That’s impressive growth, and it’s along the lines of other top software-as-a-service players who are household names in Silicon Valley and beyond.

“We’re kinda matching Zendesk and Evernote in user growth curve,” HootSuite CEO Holmes told me this morning. “Our progressive cycle to each additional million is getting shorter and shorter, which is a good thing.”

The Vancouver-based company, which counts 79 of the Fortune 100 as its clients, also continues to excel at enterprise sales. Sales to enterprises under $10 billion in value grew 272 percent in the first quarter of 2013, HootSuite said, and sales to enterprises over $10 billion grew 900 percent.

See HootSuite’s swanky new offices

The company also added a major client just in the past few days which I cannot disclose, but is a massive consumer-focused company with almost 17,000 global locations.

While a strong focus on sales and marketing has helped the company grow quickly in enterprise — which former Yammer exec Dee Anna McPherson will help accelerate — Holmes says that viral, social, and content marketing have actually been more important.

Source: HootSuite

HootSuite’s new offices in Vancouver, Canada.

“We’ve seen a very nice progression of users from our free to premium product,” he said. “Often organizations of 100+ people are on board, all at the free level, and then when they become a paying client we’ll help tie all their accounts together.”

The big new features coming in the next month are in security and analytics, Holmes told me, as HootSuite puts more technology in place to prevent hacking or phishing attacks. One of the most problematic security issues, of course, is via internal users who go rogue. To limit this risk, HootSuite is enhancing its account provisioning and LDAP support so that internal users’ social media account access can be easily and safely managed.

“If you give them direct account access … you’re giving them the keys to the kingdom,” Holmes said. “Then you’re relying on social networks to turn them off, and that can take days. We’ve seen that with McDonalds and Burger King recently.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluegenieart/7045869337/

The HootSuite bus at SXSW

In terms of analytics, HootSuite is capitalizing on the fact that its members send out over three million social media messages each day to help brands become more viral.

New tools in HootSuite will help brand managers know not only how they’re doing on one network versus another — which content is successful on Twitter, Facebook, or elsewhere — but also which of their social media managers is more effective at engaging social media users. And then, of course, sharing those lessons so all can benefit.

All of that growth requires more head count, which ballooning 250 percent last year — partially due to acquisitions such as Seesmic — and will grow another 60 to 80 percent this year, Holmes said. Which, of course, necessitated new offices, that HootSuite built in a former police station in east Vancouver.

It’s also something that reminds me of Holme’s comments a year ago about not selling out too early. He felt at the time that HootSuite could become a billion-dollar company.

Those feelings haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve increased:

“We’re getting closer all the time,” Holmes said. “I’m not interesting in selling out … we have a huge opportunity looking ahead, and the billion-dollar number is just a stick in the sand. Hopefully we’ll run right through that and keep going!”

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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It’s startup accelerator GrowLab’s demo day tonight in Vancouver, Canada, and I’m live, on location intrepidly reporting before I dash off to my phone booth tonight to transform into my regular office-bound oafish existence. Demo Day is at District 319, an abandoned Asian movie house-turned funky event space, with ominous No Minors Allowed signs decorating the entrance, and the magic starts in just two and a half hours.

There are seven startups presenting today, all of which received $20-25,000 in preliminary funding from GrowLab in exchange for five to nine percent equity. The founders are currently in their holy-mother-it’s-our-last-chance-to-practice mode, but I’ll be chatting with each in about an hour.

“I’m excited, there’s a lot of energy here … it’s definitely been a journey with GrowLab,” said KarmaHire’s James Clift “I’m super-proud of my team and what we’ve accomplished, and excited for the future.”

