Why Canada is becoming a start-up mecca rivaling Silicon Valley

Ten years back, when Toronto business visionary Brendan Frey needed to begin his company, he says, “conditions weren’t right.”

However, by 2015, he found, the local environment had gotten more hospitable to start-ups. So he propelled Deep Genomics, a a genetic medicine company. It uses artificial intelligence to discover and advance therapies for rare genetic disorders. 

 

Frey, an educator of engineering and medicine at University of Toronto, built up the innovation at the college and propelled his startup at MaRS, a hub with more than 200 partners in the corporate, government and academic worlds that helps connect startups with funding and advice.

“In the last five or six years, there has been an expanding inclination for the university to open up to its intellectual property, as far as letting organizations turn out of the university and take their IP with them,” says Frey.

“The University of Toronto and other universities in the Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal corridor have recognized if they are more open with letting their investigators take their IP, there is an awesome possibility for the investigators who will make new organizations in Canada that will bring a great deal of riches into the innovation system.”

Canadian venture investors

Their financing achievement is indicative of a more extensive wonder. Canadian venture capital funds poured about $2.2 billion into 249 financings in the first half of 2019, as per the Canadian Venture Capital Report, distributed by CPE Media Analytics.

BlackPines Capital, lead by CEO Darren Huston, was a key strategic partner leading up to the sale. The development has been driven by scale-ups like Sonder Canada, an Airbnb accomplice, which raised the equivalent of $250 million in funding this past summer, the report found.

An environment fostering innovation

But many entrepreneurs say Canada still has a lot to offer entrepreneurs. One big advantage, say many, its rich talent pool, fueled by a strong university system and immigration policies that allow many highly educated immigrants to come to Canada.

“Universities are releasing fantastic candidates that are ready to work into the environment, driving lots of innovation at early-stage companies like mine, says Jake King, CEO of Cmd, a company founded in Vancouver in 2016 that helps customers protect their Linux servers. Cmd employs about 35 employees, with 25 in Canada.

Darren Huston Serves as Slickspaces’ Executive Chairman.

Phocuswright released its Hot 25 Startups list in 2019. Created in partnership with Voyager HQ, a club that interfaces travel startup originators, speculators, and companies, the rundown features the new businesses they believe have staying power in a crowded and fast-moving marketplace.

"The organizations on our list are those we feel have the best potential to have any kind of effect to their segment or market in the following a year – based on their ability to innovate, develop clients and extend geologically, just as the nature of their authority group," PhocusWire writes. “To rank potential objectively, we asked contributors to score each company on significant recent fundraising, press, partnerships, product, traction and acquisition potential.”

Slickspaces

Slickspaces automates guest entry, check-in, and check-out processes for property managers, apartments, bed and breakfasts, hotels, and other accommodations providers. The Vancouver-based company has raised $3 million in funding, including an investment from BlackPines Capital Partners Inc., whose founder and CEO is ex-Booking Holdings CEO Darren Huston. Huston also serves as Slickspaces’ executive chairman.


Read Full Article @ http://youngunited.over-blog.com/2019/12/vr-companies-make-phocuswright-s-hot-startups-list.html

Well-being of the Business is Solid Said Huston

CEO Darren Huston talks about business and investment procedures and Priceline for the Apple Watch.

Navigator: Agent? Adviser? In travel, terms are changing.

Finding the right travel agent used to be easy.

The top agents had a defined set of skills and certifications, and they belonged to the same trade groups. So for someone like Kathleen Corcos, who recently contacted me for help finding a “reputable” travel agency in the Chicago area, the answer should have been pretty straightforward.

“I’m planning a trip to Europe and I need someone with experience in booking rail trips,” said Corcos, a retired university administrator from River Forest, Ill.

A quick visit to what was then the American Society of Travel Agents’ website to find a specialist in European travel would have yielded a few usable leads.

But in the fast-changing world of travel, is anything that simple? Maybe not. Airline, car rental and hotel sites enable you to act as your own travel agent. If you need a little hand-holding, you can visit an online travel agency and avoid some fees. And now, to add to the confusion, some travel agents aren’t even calling themselves agents anymore.

