Strong new media presence at BDC’s young business awards

New media firms could be found in abundance at this year’s Young Entrepreneur Awards, an event sponsored by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). The annual awards recognize the best companies led by under-35 management from each province. Interestingly, Quebec-region winner Triotech Amusement Inc. almost crashed before getting off the ground when a prototype of the company’s first offering, a fiberglass pod for immersing users in networked video games, fell off the back of a truck during transport and broke. "We had a company doing the fiberglass for us, didn’t have any money to have the company make another one," says Frédéric Lachance, president of the Lavaltrie-based firm. "So, we had to learn how to do fiberglass ourselves." Lachance’s initial foray into self-employment was a cybercafe near a university he and brother David opened in the mid-90s. Networked games proved an especially popular offering among the cybercafe’s patrons, and the Lachances decided to build a fiberglass structure - dubbed Cyberpod - that would allow the experience to be taken outside their cybercafe. After repairing the Cyberpod, the Lachance brothers took it down to Atlanta to show off at a major videogame conference, another move that promised disaster. After putting nearly all their funds into fixing the pod and moving it 1,600 kilometers, the two were nearly broke. "We had to sell what we had on the booth, or maybe we wouldn’t have gotten home," Frédéric recalls. Thankfully, the brothers closed a few deals and were able to fund their return to Quebec. From those ignoble beginnings, Triotech has expanded both its production space - moving from a garage to close to 15,000 square feet of space at its Lavaltrie factory and Montreal office - as well as its product offerings. The firm now designs motion-enabled mini-theatres and arcade games with surround sound and wide-screen displays. It licenses actuators from fellow Quebec firm D-Box Technologies Inc. to make the seats that patrons sit in move and vibrate in synch with the game they’re playing or the film they’re watching. Although Triotech initially did the bulk of its business in the U.S. - around 80% of sales - the firm now has its products in Mexico, Russia, Iraq, Iran and other exotic locales, a development which garnered the firm an additional YEA award this year for most outstanding export results. The company has also gone from licensing the game software included in its motion-enabled games - as was the case with its futuristic motorcycle racing game Ballistics - to developing its software in-house thanks to co-founder and chief technology officer Ernest Yale. The firm’s latest offering, Wasteland Racers, was developed from the ground-up by Yale and the brothers, the three of whom are long-time friends. The motion movie side of the business has also grown measurably, according to Yale. "We sold the Mystic Aquarium an 18-seater with motion and 3D projection," he says. "That’s a pretty big installation - it’s a project worth something like $300,000." Klick Communications Inc. president Leerom Segal, who won the Ontario award, epitomizes the young entrepreneur: he started working as a software programmer at age 12, and by 16 he was chief technology officer at an interactive marketing firm. He and several former business partners founded Klick - whose services range from using rich media and interactivity to enhance corporate web presences to designing and delivering e-learning initiatives - in 1997, when Segal was 18. The BDC award isn’t the first recognition the firm has received: the company was voted one of four most promising new media companies at the Canadian New Media Awards in 2003, and was more recently included in Deloitte & Touche’s Technology Fast 50 and Fast 500 as well as Profit Magazine’s list of the 100 fastest-growing firms in Canada. Segal says the key to Klick’s success has been managing the relationship with customers. "We don’t take on a lot of clients - we do a lot of work with the same clients, and that helps us understand the customers a little bit better," he says. "Our customers do the best selling jobs: if somebody calls a reference , we end up ultimately getting the work." That focus on full service for a select customer base proved to be a sound strategy when the dot-com bubble burst just a few years after Klick was founded. "There were a lot of opportunities on the table, and a lot of organizations didn’t have the discipline or responsibility to carefully manage how much they took on," Segal says. Vancouver’s AirG is perhaps a little bit different than the other firms winning accolades from the BDC this year. The five-year-old company already has deals in place with the biggest names in wireless entertainment, including the launch of a Java-based mobile community with Bell Mobility this week. AirG also signed up Sprint/Nextel as a customer in August, providing a private-label mobile community for the U.S. wireless provider’s youth pre-paid brand Boost Mobile (CNM Aug. 18/05). However, like Segal’s Klick, the partners behind AirG - Frederick Ghahramani and Vincent Yen - started out at a relatively young age, and have received their share of awards too. "The company initially got some of its funding from an engineering students’ union competition for projects," says Ghahramani, who’s director of the firm. "Then, we won the New Ventures BC prize, which is about $50,000 in funding and services from the Bank of Montreal and Telus. That was in 2001, and there were about 170 companies in BC competing for that prize." Being a West Coast firm has provided some advantages and helped the company grow, Ghahramani says. "We’re only really two-and-a-half hours away from Silicon Valley, so there’s lots of good success stories and angels that are accessible through that," he notes, adding there’s also a "do-it-your-own-way mentality" of self-reliance that permeates the business environment in British Columbia. AirG also works with the federal government, in the form of the National Research Council’s Industrial Research Assistance Program. "Those are some of the hardest-working civil servants we’ve ever come across," Ghahramani says. "They’re from here, they understand the needs of business, and they’re fantastic at helping us catalyze new growth. The company has been profitable for four-plus years, and there are lots of checks going back to the Receiver-General, so it’s all worth it." Ghahramani is nonplussed by all the attention his firm has been getting in the form of awards, however. While he says he’s honoured to receive the BDC award, "the real goal is not to win prizes but to win market share, and that’s what everyone here is focused on." The company will expand its workforce by nearly 50% in the next year, Ghahramani says, growing the firm from 70 staff to 100. Firms with more major wireless carriers in the US, such as Verizon and T-Mobile, are also in the works.

Strong new media presence at BDC’s young business awards

News | 10/27/2005 4:00 am EDT

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