All of them spent the last three months working around the clock preparing for this moment:

• ePACT is the emergency network that connects families, organizations and entire communities via web and mobile access to critical information, communication and support in any crisis.
• KarmaHire revolutionizes the 9B recruitment advertising market. It is an optimized hiring platform for fast growing companies to create high converting recruiting pages in minutes, attract better talents, and increase their ROI.
• Procurify is a spend management solution for organization of all sizes. It is an online software that is easy-to-use, secure, and cost effective.
• Spacelist is the MLS for commercial real estate.  With over 16 million square feet of available space, businesses can clearly see all their options, setup a tour and move into a great space with less stress and less confusion than ever before.
• Nanu Interactive develops applications that add sharing and magic to family activities. We want to enrich the things you do by using technology to make them magical.
• OOHLALA is the must have collage app that helps you connect with your campus life.
• Will Pwn 4 Food makes fast-action 3D games that you can play on their website, anytime, anywhere for actual cash and prizes!

Today’s a big day and a lot is riding on the startups’ pitches. Investors and mentors will be in the crowd watching, and up to five of the most successful graduates will receive a convertible note for $150,000 from the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Former GrowLab grads include Skyscraper, which just raised a $500,000 seed round in December of 2012, and Mover.io, which is looking to be be the default mover of data — everywhere.

More a little later today.

Image credit: John Koetsier

Who knew, for example, that Sydney, Australia, is global capital of “data-driven startups?” Or that the top nine startups of the last 15 years have generated nearly a trillion dollars in value, helped along by the likes of Facebook, Google, and Amazon? And while everyone would likely have guessed that Silicon Valley is the top hub of entrepreneurship on the planet, with Tel Aviv high on the list (if not exactly second), Los Angeles coming in third is a bit of a surprise.

The conclusions are based on data from startups that use the Startup Compass, a tool that helps founders make better  decisions through data. Startup Genome analyzed factors such as startup incidence, funding availability, business performance, founder mindset, technology trends, support networks, and talent availability to find the hottest locations to start and grow a company.

Here are the top 20 technology hubs, as defined by the Startup Genome:

1. Silicon Valley
2. Tel Aviv
3. Los Angeles
4. Seattle
5. New York City
6. Boston
7. London
8. Toronto
9. Vancouver
10. Chicago
11. Paris
12. Sydney
13. Sao Paulo
14. Moscow
15. Berlin
16. Waterloo (Canada)
17. Singapore
18. Melbourne
19. Bangalore
20. Santiago

More valuable than the ranking, Startup Genome provided the ranking data for each technology hub on eight key criteria. Using these criteria you can see, for example, that while Vancouver ranks 14th in the support index, probably due to being a relatively young ecosystem, it ranks second in the mindset index (indicating that it has plenty of eager and driving founders) and fourth in the talent index.

Tel Aviv, on the other hand, ranks second in startup output and equivalent to Silicon Valley in funding, but only 12th in performance, perhaps due to Israeli startups’ sometimes-wondered-at predilection for building smaller companies, outfits that don’t turn into enormous enterprises.

The report is rich in data and many more details — you can get your own copy right here.

Image credits: Startup Genome

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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After spending the first ten years of her working life in the fashion industry, Landa moved from fashion to technology. She’s become one of the most influential connectors in Silicon Valley, and has helped, invested in, or worked with over a thousand startups.

We caught up with her at the recent Grow Conference in Vancouver.

VentureBeat: You moved from fashion to technology. Why?

Landa: Fashion’s boring (laughing). Ok, it’s not boring, it’s just … it became monotonous, I did for ten years, and, when you’re in the fashion industry, it’s all about trends and seeing around corners and knowing what’s coming in the next year to two to three years, and it just became repetitive after a while, and the internet came around, and I started seeing that and thinking, OMG, my mind was just blown.

And it was moving so fast, and that was the next cool thing.

VentureBeat: Best funding decision you ever made?

Landa: I think it — DAHHH — putting money into my own company (laughing).

VentureBeat: Best thing about producing conferences?

Landa: The result at the end of the conference: how happy people are, and how you’ve changed their lives.