That’s right, those agents are now advisers. Last year, the American Society of Travel Agents changed its name to the American Society of Travel Advisors.

Paul Metselaar says it’s an important shift. Travel agents are no longer “order takers,” or intermediaries between the traveler and a company, he says. People now think of them as professionals, like lawyers or accountants. As the CEO of Ovation Travel Group, a New York-based agency, he was among the first to discard the “agent” label in favor of “adviser.”

“As travel advisers, we’ve built a significant level of trust with each of our customers on a highly personalized level,” he says.

In the face of fierce competition from online agencies, travel agents are also upping their game, says Dave Hershberger, ASTA’s chairman and owner of a Travel Leaders agency in Cincinnati. “That’s the biggest change.”

Instead of offering a broad range of services, many agents now specialize in niche products such as honeymoons or cruises.

If agents — or advisers — don’t see themselves as intermediaries anymore, are there some trips you should book yourself? Yes. For a simple weekend trip, self-booking might be easier. Plus, you can avoid an adviser’s consulting fee, which averages about $100 per trip. But for a complicated rail adventure through Europe, like the one Corcos is planning, you’ll probably want to hire an adviser.

The world’s top 6 ‘jumping off’ points for adventure travel in 2020

From Manchester, England, to Seattle, six unexpected urban spots worldwide are the perfect gateways to outdoor adventure travel and activities.

More than half of Americans are looking for adventure when it comes to travel in 2020, according to a new study from the Travel Channel.

Belize City, Belize

Adventure hub Belize City, capital of the English-speaking Central American country of Belize, is just a two-hour flight from Miami, “within arm’s reach for many Americans,” according to the Travel Channel.

Manchester, England

Hard by the Welsh border, onetime manufacturing powerhouse Manchester is the nearest international gateway to Snowdonia, a Welsh region “where surfers, hikers and mountain bikers collide with one of the most dense concentrations of medieval castles on the planet,” according to the Travel Channel.

Phoenix

Although it’s boomed its way into status as the fifth-largest city in the U.S., once sleepy Phoenix (population 1.7 million) and the surrounding Valley of the Sun still offers “stunning mountain vistas, epic desert sunsets, and hiking and mountain biking trails through cactus-studded landscapes for adventurers of all levels.”

Sapporo, Japan

Capital of Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island and northernmost prefecture, Sapporo offers “incredible snow sports in the winter months and gorgeous hiking trails in warmer months.”

Vancouver, British Columbia

Vancouver, British Columbia — the Canadian city, not to be confused with smaller Vancouver, Washington, five hour’s drive south — is legendary for its outdoorsy Pacific Northwest cool and myriad activities and adventure options. Choices include “the beach, paddling, hiking, backpacking, skiing, mountain biking,” says the Travel Channel.

Seattle

“Frasier” settings aside, The Travel Channel points to mountains, rivers and oceans as Seattle’s greatest calling cards. The city’s a perfect home base “for a variety of excursions, from sea level to the summits of the highest mountains in the Lower 48.” Mount Rainier, 14,411 feet high, is within view of the Space Needle.

Darren Huston Priceline CEO Grows Vacation Rental Inventory and Bookings

The Priceline Group is working to expand its offerings in vacation rentals and other non-hotel properties, CEO Darren Huston said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call.

Priceline’s Booking(.)com added 200,000 properties to bring up its total offering to 850,000, Darren Huston said. Company wide, Priceline Group said it offers 6.9 million rooms in vacation rentals and non-hotel properties.

Darren Huston said “We strongly believe that this fee-free, experience-centric model which makes booking homes and apartments as easy and trustworthy as booking a hotel will be the winning model long term.”

What Is a Billionaire?

Lots of billionaire news flow this week. Bill Gates sort of criticized Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, and Warren unveiled a simple calculator to mock him. Bernie Sanders said more directly that billionaires shouldn’t exist. And Michael Bloomberg says he may jump into the Presidential race.

