
Frist half will be about how you came up with the idea of the company and started
Second half about overcoming entrepreneurial challenges and other important aspects
The challenge
Our solution – what is prodigy
tructure and a plan
Pivotal turning points
Getting our first alpha customers
Sales
having a space to work and meet up
preparing for launch
importance of advisors and asking for help
hiring employees
launching
customer service and building trust
While we were undergrads, we decided we wanted to make learning math addictive.
Rohan and I both played
At Waterloo, we decided we wanted to make learning math addictive
Waterloo
We wanted to make learning math addictive
We wanted to build an “irresistibly engaging” program, to stop this decline and change attitudes about math in the early years
We looked at examples from our childhood that drove the most engagement, and essentially made a Pokemon with Ontario’s math curriculum in it
Waterloo
We wanted to make learning math addictive
We looked at examples from our childhood that drove the most engagement. Both Rohan and I loved games like Pokemon, which could capture our attention for hours on end.
Make learning math addictive
I’m sure you’ve all seen this graph
Students disengage over time
Name-drop fullan
We wanted to build a math program that was “irresistibly engaging” as a way of not only stopping this decline, but with the long term goal of having students absolutely love learning math.
We wanted to build an “irresistibly engaging” program, to stop this decline and change attitudes about math in the early years
Key Point – Current educational software completely ignores the HUMAN element of learning – the child’s emotions
I’d like to ask, how many people in the room have ever worked with children before? Yeah, I’m sure we all have at some point.
When working with children, you would not only respond to a child’s performance (if they were answering right or wrong), but also to their emotions (if they are bored, frustrated, or engaged), and adapt and adjust your teaching style accordingly, right?
And while this sort of ‘emotional calibration’ is so obvious and intuitive to us as humans, this is largely ignored when it comes to software products
Time and time again, researchers from Harvard to McGill to MIT are showing that learning is NOT an EMOTIONLESS process
If a child is frustrated (point at the board) you can’t keep asking them more difficult questions
Yet, this is what every single piece of educational software today does – it bases its decisions on only right or wrong answers, resulting in stressed, frustrated and burned out children.
This problem is so big that parents end up paying over $45/hour for this emotional and personalized experience which current software just can’t provide
What if we could bridge this gap?
Sources:
The Role of Emotion and Skilled Intuition in Learning [http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~immordin/papers/plugin-MBE_Chap4_4-26-10%20PROOF.pdf]
Tutoring costs $45-$65 per hour, and $85-150 in Manhattan [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/your-money/21wealth.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www]
Key Point – We bridge the gap between software and human tutors with our emotionally intelligent product
To address this problem, SMARTeacher has created the world’s first online education game that can detect and respond to a child’s emotions.
What this means is:
If your child is bored, we make the game harder
If your child is frustrated, we automatically offer them hints and help content to help them understand and build up their confidence
And if they’re engaged and doing well, we accelerate their progress
This allows us to offer an unprecedented level of personalization, and over time, actually learn and adapt to a child’s unique learning patterns and style.
Sources:
Private tutoring market set to hit $152B by 2015 (over $13B in South Korea alone) - http://www.prweb.com/releases/private_tutoring_market/home_tutoring/prweb3830864.htm
Key Point – We bridge the gap between software and human tutors with our emotionally intelligent product
To address this problem, SMARTeacher has created the world’s first online education game that can detect and respond to a child’s emotions.
What this means is:
If your child is bored, we make the game harder
If your child is frustrated, we automatically offer them hints and help content to help them understand and build up their confidence
And if they’re engaged and doing well, we accelerate their progress
This allows us to offer an unprecedented level of personalization, and over time, actually learn and adapt to a child’s unique learning patterns and style.
Sources:
Private tutoring market set to hit $152B by 2015 (over $13B in South Korea alone) - http://www.prweb.com/releases/private_tutoring_market/home_tutoring/prweb3830864.htm
SMARTeacher grew out of what was originally a final year project at the University of Waterloo
We spent 8 months at school developing what would become SMARTeacher’s very first prototype.
When we graduated, we were all gung-ho to start a company, but neither of us knew what we were doing.
