Tag: TrafficSoda

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The AC Celebrates Our Newest Graduates

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Alaunus and TrafficSoda mark milestone as the AC approaches 10 years!

The Accelerator Centre is very proud to continue building on our track record for fostering amazing, successful tech  companies with the Graduation of Alaunus and TrafficSoda, our 50th and 51st Graduates. This milestone graduation coincides with our 10th anniversary, capping off a decade of supporting some of the most innovative and successful companies anywhere. We’re excited to welcome Alaunus and TrafficSoda to the elite club of AC Graduates, which includes Canadian tech stars such as Axonify, Clearpath Robotics, Kik, Magnet Forensics, Miovision, Plasticity and Top Hat.

Founded in 2011, by Wilfrid Laurier University graduate Andrew Ringer, Alaunus provides mobile IT solutions for the Canadian healthcare landscape. The company’s flagship product HealthPlanr is a fully mobile practice management solution that allows care providers to increase efficiency, improve care and collaborate securely.

TrafficSoda, founded by Wilfrid Laurier University business graduate Jessica Chalk, is a powerful B2B platform that helps businesses drive prospects to their website and convert those visitors into buying customers. Jessica was recently nominated for a 2016 Business Excellence Award in the category of Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

“We are incredibly proud of our Graduates and the contribution they are making every day to economic growth in Waterloo Region. These are tomorrow’s business and technology leaders,” says Paul Salvini, CEO of the Accelerator Centre. “Collectively our Grads have created 1,500+ jobs, and have generated more than $500M in investment and revenue. That’s a hugely impressive achievement over just a decade of effort.”

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Highlights from the AC Client Showcase

This past September we brought the Region’s business, academic, and technology community into the AC to connect with the brightest and most promising entrepreneurs in Waterloo Region and beyond. The 2015 AC Client Showcase was a tremendous opportunity for people to plug-in and learn about the big ideas and game-changing technologies that will shape the future.

From nanotech to big data; smarter cities to a smarter world, the Clients at the AC have always pushed the barriers of what we thought possible and sparked change across the globe.

Here are some highlights from this year’s AC Client Showcase.

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TrafficSoda: Beyond SEO

by Peter Moreira

This article originally appeared on Entrevestor.com

A beautiful website can sometimes sadden Jessica Chalk, especially if too few people visit it.

Chalk is the CEO of Waterloo-based TrafficSoda, which helps businesses drive traffic to their sites through a proprietary text analytics tool. TrafficSoda aims to help enterprise clients increase their rankings in global internet traffic, or help local businesses truly dominate the rankings in their city or region.

_42R2117smwebAnd the company says its method is far more effective than search engine optimization.

“I can’t stress this enough,” said Chalk in an interview after she presented at the Waterloo Accelerator Centre Client Showcase earlier this month. “There are so many businesses out there who spent tens of thousands of dollars on a beautiful website, and they have no idea how to get people to it. A website with no traffic is like placing a billboard in the middle of a desert.”

TrafficSoda gives online marketers the power to drive more organic, targeted web traffic to their site. The system interacts with online audiences across thousands of channels, through value-driven conversations and comprehensive analytics.

Rather than relying on common SEO strategies, TrafficSoda uses machine learning to identify who its users are talking to and then to develop channels to make sure those parties visit the user’s site. The process, said Chalk, is not to make assumption about who the audience might be but to go out and identify who the business is communicating with.

The company also says that its unique approach to scalable lead generation allows online marketers to bring the users more actionable sales leads than other methods.

In the interview, Chalk mentioned several times that too many businesses have been burned by SEO so her company has to explain to clients how it is different.

The story of TrafficSoda dates back about two-and-a-half years when Chalk, a Wilfrid Laurier University business grad, was an employee of another startup that worked in the Accelerator Centre. The company hired a consultant named Rob Farnham, an expert in the internet with 17 years of experience, to help it get more online traffic. Chalk and Farnham decided the process was so good that they should form their own company.

They did, and raised some seed funding in 2013. Soon they had their own startup working out of the Accelerator Centre, and they are now considering raising an A Round to finance further growth.

The TrafficSoda team has now grown to eight people, and the company may soon have to leave the Accelerator Centre because it will need more room.

“I went from employee to employer here, so from a personal development standpoint it’s been incredible,” said Chalk. “I don’t want to leave this place but we’re running out of space.”