Jay Goldman

Great news today courtesy of David Crow: the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation announced funding of up to $500,000 for eight companies through the Investment Accelerator Fund! I know a few of the companies personally and they all seem like pretty solid bets.

• I met John Salama, Chief Software Architect at Kneebone, at a University of Toronto Research in Action showcase a few years ago. I really liked their elevator pitch and we chatted for a while about ways Radiant Core could work with them but nothing ever came of it.
• Nulogy was a Radiant Core client so we know Jason, Kevin and the gang pretty well. Martin spent a good deal of time working through PackManager’s user experience and providing fairly detailed wireframes and visual design at a key time in the product’s early days. They recently won a Red Herring Top 50 in Canada award, so they must be doing something right
• Regen Energy is fairly closely associated with Zerofootprint, and so I had the opportunity to sit down and chat with Mark Kerbel (CEO) on a few occasions. Their technology is really, really interesting for larger buildings with substantial HVAC installations, allowing them to effectively cycle their power use as an intelligent network of devices. Their How it Works animation tells the story much better than I can.
• I met Bern Grush, Chief Scientist at SkyMeter, at one of the Metronauts events and brought them in to form a partnership with Zerofootprint. Bern is more passionate about road congestion then any one man has any right to be, but he’s used that passion in the pursuit of good (rather than evil) and has co-developed a pretty amazing in-car tracking system. SkyMeter is well ahead of its time and it looked like the road wasn’t going to be long enough to let them rest of us catch up, so I’m glad to see that it’s been extended.

Congrats to all of the recipients! As David said: it’s fantastic to start 2009 off with a big funding announcement in the midst of all this negative economy chatter.