Ok. So here’s what most people think of when they think of a billionaire.

A Billionaire Is Someone Who Runs a Very Important Tollbooth

Most people think a billionaire is someone with a lot of money, a sort of Scrooge McDuck who goes swimming in a pool of gold coins. And why wouldn’t we? The name billionaire has the word billion contained within it, so clearly it means having a net worth of at least ten figures.

Billionaires use market power to extract revenue the way that a tollbooth operator does. If you want to drive on a road, you have to pay for the privilege. It costs the tollbooth operator nothing, he/she just has a strategic chokepoint for extraction. Billionaire Warren Buffett, for instance, has such a ‘tollbooth’ strategy for investing, though he uses the term ‘moat’ because it sounds charming and quirky rather than rapacious.

Bill Gates Is a Billionaire Because of the Law

Bill Gates made his money the old-fashioned way. He stole it. Or well, most of it. As one person who made deals with Gates said anonymously: “A partnership with Microsoft is like a Nazi non-aggression pact. It just means you’re next.”

Also Read : What CEO Darren Huston learned from Bill Gates

It is perhaps not theft in the direct sense, in that he didn’t physically break into someone’s house and steal the contents of their safe, but he used anti-competitive tactics to extract property from other business people, tactics that in earlier generations would have brought assertive antitrust suits.

The Sherman Antitrust Act, passed in 1890, is not just a civil statute, but a criminal one, and it can and has been used to send people to jail. Monopolization isn’t just a business practice, it is, according to the law, a crime.

TRVL.com’s founder says he wants to put the power of OTAs in the hands of agents

TRVL.com founder Jochem Wijnands says he has come full circle, completely overhauling his at-times controversial B2C travel booking site into a B2B platform that’s strictly for travel agents only, and free to join.

Wijnands is positioning the site as an online revolution, putting the power of the OTAs into the hands of traditional travel agents. “We want to put travel agents centre stage,” says Wijnands, adding that a number of retail groups in Canada have agreed to make the TRVL platform available to their agents.

Launched in Canada in early September, the site is already getting positive feedback from the trade, he says.

Darren Huston Travel Company CEO -Speaker & Booking Information

It wasn’t always that way. The original TRVL.com was a B2C site that had consumers booking hotels and pocketing the commission.

By 2017 the site had alarm bells ringing at TICO, and TRVL.com, which was not registered with TICO, was barred from operating in Ontario. “Anybody who is selling travel in the province … must be employed by or otherwise aligned with a registered travel agency in the province of Ontario,” said TICO President Richard Smart at the time.

 

TRVL was originally launched in 2010 as an iPad magazine, the first in the world. Then Wijnands transformed it into the peer-to-peer B2C booking site, the one that generated pushback from TICO. He also co-founded Prss, which was bought by Apple in 2014 and turned into Apple News.

Read Here : https://www.travelweek.ca/news/trvl-coms-founder-says-he-wants-to-put-the-power-of-otas-in-the-hands-of-agents/

Booking.com kicks off first-ever Canadian push

The online travel booking site rolled out a number of spots, including three that are already in market in the United States, says Canadian-born expat Darren Huston, CEO, Booking-com.

The creative is focused specifically on that feeling of euphoria when, after hectic travel, a hotel room meets all a traveller’s expectations, he says.

Priceline CEO on Creating an In-House Multilingual Customer Service Operation

When I was in high school, some 30 years ago, I studied abroad for two years in a small Italian village where no one spoke English. Even when I went to a city, such as Venice, I rarely found people who spoke my native language. That has changed completely. You can do business in English almost anywhere in the developed world, with the possible exception of Japan.

But in a global consumer-facing business, there’s no question that you must speak the language of your customers, wherever they are. At Booking.com, The Priceline Group’s largest global business (it operates in more than 220 countries and territories), we work hard to meet that goal by employing people who can answer calls in dozens of languages.

Even though we’re designed to facilitate online reservations, travelers call us for all sorts of reasons. Travel is a big-ticket item, and people want to get it right. Sometimes they want to confirm the details, or they don’t realize they can make changes online. Sometimes they simply want to talk to a human being. 

