Crommunity Round-Up: Exploring the marketing activities ofKitchener-Waterloo's technology companies
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Crommunity Round-Up: March 2021

March saw two local companies reveal what they’ve been working on, which is always a big deal!

We profile those debuts, plus we provide the usual assortment of tidbits in this edition of the Crommunity Round-Up.

Need to catch up? Check out past Round-Ups

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Cavelo’s here to help you take care of your data

In a blog post, Introducing the Cavelo platform, Cavelo’s CEO (James Mignacca) did just that. After running through some of the threats and compliance regulations facing today’s organizations, James explains that:

We set out on a mission to make data discovery, classification and tracking simpler. We wanted to give companies a head start on regulatory compliance and a leg up on threat mitigation. The Cavelo platform is a SaaS-based, data compliance risk management solution that installs as an endpoint agent. Powered by machine learning, the platform’s engine can ingest limitless volumes of data from multiple sources and hosts, scaling over time as the business adds more data to the network.

(you may be interested to know that there’s a free version of the Cavelo platform)

Cavelo is addressing a pervasive, urgent, and valuable problem; plus, the company has strong team that includes many of the folks who helped build RootSecure (acquired by Arctic Wolf). Addressing this problem leverages much of the same technologies that RootSecure put to effective use, so I expect Cavelo is hitting the ground running.

I like James’ post because it’s managed to succeed at the difficult task of being both succinct and thorough at the same time: it gives the non-expert reader enough context to understand why what Cavelo’s doing matters, but doesn’t drag it on forever.

Related note: my favourite “launch blog” of all time is Introducing Cloudflare One—blogs like it can be an important part of a launch’s communications, so give that one a read when you have a few minutes and add that tool to your utility belt

***Most Read***

The most-read Cromulent post in March was In conversation with… Jamil Dewsi, in which we chatted with DarwinAI’s Head of Growth about winning reference customers, rapid go-to-market iteration, the importance of having just enough process—and other fun things!

(our second-most read post was our tongue-in-cheek and far-too-deep analysis of the graphic design and information architecture on a box of human kibble)

AdHawk Microsystems debuted a pioneering human-machine interface

With a splashy new website, AdHawk Microsystems debuted MindLink: a camera-free eye-tracking solution that has important applications in research, extended reality (XR), gaming, and healthcare.

That “camera-free” part is super important (supes impo): cameras are bulky and they chug batteries, but MindLink uses micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS, ftw!) to dramatically outperform cameras—capturing gaze with better than 1 degree of accuracy and a sampling rate of 500Hz.

So AdHawk definitely has important technical differentiators and they’ve elected to pursue high-value markets where these differentiators matter, rather than get drawn into the low-margin-and-still-doesn’t-quite-exist-and-possibly-never-will-or-at-least-won’t-for-a-long-time consumer eye-tracking market.

AdHawk already has some very impressive partners—including Samsung, HP, Sony, Essilor, and Intel—so it looks like they have terrific support in place as they look to establish product-market fit and transition into scaleup territory.

***Felt Cute, Might Delete Later***

March also saw us start a fun and perpetual blog series—Dear Diary—in which we write about projects we’re working on, explore challenges we’re encountering, share tips and techniques, and so on.

Bits and Bytes

Here are a few other March notables:

  • Aterlo held the WISP Virtual Summit 2021 > Reloaded—this online event combined pre-recorded content with live video Q&A and video networking (plus mailed swag boxes, for good measure) and continues Aterlo’s proven approach of bringing together and helping to educate the WISP (wireless ISP) community [thanks to Harneet Singh for the tip!]
  • Magnet Forensics, in conjunction with Forensic Focus, hosted a webinar (Let’s Talk About The State of Corporate Digital Forensics) that discussed the findings of their recent report and, in doing so, kept the conversation going
  • Shinydocs released an eBook, Project Closeout in the Oil & Gas Industry—this eBook shares ways oil and gas companies can overcome the challenges of document handover, build a strategy to get control of the document chaos, and use automation, AI, and data to great advantage
  • Miovision published a new success story, Informing an Active Transportation Plan with Miovision DataLink, that details how one of their customers, McElhanney, used Miovision’s solutions to provide a large Canadian city with real-world data about the population’s use of active transportation—it’s considerably longer and much more useful than most success stories you’ll see, almost doubling as a how-to guide for planning effective and efficient traffic counting projects

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Aaaand that’s a wrap.

If you want to nominate something for inclusion in the April round-up, then hit me up.