And it’s this point that’s so crucial that you dive in and keep working, because there’s no one holding you accountable if you start to slack off.
You don’t have any customers, deadlines, or employees asking you what to work on next. It’s entirely self-motivated, so it’s extremely important that if you have an idea you think is worth pursuing, that you dive in and give it an honest shot.
You need to put in some real time in order to get your first “win”, which helps to reinvigorate you and your team.
For us, our first win was a government grant from FedDev, called the Applied Research and Commercialization (ARC) initiative
It wasn’t until we set a meeting schedule that we started to make daily progress
This was slightly harder for us, since Rohan and I live over an hour apart.
It’s important to schedule regular meetings
It’s even more useful if you can find a regular place to meet. Because we had no money and were in different locations, we moved from place to place as we added more people
We started by meeting at Jane and Finch in Toronto – Certainly not ideal
Brock University’s study rooms
My basement
First office in Burlington
Know what your MVP is
If you’re anything like me, less than half of the features that you feel are absolutely essential probably are.
I was lucky, because my dad started his own company and constantly questioned me whenever I came up with another “great idea”
Easy to scope creep without customers
We’ve cut a ton of features that seemed extremely important at the time
Setting deadlines
In October, we approached Ridley College and asked if they would be willing to use our game in their classroom
At the time, we were using the word “game” pretty loosely.
The Arena wasn’t open: I told the kids that there was a huge battle in there with a Dragon, and they were trying to fix all the damage before it would be opened.
The store wasn’t available: The store owner had went on vacation, and he wasn’t due back for another few weeks.
As we started testing, things started to break. A lot.
First time we had done true user testing. Found out real users (and especially children) don’t like to wait.
Click buttons dozens of times
They would click buttons 7-8 times if it was slow to respond. One child created 15 wizards because the “Create Character” button took ~5 seconds to respond.
Slow internet
We were also blessed/cursed with Ridley’s incredibly slow internet, which meant that every time a child picked a spell they had to wait ~5 seconds to see the question, and then another ~5 seconds to find out if their answer was correct.
When we were testing, we hadn’t thought to check any of this.
Why it’s so important
Fundamental problems
These fundamental problems we found early on would have become much more difficult to fix as we moved forward. By testing early and often, we were able to find and fix a number of big problems that would have been a nightmare later one.
Customer feedback benefits
Helps focus design efforts
[Joke] Found out which items they liked the most, and then we made those the hardest to get.
One of the great things about working with kids is that they’re more than happy to tell you when something sucks. And as a developer, that’s exactly what you need to focus your design efforts. Now it may not always be as explicit as a child telling you something is terrible, but by working with Ridley students we made some important decisions.
Prioritizing items – Changing their clothes before they had a way to buy these items.
The best example I can give you is that we made items available before we actually had a way to sell them. So we gave kids all the hats, wands, and wizard robes that were available at that time, and let them customize their characters with them because it was going to take us a few weeks to create a proper store and purchasing system. Kids loved the fact that they could choose what they wore, and it bought us time to work on the store while keeping them engaged.
Provides motivation and deadlines
Because I had given the kids a time when things were expected to be working, we encountered our first real deadlines and this helped to focus our efforts.
It’s very easy to get distracted when you’re not forced into a specific direction, and working with customers helps you to focus your team on what’s important.
Key point
You have to manage the customer’s expectations
In exchange for them using such
After a successful Alpha test, we got to the point where we decided to hire our first Employee
I’m sure you’ve all heard the importance of having the right people on the board, but I think this is something that doesn’t get stressed enough!
Why it’s important
As a startup, you have very limited resources, so you need to find the BEST people
These are the people that you rely on day in and day out, so you need people you can trust to pull together and execute what needs to be done when it’s necessary
When we were starting out, there were originally 4 of us.
The first, and probably most significant decision we made in shaping the company was going forward with just the two of us. Don’t get me wrong, these were exceptionally bright people – one is at Stanford and another’s consulting for Deloite – but they didn’t have the entrepreneurial drive to be good co-founders for our company
Then we came to the point where we were hiring our first employee.
