Cool Companies

Cool Companies 2006

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Vol1 Issue 2

Issue Theme

Vancouver, Calgary & Edmonton Innovation Leaders


Cool Companies Profiles

20 Cool Companies profiles of Cool Companies Award winners include:

The Litebook Company
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The Litebook Company’s product is a light emitting diode (LED) technology to help people cure their winter blues. This product has also been used to regular sleep patterns that come with sleep disorders and travelers with jet lag. It has also shown to be therapeutic for pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS), bulimia nervosa, Alzheimer’s disease, chronic fatigue, non-seasonal major depression. The company expects to start FDA approval of this product in 2007. The Litebook Company seeks strategic distribution partners for global markets.

Replicon
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Replicon has a set of web-based tracking tools that help business people manage their business operations better. 95% of its customers come via the Internet from all over the world. Replicon continues to seek new ways to create awareness and sales of its products worldwide using the Internet. It also seeks more growth opportunities in the business-2-business product industry.

Experience Stories

Founding entrepreneurs from some of the Cool Companies profiled in this issue told us in their own words of the challenges they faced and overcame in starting and growing their companies, and the lessons they learnt along the way. Here are two of those stories:

Larry Pederson
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Founder of The Litebook Company
Direct from the entrepreneur: “You may want to be a global company one day, but you have to prove you can walk before the universe will allow you to run…. The opportunities that present themselves are many and varied, but only pick the lowest hanging fruit and go after it with vigor….Serendipity means making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. Prior to Litebook, I was a complete skeptic about the concept…. (However) my experience with this project has been infused with one serendipitous event after another. I finally accepted that this could be a real phenomenon.”

Raj Narayanaswamy & Lakshmi Raj
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Co-Founders of Replicon
Direct from the entrepreneurs: “We were both computer science people focused on products. We learned the hard way to always keep the business focused on the customer… We have built or company to over 100 people on one product and apply our customer feedback to help us improve it….It is our experience that too many new features are confusing to customers. Our approach is to create a products update every 3 or 4 months that only has 1 to 3 new features. We find it easier to test for bugs and it is easier to educate everyone if there are not so many features. Our customers also like getting new features every 3 to 4 months. In most software companies this is unheard of. They are used to rolling out an update every 9 to 12 months.

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