Next 36 Ventures tonight at MaRS and on BNN The Pitch

The energy in the room will be at nuclear fusion level tonight. Why? Imagine 36 of the young, newly selected participants in an entrepreneur incubator in one room with Canada's leading entrepreneur community and now you get the idea. It is a lethal combination of excitement.

I am meeting the Next 36 Ventures Finalists at MaRS and Claudia Hepbourn has done an incredible job of developing emerging entrepreneurs and making young people build their careers and business ideas.

Several of the better concepts made it onto the business owner show where they pitch for VC and private equity money. 

See "Whadyathink?" and  "Playfit Mobile" pitch to Jacoline Loewen, Loewen & Partners, private equity expert on BNN's The Pitch.

Whadyathink - http://vod.bnn.ca/Video/507127

Playfit Mobile - http://vod.bnn.ca/Video/507128

The Decision - http://vod.bnn.ca/Video/507129

or view at

http://vod.bnn.ca/Video/507127

Birch Box creates a new channel for make up and cosmetics

Cosmetic brands are the female equivalent of game apps. As a founder, if the brand catches on, the pay off can be great.
I was talking with a cosmetics business owner and a private equity fund from San Francisco and The Shopping Channel is one high risk and expensive way to get a brand boosted but there is an exciting new company called Birch Box that has created an entirely new channel to reach make up hungry females who can never have enough lipsticks or eye shadows.

Bayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp got their investor partners on board and learned that there is a dangerous side of shipping cosmetics.

Birchbox is the startup that VCs can't stop talking about and that new startups are trying to emulate.

The company, which sends its customers a box of beauty products samples every month, launched just over a year ago and it has been growing exponentially with more than 45,000 users and various upscale cosmetic partners such as Khiels, Carol's Daughter and Kerastase.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-birchbox-2011-11#ixzz1ej6fTHG7

Private Equity wants you to have more than one client

A revolution, rather than an evolution, is happening in the natural gas and oil markets in North America and the world. The revolution results from the impact of fracking and horizontal drilling, and the resulting discovery and development of huge, unconventional oil and gas reserves around the world in shale formations.

The US has potentially two Trillion barrels of unconventional oil reserves in shale and other formations, which can be developed, making it the world’s largest oil producer.

This is followed by China at 350 Billion barrels and Israel with 250 billion barrels. These are all as compared to  Saudi Arabia’s current 260 billion barrels of conventional oil. For Canada, it is 179 Billion Barrels.

The recent US and Canada diplomatic slap in the face over the pipeline between the two countries, as reported by MacLean’s, is around the politics of environmentalists, but also rumored to be the large US oil and coal lobby groups pressuring the US government not to allow any competitors into the US market. Canada would be a big threat to these companies. As the Canadian government said, “The pipeline is a no brainer.” Not to the US government though.

Patrick Daniel, CEO Enbridge,  says that most of the transportation is not through a pipeline anyway, but he supports that the pipeline is a no brainer and the delay is a serious issue. Instead, Canada will now be pushing up the Gateway project to do a pipeline to Kitimat, not Prince Rupert. This pipeline will then transport energy for Asia and our geographic position puts Canada geographically closer to the Asian markets than the Middle East, a huge competitive advantage. Daniel said that environmentalists like to "mob the mike" and that other voices need to also make themselves heard. He said that technology companies say they are revolutionizing medicine but he believes energy already did that by making sure the patient got to the doctor. When you look at that reasoning, we do take for granted our transportation and lighting.

Having one client which is Enbridge's current client situation, the USA, would not be liked by a private equity investor. Enbridge and Canada are now being forced by the USA's politicking to look for their next big client. Asia is the next no brainer, but the Vancouver Port is too full so Kitimat needs to be developed. Enbridge says there will be environmental rules in place to ensure only top quality ships are allowed to be accepted. 
Providing energy to Asia is a race.