VentureBeat: Company you helped that you were most proud of?

Landa: Oh, whoa, there’s no way, I’ve helped over a thousand companies … there’s too many to choose from.

VentureBeat: Worst thing about producing a conference?

Landa: It’s like your birthday party that you threw … as many friends as you have you’re never positive they’re all going to come to your party!

VentureBeat: Most regretted funding decision?

Landa: That’s NOT going to happen (laughing).

VentureBeat: GrowLab is in Vancouver. What’s good about Vancouver?

Landa: Let’s be clear. GrowLab is also in San Francisco, and to me what’s most important is the bridge that’s being created between those two cities because I don’t think an accelerator should exist in only one city.

You have to have a bridge to the valley.

VentureBeat: The latest grads from GrowLab: Better than last year?

Landa: Older, more sophisticated, and further along …

VentureBeat: One that’s most likely to go huge?

Landa: It’s between two. I’m going to say Mover.io.

VentureBeat: Investing preference: consumer or enterprise?

Landa: Actually it’s more in the middle zone of SaaS applications. Infrastructure is how I see enterprise, and I want to lean more toward business applications as opposed to straight consumer … I like business applications or developer tools.

VentureBeat: Biggest challenge for first-time entrepreneurs?

Landa: They don’t know what they don’t know.

VentureBeat: One thing you wish every startup CEO would know.

Landa: How to sell.

Photo credit: Debbie Landa

That’s how Dave McClure started his talk today at GROW conference in Vancouver, Canada, where he’s already been busy investing. He’s been doing a lot of speaking in Canada lately, having just recently flipped off Montreal’s tech entrepreneurs.

McClure is focusing internationally this year, in Brazil, India, and Mexico. His incubator program, 500 Startups, recently merged with Mexico’s Mexican.VC.

After starting with typical flair and a warning “there will be lots of swearing,” McClure talked about making venture capital work better and how 500 Startups picks and works with its startups.

The first is not a challenge, apparently: ”It’s pretty easy, ’cause most VCs suck balls.”

Rates of returns for VCs are horrible, says McClure. He likes a few, including Sequoia, Union Square, and Andreeson Horowitz, but most do not make money.

500 Startups works differently by making make lots of little bets … as many as 200 investments per fund. McClure wants to be right about 20 percent to 25 percent of the time, but he usually only achieves significant success — $100 million exits — on only 20 percent of its investments.

When looking for new entrepreneurs, 500 startups is looking at up to six different factors:

1. Introductions (Are the founders crazy, liars, or idiots?)
2. Product (Does it work?)
3. Market (Are there people who use it?)
4. Revenue (Will people pay for it?)
5. Growth: (How can you scale?)
6. Finance: (What will it cost to get customers; when and how do you make money?)

In addition, when looking at startup teams, McClure wants to see at least three skillsets: hackers, hustlers, and hipsters. Hackers are developers and engineers, hustlers sell and marketer, and hipsters design and build out the user experience.

The shift McClures is seeing (or embodying) is traditional VCs (white guys in suits, apparently) becoming a guild of geeks, mentors, and angels. The legendary PayPal mafia — of which McClure is a card-carrying member — comes to mind.

Entrepreneurs coming to incubators or angels, McClure says, can impress potential investors with trusted referrals (which enable simple due diligence), a functional prototype (which shows that there may be a good team behind the product), and actual revenue (which proves that there’s a market and customers).

Once a company is accepted into an accelerator, it takes a while to sort out winners and losers.

“In six months you’ll know if they don’t suck. In one to two years you’ll know if they’re awesome,” says McClure.

Bonus: Random Dave McClure quotes

“VCs are idiots. Founders are also idiots.”

On accelerators: “It’s not sane, it’s not stable. But success emerges not because of you but because of the environment you create.”

“If you have a choice between being a founder or a VC, be a VC. It’s a way better gig.”

“Be early and contrarian or late and right.”

