In the minds of many people, Google's purchase of Toronto startup BumpTop for a reported $35 million last year put the Toronto tech sector on the map, and also secured the position of
Xtreme Labs (and its affiliated investment arm Extreme Venture Partners) as the big players in the local mobile software development industry.
So some excitement greeted the launch this month of a new venture by some of those familiar players-
-the new app-monetization platform Blu Trumpet is led by Nina Sodhi, the University of Waterloo alum and Harvard MBA who served as COO of BumpTop. And the venture is the first to emerge from Xtreme's partnership with New York-based IAC, Hatch Labs, which bills itself as an "entrepreneurial sandbox" for mobile products.
Blu Trumpet, with sales and administration offices in New York and development based at Xtreme's Yonge Street headquarters, has introduced an advertising mechanism for app developers that they claim users will enjoy rather than find annoying. "We call it it 'life after banners," says Sodhi. "It's an app discovery tool that app clients add to a nav bar, so users choose to navigate to it to find other apps from advertisers." Karthik Ramakrishnan, the product director who heads the development team in Toronto, says that early metrics show more than 10 per cent of users come back to the app discovery tool again and again, "so we know it is adding value for the users." Which, Sodhi and Ramakrishnan agree, makes it all the more valuable for both advertisers and host apps.
Sodhi says that Blu Trumpet currently has a team of four working in Toronto and two in New York, and expects to double its staff her and perhaps triple it in New York by the end of the year. She says that originally the company's plans had not called for basing all development work here, but that the rich pool of talent that's available here, and that has been shown to be "willing to stick things out" with start-up companies, made the decision obvious. Sodhi attributes the bustling scene here to both the presence of great engineering university programs in the area and to government programs that support innovative startups. Meanwhile, Ramakrishnan says that prominent "exits" like the sale of Bumptop last year have created an appetite for startup life among local developers. "People are interested in startups again--the risk factor is mitigated by the coolness, the desire to be in on the ground floor of something exciting," he says.
Writer: Edward Keenan
Source: Nina Sodhi, CEO, Blu Trumpet; Karthik Ramakrishnan, Product Director, Blu Trumpet