A recent article in the National Post titled “Democratic Jackpot” highlights the new sources of energy and how it will be an incredible game changer . Most of the finds are in democratic countries – interesting. They will also be coming online within 10 years.

 The game-changer is "unconventional fossil fuels," much of it trapped in shale - rock that often contains oil or gas. In the case of gas, the U.S. is developing so much, so fast in so many places that the domestic price for natural gas has more than halved. Whereas five years ago the U.S. planned to build major terminuses to import gas, it is now becoming a major gas exporter. America's Marcellus Shale formation alone - a natural gas reservoir that lies more than a mile underground beneath Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Ohio - has enough gas to supply the Eastern U.S. for decades.

Europe, though a novice in the unconventional energy game, has already discovered vast amounts. The U.K., in the first shale gas field it drilled earlier this year, discovered a gas deposit close to half the size of Marcellus, enough to fuel the entire British economy for decades. France and Poland have comparable finds; Germany and the Netherlands smaller ones. Europe has also discovered immense amounts of natural gas in the Mediterranean, which Cyprus, Greece and Israel have begun to develop for delivery to the European mainland. Among the Western democracies, Australia, too, has massive amounts of exportable natural gas, as does Canada, Brazil and others in the Americas. As does China and other Asian countries. All told, the International Energy Agency estimates a world store of natural gas sufficient to last 250 years.

A similar tale of unconventional riches is unfolding in oil, where the U.S. has in excess of two trillion barrels, the world's largest store. China comes next, with some 350 billion barrels, followed by Israel's 250 billion barrels, an amount close to Saudi Arabia's 260 billion barrels of conventional oil. Thirty-five other countries, including 15 in Europe, are believed to have lesser amounts of unconventional oil, but they may not remain lesser for long - with each new assessment in recent years, the estimates have climbed with new discoveries.

The cost of developing these unconventional resources, meanwhile, continues to drop. In the case of Israel, which has developed an unusually clean and efficient drilling technology, oil is expected to flow at a cost of US$35 to US$40 per barrel, or less than half today's world oil price of US$90 a barrel.

The diversified democracies of the world - the U.S. and European countries among others - will profit big time from the world's endowment of unconventional oil and gas, partly because many of them will become energy exporters instead of importers and mainly because low energy prices will spur their advanced economies. Not so for today's undiversified, energy-export dependent countries.

Maxime Bernier delights the business owners at the Globe and Mail Small Business Summit

Maxime Bernier blew me away with the government's positive approach to business. He spoke at the Globe and Mail Small Business Summit about how everyone should be grateful to business owners and how hard it is to get past the politics of envy of success.
Never thought I would hear that in Canada.
There is more and I recommend that every business owner sign up on this new website. It is wonderfully easy to use and very practical.

The Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of State (Small Business and Tourism), today announced that BizPaL is becoming a permanent service available to small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners.

“The Government of Canada supports SMEs by putting in place initiatives that enable them and entrepreneurs to continue to grow and create jobs,” said Minister of State Bernier. “BizPaL is a concrete example of an initiative designed to cut through the red tape that small business owners encounter.”

BizPaL is an innovative and cost-effective one-stop online service that provides simplified access to information on permits and licences that entrepreneurs and small business owners need to establish and run their businesses.

This unique partnership among federal, provincial, territorial and municipal governments is designed to cut through paperwork burden and red tape. The $3 million in annual funding provided in Budget 2011, the Next Phase of Canada’s Economic Action Plan, will allow the program to provide even greater value to small businesses through continued expansion and service improvements.

In the coming months, BizPaL will become available to more Canadians as additional municipalities join the program. To date, 11 provinces and territories are participating in BizPaL, with more than 600 municipalities offering the service, making it available to over 57 percent of the Canadian population.

Visit the BizPaL website (www.bizpal.ca) for additional information or to access the websites of participating partners.

We are the 99% - Occupy spreads

Surprisingly, this anti-capitalist protester is not getting a lot of press...