“I’m better than probably 90 percent of the people out there. Doesn’t mean I’m smart, probably means I’m lucky.”

“Winners win, losers lose, tweeners tween.”

Those companies include:

• Wantering: Wantering is your personal shopper for the web.
• Foodee: A new product from Invoke Media, the maker of HootSuite. Food.ee simplifies group ordering of delivery food for offices.
• Skyscrpr: Skyscrpr is a revenue management and optimization platform. Independent publishers monetize their sites through various sources like display ads, sponsored content and social.
• BlueBat: Bluebat is the innovator of the BlueBox engine, an end-to-end software-development environment for the creation of social games on Facebook and mobile.
• Cinecoup: Cinecoup is blending the studio and agency model with a social web platform to disrupt the way $1 million to $5 million independent feature films are developed, financed, and distributed.
• Mover.io: Mover uncomplicates the migration of data into and around cloud storage platforms. Our customers are IT managers, cloud storage providers, and your average consumer.
• Karmahire: KarmaHire is an video interview and interactive skill-testing platform that helps companies hire better talent 10-times faster.
• Weeve: Weeve is a crowdfunding platform that allows nonprofit organizations to raise money and awareness for their cause 100 percent free.
• Battlefy: Battlefy is the online destination for gamers to organize, play, and watch eSports (competitive play of video games).
• Next36 company – Kira: Kira is a collaborative platform that accelerates the interview process using video — leaving behind stacks of impersonal resumes and applications.

Have a favorite? Want to know more about it?

Let me know on Twitter – I’ll do my best to get a full interview and overview.

Image credit: John Koetsier

Hollywood North? L.A. with rain? The city that riots whenever its hockey team doesn’t win the Stanley Cup?

Americans might think of Vancouver in many ways — but typically not as a tech startup mecca.

And yet Summify, A Thinking Ape, OpenCal, TinySpeck, and PhoneGap are just a few of the city’s better-known startups of the past few years. Along with established-but-still-young companies such as Hootsuite, these startups have joined multinationals Electronic Arts, Sierra Wireless, Pixar, Sony, and Microsoft in the Vancouver area.

Just don’t ask the venture capitalists who take the 3-hour flight north from Silicon Valley. They have their own thoughts about Vancouver startups, but they’re not likely to reveal them to you. They’re too busy trying to snap up undervalued Canadian companies.

Debbie Landa remembers talking to VCs from Bessemer who were coming up to Vancouver a couple of years ago. She’s the chief executive of San Francisco-based Dealmaker Media and doyenne of the GrowLab accelerators as well as the Grow Conference, which is now an annual event in Vancouver (it kicks off today).

Source: John Koetsier

A view of Vancouver from the south, with BC Place and Rogers Arena in the foreground.

“They [the Bessemer VCs] were a little shocked to hear that they were not the first,” Landa told me. “But the first people to register for Grow were VCs from Accel and Battery, and they’re all at each other’s throats in competition.”

Slicing and dicing: big, up-and-comers, and investors

“I see the tech scene in Vancouver in three slices,” Olivier Vincent says.

Vincent’s an entrepreneur with several exits under his belt, including local-search company Canpages for $225 million. Vincent is working on a new startup, Hipparcos Technologies (presently in stealth mode).

“There are the big names, the up-and-coming startups, and the investment community,” Vincent said.

The big names are often regional offices for international technology-related companies: Microsoft, Sony, and Pixar fit into this category, as does Electronic Arts, which maintains a big presence in the Vancouver area. (Rumors have been swirling about Google opening a Vancouver office, but those remain just rumors, according to Leslie Church, a Google public relations representative.)

HootSuite is also becoming a big name, with ambitions to be a billion-dollar company in the social media management space.

Source: John Koetsier

Vancouver, Stanley Park, floatplane harbor

Smaller companies that have developed solid niches and funding include A Thinking Ape, a gaming company; and AirG, the mobile social network with upward of 50 million users, mostly on feature phones. Make5, Suite101, and PC HelpSoft are a few of the others gaining some traction.

