editor’s letter

Enter our Innovation Campaign: $100,000 is on the line

And then read about Canada’s best tech offerings in the Backbone200

The second annual Innovation Backbone lion in annual revenue, we

b usin e s s t e c h nolog y lif es t y l e

Campaign is now live. Last year, we at Backbone decided it was $100,000 The 2nd Annual Backbone want you to enter our contest. If you know someone who time to get out of the stands Start Me Up could be our next winner, tell and join the game, so we creRaising innovative entrepreneurs to the next level Innovation Campaign him or her about the Innovaated the Innovation Campaign tion Campaign. to boost deserving Canadian Full details—including tech start-ups. From a list of eligibility rules and entry inhundreds of Canada’s bestSPONSORS structions plus the full prize and-brightest young compa- list and the names of our sponnies, our judges narrowed the sors and judges—is online at field to 10 and then chose one winner and www.backbonemag.com/startmeup. The one runner-up. They received cash prizes, contest closes March 30th. mentorship opportunities, products and services (such as office space in some of Introducing the B200 Canada’s leading incubators) and ongoing Canada is a big place and technology procoverage in Backbone and on our Web site. gresses at warp speed. These two factors

Winning paid off for EidoSearch and make it tough to stay up to date on our runner-up TitanFile, as both companies business tech scene. And that’s where the have experienced dramatic growth in the Backbone200 comes in. last year. EidoSearch helps companies This is a brand new list of the best Canconduct analysis against complex data. ada offers in work, play and productivity The company doubled its customer base, solutions. We have information for those more than doubled it workforce, improved seeking funding, investment targets, highits user interface and increased its pack- paying jobs, events or e-learning, outaged data sets. sourcing and cloud providers. And we’re

Secure file-transfer company TitanFile not all about business: we can also help landed $1.1 million in financing, which it is you buy a cool gadget, watch Kevin Spacey plowing back into product development yell at incompetent employees or read and expansion into the U.S. It was also about Steve Jobs yelling at incompetent selected by McInnes Cooper and Stewart employees. The companies, organizations McKelvey, the two largest Atlantic Canada and products that made the Backbone200 law firms, as a secure communication so- are not necessarily the biggest or richest; lution. “We were able to leverage the at- many are, but some entries are ones that tention from the campaign to get more our writers and sources felt were deservclients. It helped establish us,” said co- ing of recognition because they are promfounder Milan Vrekic. ising, interesting or unique.

Last year, TitanFile also released a new We don’t guarantee you’ll agree with version of its product and the company all of our picks; in fact, we’re sure you has been successful in recruitment. Be- won’t, and we look forward to hearing ing the runner-up and receiving ongoing your feedback on our choices. But we do editorial coverage “helped us attract really promise that you’ll find much here that is great people to the team.” interesting and useful. Who knows, maybe

The future looks bright for both com- your next employer or big business project panies. “Take what we did in 2012 and add is somewhere in the Backbone200? a multiplier to it,” said EidoSearch cofounder David Kedmey.

We’re thrilled that we could help deserving Canadian start-ups, and now we’re Peter Wolchak ready to do it again. If you run an early- Editor stage tech company with less than $2 mil- pwolchak@backbonemag.com

Publisher Steve Dietrich sdietrich@backbonemag.com EDITORIAL

Editor Peter Wolchak pwolchak@backbonemag.com Contributing Editor Lisa Manfield lmanfield@backbonemag.com Art Director Shelley Walker swalker@backbonemag.com Production and Prepress Peter Pasivirta Online Communications Manager Sue Ansell sansell@backbonemag.com Publishing Assistant Vera Lourenco vlourenco@backbonemag.com Contributing Writers Trevor Marshall, Jim Harris, Danny Bradbury, Lawrence Cummer, Ian Harvey,Gail Balfour Contributing Illustrators Jon Berkeley, Gavin Orpen, Vin Ganapathy Contributing Photographers Steve Uhraney, Miguel Hortiguela

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Associate Publisher, Director of Sales Dinah Quattrin Tel: 416 993 9636 dquattrin@backbonemag.com V.P. Sales Marketing Steve Dietrich Tel: 604 986 5352 sdietrich@backbonemag.com

HEAD OFFICE/CIRCULATION

Publimedia Communications Inc. Tel: 604 986 5344 info@backbonemag.com PLEASE SEND COMMENTS TO: E-MAIL pwolchak@backbonemag.com

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

MAILING ADDRESS 187 Rondoval Crescent, North Vancouver, BC V7N 2W6 FAX 604 986 5309 WEB SITE www.backbonemag.com MEDIA KIT www.backbonemag.com/mediakit EDITORIAL OFFICE 1676 Wembury Road, Mississauga, ON L5J 4G3 editor@backbonemag.com SUBSCRIPTIONS One-year subscription $25.95 (+ HST) within Canada $40.95 outside Canada To subscribe call: 604 986 5344 online: www.backbonemag.com/subscribe Backbone magazine is published six times per year by Publimedia Communications Inc. Year established, January 2001. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher, or the staff. All editorial is deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. The publisher is not responsible for any liability associated with any editorial or products and services offered by any advertiser. Copyright © 2013 Publimedia Communications Inc. www.backbonemag.com

FROM DETAILS TO DESIRES:

Companies aren’t short on data. In fact, with the average large business storing more than 200 terabytes, com panies have more than enough data to tell them when, where and who is buying their product. But few Canadian businesses have embraced the potential in all those valuable bits of in for mation. To remain competitive in this increasingly competitive world of ours, data is going to play an increasingly more important role – but not just data; big data. DATA’S NEW VOICE. Welcome to the world of big data. Big data isn’t just sales and inventory numbers; it is tweets, videos, clickstreams and other unstructured sources. It’s the data of desire. And today, we have the technology and tools to make sense of it. So now, instead of learning which customers it has lost, a company can learn which customers it might lose and present timely o ers or products motivating those customers to stay. Using IBM Smarter Analytics to identify which customers were most likely to switch

to another communications carrier, XO Communications was able to predict likely customer defections within 90 days, reducing churn by 35 percent the fi rst year. Data can help Canadian businesses become more innovative and competitive players in the Smarter Planet. How do we know? Let’s just say, we have the data to prove it.

ibm.com/smarteranalytics/ca

“ For the first time, we can decide which promotions to run based on facts rather than gut feel.”

Patrick Neeley Chief Business Officer, Chickasaw Nation Division of Commerce

THE POWER OF BIG DATA.

80%

of the data currently produced is unstructured – coming from sources like images, videos, tweets, posts and e-mails. 1 2

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Combining big data with company data paints a better picture of the customer.

MINING MOTIVATION Enter Smarter Analytics from IBM – software, systems and strategies that help companies combine their own enterprise data with their consumers’ unstructured data to see a fuller picture. A big data platform, paired with predictive and sentiment analytics, allows organizations to correlate, for example, sales records with social media mentions for more relevant insights. TweetTweetTweetTweetTweetTweet Share

LET’S BUILD A SMARTER PLANET.