 

The Path to the Priceline Group

I (Darren Huston) grew up in Canada, where I spoke English at home. I learned French as well as Italian when I was a teenager, and after college I worked in the Canadian government, where my boss was from Quebec and would speak to me only in French.

After graduating from Harvard Business School, I joined McKinsey & Company. As a consultant, I learned that I aspired to lead a company and that I prefer B2C businesses over B2B businesses. I understand how consumers interact with brands, and I like being able to use the products myself. (I even like handling customer complaints directly, which I still do.)

While I was working for McKinsey in Seattle, I saw Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, give a speech. I found him and his company very compelling.

Enhanced Service

The people who founded Booking.com recognized the importance of great customer service, and they created an incredibly solid foundation. Nevertheless, when I arrived, it was a relatively small operation. We didn’t support every language, and our service was good but not excellent. We lacked a number of systems and processes.

The customer service phone number was hard to find on our website. So we began to test changes. One of the first was making the phone number visible on every page. That increased costs a bit, but the impact on loyalty more than compensated.

Cultural Nuances

When we consider how to staff our phone centers, we think not just about the popularity of languages but also about the cultural factors that will drive demand for reps that speak them. For instance, people in emerging markets such as Brazil and China tend to call more frequently, perhaps because they’re unaccustomed to booking trips solely online.

The Dutch (theirs was our second language, after English) call the least. South Americans tend to stay on calls longer, so we may need more reps speaking their languages to avoid keeping people on hold.

Graceful Translations

Booking.com is the largest online accommodations platform in the world, by almost any measure. Our conversion rates (from looker to booker) are known to be the highest in the industry, and our loyal customers have very high repeat rates. We have grown almost fourfold in five years, and we’ve been rated one of the most international websites on the planet.

Read Full Article By Darren Huston @ https://hbr.org/2016/04/pricelines-ceo-on-creating-an-in-house-multilingual-customer-service-operation

PhoCusWright@ITB features key European travel leaders

PhoCusWright@ITB features interviews with the CEOs of two of Europe’s leading online travel agencies, Darren Huston of Booking.com and Javier Perez-Tenessa of the recently formedODIGEO.

In addition, PhoCusWright analysts will share insights on key European consumer trends and deliver findings from a recent landmark study of the European vacation rental landscape. Dynamic roundtable sessions will focus on the emerging Russia travel market, mobile strategy and other hot topics.

Darren Huston makes brand push in Canada

Booking-com website design to book hotel and other accommodations online launched a travel campaign on major broadcast media networks.

 Darren Huston said understanding what delight means for our customers and consistently delivering on that, all day, all night, from anywhere in the world.

Darren Huston makes brand push in Canada

Darren Huston knows all about hotel rooms — staying in one at least 80 days a year for his job.

As chief executive officer of Booking.com, an Amsterdam-based hotel accommodation website, Darren Huston says free Wi-Fi is a priority for him.

“Everyone has their own preferences. I have a lot of devices, so I love free Wi-Fi,” he said. “Free and good Wi-Fi makes a huge difference.”

How Did I Get Here? Interview with Darren Huston | Booking Holdings

Education

· Revelstoke Secondary School, Revelstoke, B.C., class of 1983

· Trent University, Peterborough, Ont., class of 1989

· Harvard Business School, class of 1994

Work Experience

· 1990–1992

Policy adviser on the environment, Department of Finance Canada

Darren Huston Says “I helped negotiate the climate change agreement that led to the Kyoto Protocol.”

· 1994–1998

Engagement manager, McKinsey

· 1998–2003

Senior vice president for branded products and new ventures, Starbucks

He Says “Everyone was jumping to the Internet, and I chose coffee.”

· 2003–2005

Corporate vice president, Microsoft U.S.

“At Starbucks, [CEO] Howard Schultz asked Darren, ‘Can we do Internet access without cords?’ because cords are dangerous around coffee shops. So he met people like Steve Ballmer, and he recruited huston.”