Some of the companies of this scale have been acquired: OpenCal by Groupon, PhoneGap by Adobe, and MetroLyrics by CBS, highlighting that one of the challenges in Vancouver is the money side.

VCs flying up from the valley help provide liquidity, but local angels and VCs are in somewhat short supply, meaning that acquisition at fairly lower numbers early in company’s lifecycles is common.

VCs, angels, and Vancouver’s Dave McClure?

One of Vancouver’s most prominent startup investors is Boris Wertz. The other GrowLab founder (with Landa), Wertz is in some sense a Vancouver version of PayPal alumnus and 500 Startups founder Dave McClure. Except, of course, without McClure’s f-bombs and middle fingers.

Wertz has funded about 35 startups through first W Media Ventures and now Version One Ventures, which has raised a $15 million “micro-VC” fund to make $250,000 to $500,000 seed and Series One investments. Summify was one of his investments, and it was also a significant exit when Twitter bought the company for an undisclosed amount.

Source: John Koetsier

Downtown Vancouver

But he doesn’t have enough local competition — as he himself said in an interview with Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper: “I’d say 90 percent of consumer Internet projects in Vancouver come through me. I wish it weren’t that way. It’s not healthy.”

Healthy or not, Wertz is seeing a lot of new potential in Vancouver, and that is something he likes.

“Some of the hottest new startups I see in Vancouver right now are Indochino, A Thinking Ape, and Unbounce,” Wertz said when we chatted last week.

But competition is coming, both from the Bessemers and Accels. And from the real Dave McClure.

McClure is in Vancouver for the Grow conference. It’s not going to be his first visit, says Landa, and he has not been idle.

“Dave McClure has been doing a ton of investing,” Landa said.

No, it’s not Silicon Valley north

It is, of course, de rigeur to compare every new tech hotbed with Silicon Valley. And the reality is that the best of them fail the test.

The valley has everything, as Robert Scoble told me a month ago:

Source: John Koetsier

Digital Orca and cruise ship looking north from Vancouver.

“First of all is money,” Scoble said. “You can’t get funded to do risky weird shit in very many places. Secondly, it’s PR: Most of it is here. Third, it’s talent: The guy who built a 20,000 node server farm for eBay, he lives here. You can’t get that anywhere else.”

Fourth and finally, Scoble said, it’s the culture.

“Just on Sunday walking on the beach I ran into the guy who runs the welding team at Tesla … he lives here, not anywhere else. It happens every single day, and you just don’t have this anywhere else.”

Vancouver’s not there yet, especially on the money and PR side.

But it is a thriving and innovative technology hotbed and, to this point at least, a source of good deals for cheap acquisitions.

And someday, if Wertz’ vision comes to fruition, it could be much more than that.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Seattle-based GameHouse was one of the big players on the casual web, but it lost its pole position as the audience shifted to social games on Facebook. Now the company is making a run at social games again, and it will tap some of the game development talent in Canada to do so. The effort is part of a $10 million investment in social games.

“Social game development is the No. 1 priority for our company in 2012, and the expansion in Victoria was chosen for the city’s high caliber of talent combined with a great quality of life.” said Matt Hulett, chief gamer at GameHouse. “I believe this strategic expansion of our social games studio in Victoria will not only multiply our games portfolio but will also solidify our leadership position in the overall games industry.”

GameHouse has had a couple of successful Facebook games. Collapse! Blast and Bayou Blast launched in the fall and have attracted nearly 400,000 daily players to date. With 3.7 million people playing its social games each month, the company hopes to build its audience so it can become a contender for the big revenues in social games. So far, revenues are growing at triple-digit rates.

