Fred Wilson of AVC.com shared this four year old Jack Dorsey speech yesterday. In it Dorsey says the first step to creating a new product or business is to draw your ideas down on paper and share them with others. The ideas for both Twitter and Square started on paper. In the case of Twitter,… Continue Reading

In an exclusive interview to CEO.CA, LX-Ventures (LXV) CEO Mike Edwards asks investors for patience and defends his company’s execution in light of its recent 60% share price fall. Edwards says LXV has no plans for future acquisitions or financings until a “business model validating event’ occurs whereby one of LXV’s portfolio companies is sold… Continue Reading

Congrats are in order to supporters of Vancouver, Canada-based online optical pioneer Coastal Contacts, which announced a friendly sale to France’s Essilor International Thursday for $435 million or $12.45 per share. See: Globe and Mail, Bloomberg and Vancouver Sun coverage. Essilor gains five million customers and a system for providing eye ware consumers with custom glasses… Continue Reading

They just wouldn’t have it. The Conservative Canadian government wanted a new outside competitor to start driving prices down in the local communications market, and Verizon was making all the right noises, but the big Canadian telcos just wouldn’t let it happen. The jury is out on whether admitting a company like Verizon (VZ:NASDAQ) into… Continue Reading

The picture above is apropos. Because it appears the person shown is setting fire to cheap paper. LX Ventures (TSXV:LXV) was seen by many as the ascending tech rocket that would boost the local sector. CEO Mike Edwards is a renowned tech player, he’s got nice exits behind him, and witht he Mobio social media platform,… Continue Reading

Facebook sees an opportunity to integrate a company called Whatsapp into its array of offerings so it decided to pay as much as a whopping $19 billion for a company that loses money. An excerpt from the CNN Money article: “Zuckerberg said he doesn’t anticipate trying to aggressively grow WhatsApp’s revenue until the service reaches… Continue Reading

We recently had a chat with management over at Pinetree Capital (PNP.TO) and they were very optimistic about a handful of diverse investments they’ve made in the cloud computing (LeoNovus, LTV.V), microprocessors (Poet Technologies, PTK.V) and bio-tech (Lorus Therapeutics, LOR.TO) spaces. As a brief primer, Pinetree is a diversified investment and venture capital firm focused… Continue Reading

Hollywood’s always had its bad guys. Think the Joker or Darth Vader. But their biggest villain is a man who calls himself Kim Dotcom. You won’t see him on the big screen but, until recently, he ran a service that made it possible for you to see almost any movie you wanted to for next… Continue Reading

Jim Dines has been writing one of the world’s best read financial newsletters, The Dines Letter, since the 1950’s, and he’s still going strong… A few days ago Dines joined King World News to discuss his outlook for 2014 (Listen to the interview). Dines pats himself on the back for calling the coming 3D printing… Continue Reading

Tom Perkins, co-founder of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, which was an early financier to Genentech, Google, Amazon and scores of others, took to Bloomberg Television earlier to apologize for comparing the persecution of America’s rich to the plight of the Jews under Hitler in Nazi Germany. Perkins says he regrets the Kristallnacht comparison;… Continue Reading

Michael “the Wek” Wekerle, the fast talking Canadian investing legend and Chairman of Difference Capital, took to the stage at the Cambridge House CanTech Investment Conference in Toronto earlier this month to promote his firm and Canada’s technology sector. Here are some of the more memorable of the Wek’s quotes: “I don’t think anybody has… Continue Reading

On Fire: ALQA, CUR, SVV, BCRX, Gold & More THE CALANDRA REPORT: Subscribe We send this update from Active Trading Partner’s David Banister, whose analysis thus far is superb. We have been tracking the 48-year-old New England writer’s work on ALQA for about four weeks. Also, CUR. Plus: metals equities, including Almaden Minerals (AAU in… Continue Reading

Keek.com, a Toronto-based video sharing service with sixty million users users worldwide (15 million of which are active monthly), burst onto the social media scene in 2011, tantalizing private tech sector investors with a billion dollar valuation trajectory. Unfortunately, as Keek maneuvered to grow with an expanding global user base outside of North America and… Continue Reading

CEO.ca audience, we exhibit several items direct from The Calandra Report. Thom Calandra will be visiting CEO.ca regularly. His TCR audience is active and pays as much as $101 yearly for the twice-weekly TCR reports, Each of the following items should serve an audience looking for a short fuse on a trade. Our CEO.ca audience… Continue Reading

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos tells his vision to Charlie Rose on CBS 60 Minutes yesterday. This is an inspiring segment and an incredible publicity coup for Amazon.