Ooploo

Thought I would talk a little bit about my company Ooploo inc.

This company started after the Nortel / Avaya chapter of my life came to a close in January 2013. Diving into startup life again after gaining 6 years of large enterprise corporate experience gives you a different perspective of business and customers. The larger the customer, larger the sales cycle and the larger the product creep. 80 / 20 rule is never so important.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to go through Lead to Win, an intensive bootcamp for startups, in February 2013 which later helped me secure some government funding from FedDev through a program called Global Start. Along with securing our first “real” corporate customer / partner this really helped facilitate the growth of the company.

Ten months later and Ooploo has grown significantly and is currently offering solutions in the financial and healthcare verticals. We are still very much a startup and bootstrapping as much as we can. It’s such an exciting time as I am forming new partnerships, meeting new customers, getting to travel and making some great new friends. There will be new innovations coming out of Ooploo in the near future. I look forward to sharing them with you.

Lead To Win

I just got some funding from Fed Dev through the Lead to Win program in Ottawa Ontario. 25k + 25k match = 50k of awesome.

Lead to win is 2 x three day, all day intense bootcamp for entrepreneurs.

Learned a lot and eventually got a cool certificate! (also now hanging in the Ooploo offices)

Lots of good things coming!!

I’d like to thank Tony Bailleti and everyone involved in the program for all their valuable insight and support!!

LTW

Music update

I thought I’d give an update on some things that have been happening in the music side of my life.  Recently in November I traveled down to Toronto with the rest of the boys from Open Sky to attend the GMAs where we had been nominated for 3 awards.  New artist of the year, rock album of the year and best cd art work.  We were surprised and thrilled to win rock album of the year and also the fan choice award, which was televised nation wide.

Since then we have signed a distribution deal along with stepping back into studio to start production of our next full length album.  I’m really excited about where things are going with this next project and I am looking forward to being able to share the new music with you.

To keep up with all the music updates you can follow Open Sky on facebook or twitter.

Facebook.com/openskyband

Twitter.com/openskyband

Everyday more and more people are telling us how our music has inspired them.  If you haven’t heard any of it yet I encourage you to give it a listen here.

Jon

Open Sky at the GMAs