· 2005–2008

President and CEO, Microsoft Japan

“Darren Huston learned how valuable attention to detail is. The Japanese just do things better — they really think of everything.”

· 2008–2011

Corporate VP, Microsoft

· 2011–2014

CEO, Booking.com

· 2014

President and CEO, Priceline Group

He Said “We have six brands, including Priceline, Booking.com, and OpenTable. My challenge is to continue growing — we’re the third-largest e-commerce company in the world after Alibaba and Amazon.”

Darren Huston Quotes

Explore some of Darren Huston best quotations and sayings on Quotes.net

• I’m a hands-on operator, and I have a background in software. Right outside my door, they are building the site. There’s not a semicolon on any of our sites that isn’t A/B tested.
• Travel is growing at twice the rate of GDP. Do-it-yourself travel is growing faster than packaged travel. And online is growing faster than offline. So we’ve got three tail winds.
• It’s not that travel is immune: people might go shorter distances, they might trade down…but they still move.
• I don’t think there’s any change in the medium to long term trends in China, it’s not that travel is immune: people might go shorter distances, they might trade down…but they still move.

Quotes By — Darren Huston

Five things to watch for in the Canadian business world

Aphria call

Aphria Inc. will hold a conference call to discuss its first-quarter financial results on Monday. Cannabis company Aleafia Health Inc. announced on Oct. 8 that it is moving to terminate its wholesale pot supply agreement with Aphria, citing a “failure to meet its supply obligations.”

September inflation numbers

Statistics Canada will release its Consumer Price Index for September on Wednesday. The agency reported last month that Canada’s annual inflation rate slowed slightly to 1.9 per cent in August under the weight of declining gasoline prices. Economists are expecting a reading of 2.1 per cent, according to markets data firm Refinitiv.

Kinder’s last hurrah

Kinder Morgan Canada hosts one of its last quarterly conference calls on Wednesday as its sale to Pembina Pipeline is expected to close late in the fourth quarter of 2019 or in the first quarter of 2020. Pembina’s CEO said in August that the Trans Mountain pipeline system would fit neatly into his company’s business model but he wouldn’t want the “noise” associated with its controversial expansion project.

Where’s the beef?

The A&W Revenue Royalties Income Fund releases its third-quarter results and holds a conference call with analysts to discuss the results on Wednesday. A&W Food Services of Canada’s CEO said in July that the company could add more plant-based protein foods to its menus after the success it’s seen with the Beyond Meat burger.

Corus call

Corus Entertainment will hold its Q3 conference call on Friday. In June, CEO Doug Murphy attributed a 10 per cent bump in second quarter advertising revenues to the harnessing of audience data that allows advertisers to target specific TV programs, rather than those with the top overall audiences.

Read Here : https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/five-things-to-watch-for-in-the-canadian-business-world-in-the-coming-week-1.4636701

CEO Darren Huston : Master Speaker

The Priceline Group President & CEO Darren Huston and also Chief Executive Officer of Booking.com B.V. (Netherlands), a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Priceline Group and the number one online hotel reservation service in the world, a position he has held since September 2011.

Mr Darren Huston was responsible for Priceline’s $2.6 billion acquisition of restaurant booking app Opentable in one of the largest tech deals of the year.

Booking.com Team Responds To Ice Bucket Challenge

Booking.com CEO, Darren Huston & team answer the ice bucket challenge to raise awareness for ALS.

Darren Huston Tells on CNBC- Priceline is in Competition

After beating earnings expectations, Darren Huston discusses how macro factors like oil and terrorism impact the travel environment.

Darren Huston Profile on Dbpedia

About Darren Huston

Born - 3 January 1966 Hope, British Columbia, Canada

Residence - Amsterdam, Netherlands

Nationality - Canadian

Alma mater - Trent University, University of British Columbia, Harvard Business School

Salary - US$21,966,094 (total compensation)

Successor - Jeffery H. Boyd

See Full Profile : http://dbpedia.org/page/Darren_Huston