Here’s the startup news making headlines today on other Web sites and blogs.
WattPad scores more funding
WattPad announced another fundraising round of $17.3 million led by Khosla Ventures and also including Jerry Yang, Union Square Ventures, and Golden Venture Partners. WattPad is a platform for readers and writers to exchange stories freely online and through mobile devices. CEO Allen Lau says the service’s number of monthly users has climbed 33 per cent to 8 million. But his target is to eventually have 100 million users per month.
Mark Evans on Mark Evans Tech
Get accepted by an accelerator
If you’re thinking of applying to a tech accelerator, or maybe even to Montreal’s FounderFuel specifically, here’s some tips on how to get accepted. It’s important to be well-prepared with your answers, focus on describing your team as much as your product, and submitting videos can also really help. Also, make sure you’re applying to an accelerator that’s the right fit for your business.
FounderFuel Blog
University of Toronto startup spinoffs
Entrepreneurs don’t have to go to Silicon Valley to make it big, the University of Toronto assures us. As of February, more than one-third of Canada’s top 100 startups call the Toronto region home, U of T president David Naylor said in a recent speech at the Toronto Board of Trade. The school itself has led to nearly 250 spin-off companies, and 25 were launched in 2011 alone. (Note this post cites Startup Genome’s report as ranking Toronto fourth among the world’s top 25 startup eco-systems. But as we’ve previously explained, that report wasn’t intended as a top 25 list of startup eco-systems. It was just a representation of businesses using an online tool.)
Anjum Nayyar on U of T News