The new studio in downtown Victoria will specialize in games for Facebook, Google+ and other emerging social platforms. Alex Mendelev (pictured) is general manager of GameHouse Canada. His approach is to allow designers to express their creative freedom during development.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Well, grab one of the last spots left to present at the VentureBeat/DEMO meetup with Rogers Ventures in Vancouver this Thursday, June 23.

If you’re in the area and have a new tech company or product you’re launching soon, this will be a great opportunity to get feedback from the DEMO team (I’m executive producer) and a few senior partners from Rogers.

We’ll be selecting up to 10 companies to meet with us at Bootup Labs (163 West Hastings, Suite 200, Vancouver). Please fill out this form to apply. Each team will be given half an hour to present their product and get feedback. We’ll be accepting applicants for the rest of today and will be in touch with you shortly if you are selected.

Following the presentations, we’ll be hosting a party at Republic Grandville Room Bar (957 Granville Street, Vancouver) for the entire Vancouver tech crowd. Join us along with local entrepreneurs and VCs, and a group of DEMO alumni and past attendees. Please register for this event here. The first 50 people through the door will get a drink on us.

Hope to see you in Vancouver this week!

The meetup takes place on Thursday, December 2 from 6-8pm. The first 50 drinks are on VentureBeat and DEMO, which is the conference we co-produce every six months that showcases awesome emerging tech products. The address is 1137 Hamilton Street. Please register here if you’d like to come.

This is my first time hitting Canadian soil, so I’m jazzed. As VentureBeat begins to expand its coverage of tech companies globally, it’s about time we made it up to Canada.

Separately, prior to the meetup, I’m taking meetings with up to six entrepreneurs who are contemplating launching technology products soon (they may be eyeing the upcoming DEMO event February 27 – March 1 in Palm Desert, or possibly DEMO in fall 2011). The meetings will be held at The Westin Grand hotel downtown, and I’ll be providing feedback on the ideas. If you’d like to attend one of these meetings, please fill out this form, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible with a time to meet.

Sutus is a Vancouver-area company that launched at DEMO last year, and raved about the press coverage it got.

This is part of my ongoing quest to find the best companies from around the world to launch at DEMO, an event where we select 60 or so finalists to demo their product to the world’s leading technology press corps. DEMO is where everyone from Netscape, to E-Trade, Boingo, Palm, Symantec, Salesforce.com, and VMWare have launched over the years. Aside from the press, DEMO is also attended by leading venture capitalists as well as corporate and business-development execs. It’s an awesome event for getting unprecedented publicity and for striking deals.

We also have meetings coming up in Seattle on Tuesday, Nov. 30, and at Sequoia Capital on December 7.

Looking forward to coming to Canada, and seeing some of you there!

Fresh out of startup incubator Bootup Labs, Summify has just announced an undisclosed seed round of funding from Boris Wertz of W Media Ventures, an angel fund active in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. The startup develops a social news-reader meant to help you “consume your river of news in minutes, rather than hours”, it says.

The two founders, former Google and Microsoft engineering interns, developed an algorithm that aggregates all the news from your Google Reader and Twitter accounts, eliminates the duplicates, and filters the most important news using social reactions: tweets, likes, shares and comments.

The information overload is a longtime problem, and many startups failed trying to come up with a solution. Even big names are now in the race for the best news personalization award. One of them is the New Digg, which displays top news as voted (or dugg) by the people you follow. However, while the New Digg uses only diggs to rate important news, Summify feeds on existing social reactions. “We could even integrate diggs from the New Digg into our algorithm”, says Mircea Pasoi, one of the founders.

Another competitor is Flipboard, a social magazine for iPad, which only aggregates Twitter and Facebook articles, offering no support for RSS at this time.

As for Summify’s business model, the founders say that’s still to be determined. They are focusing now on building a solution and getting traction. “We are convinced that anyone who solves the information overload/news personalization problem on a large scale will also be able to monetize such a service”, says Mircea. Let’s hope they’re right.