Luckily, we had learnt some quick lessons about managing people and figured out what we were looking for through the 3 students we worked with in ARC project
We knew we wanted an exceptional programmer to make up for our poor programming skills…
This is Steve. Steve is a SUPERSTAR
He has a masters degree in Artificial Intelligence, and is also one of the biggest gamers I know, which makes him a perfect fit for our company
We went on to build out a team that made up for what we were lacking, and that meant hiring people who were older and more educated than us
4/5 employees have at least 2 university degrees
Small failures and setbacks are inevitable, but it’s how you handle those situations that determines the outcome
During our beta-test at Mentor college, we ran into a whole host of issues
The back end of our website wasn’t working, we had problems installing, and there were one or two days where a class full of 20 kids were crashing.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that we want to move so quickly, and part is because we haven’t yet developed truly effective development processes to avoid such problems.
The only reason we got through this is because we built trust with our customers by remaining responsive, accountable, and managing expectations.
We were in Mentor almost EVERY SINGLE DAY working with the kids and hammering out problems as they came up
We were on the phone talking to customers and getting feedback on Sunday nights
And we took action on their feedback immediately
And this is the same case for your advisors
When we came into the RIC Centre, we didn’t know anyone here
We built trust with them through slowly
Small failures and setbacks are inevitable, but it’s how you handle those situations that determines the outcome
During our beta-test at Mentor college, we ran into a whole host of issues
The back end of our website wasn’t working, we had problems installing, and there were one or two days where a class full of 20 kids were crashing.
A lot of this has to do with the fact that we want to move so quickly, and part is because we haven’t yet developed truly effective development processes to avoid such problems.
The only reason we got through this is because we built trust with our customers by remaining responsive, accountable, and managing expectations.
We were in Mentor almost EVERY SINGLE DAY working with the kids and hammering out problems as they came up
We were on the phone talking to customers and getting feedback on Sunday nights
And we took action on their feedback immediately
And this is the same case for your advisors
When we came into the RIC Centre, we didn’t know anyone here
We built trust with them through slowly
6 government grants: Total: 155k
In final round for another 60k
90k in industry partner support
6 government grants: Total: 155k
In final round for another 60k
90k in industry partner support
My name is Sebastian Dwornik, and I’m from a new Start-up named Qriffic.
If you’re a service based business, like a restaurant for example, customer experience can make or break your business.And if your business does well, you’ll get a lot of customers coming in to be served. Which is a good problem to have.BUT a certain problem arises nonetheless. One that threatens your customer’s experience, and affects your bottom line.
I’m talking about line-ups ladies and gentlemen.And for every minute people wait in that line, your service business is about to lose good money by having some of those people walk away.As well as a busy line-up further scares away more potential clients that arrive.And they’ll probably tip less too by you having made them wait.
Chaining people on the spot by making them wait in long line-ups tarnishes the customer experience and adds an extra hurdle that your business now must deal with.
So for a restaurant, the common solution is to whip out the old-fashioned paper waiting list and a stack of expensive coaster buzzers.
And within a few moments the poor hostess becomes stressed with scribbling all these peoples information, as well keeping track of coasters. Some of which usually get stolen and add further cost to the business.
That’s no way to treat people that are willing to give you their money.And what’s not good for them, is definitely not good for your service business.
“There has to be a better way!”
It just so happens that a line has been forming while I’ve been speaking.Let’s take care of them, the Qriffic way.
So as you might have guessed, it’s a web app to replace and automate the paper waiting list, …
… and instead of pricey coasters, it utilizes people’s mobile phone’s to TEXT them the estimated wait time. And when their table is ready, as an example.
And they are then able to roam around without the fear of losing their spot in line. Because their phone is now waiting in line for them.FREE your customers.And they’ll return happier knowing that you’ve respected their time.
It’s a WIN, WIN.By improving their customer experience, in turn you’ll improve your service businesses bottom line. By saving costs, raising your operational efficiency, adding value through convenience, and gaining more customers because of it.
My name is Sebastian Dwornik, and I’m from a new Start-up named Qriffic.
My name is Sebastian Dwornik, and I’m from a new Start-up named Qriffic.
My name is Sebastian Dwornik, and I’m from a new Start-up named Qriffic.