A New Generation Inspires Innovation

Two years ago Derek Ball, Dayton Foster and Allan Mackenzie set out to develop a company that they felt would fill a gap in the social media market. Each one of them a father, the trio had noticed that their children were increasingly making use of the Internet and were expecting a level of interactivity and engagement unique to their generation. This generation wants things now, in real-time; they want their interactions to be dynamic and media-rich. The trio did not feel that existing technologies were meeting these criteria and decided to develop a software solution that would.

The three founders originally funded Tynt, and when required, further capital was not terribly difficult to obtain since the three were far from newcomers to the entrepreneurial scene. They were able to make quick use of what Ball deems their “thick rolodexes” to recruit high profile angel investors like Chris Brahm, Partner and Director of Bain & Company, and Dr. Steven Woods, Site Manger for Google Canada. They also took an investment round with iNovia Capital in Montreal. Drawing further on their experience in launching and running companies, the founders recruited knowledgeable staff from those companies to become Tynt’s first employees.

“What I’ve found consistently with the companies that I’ve worked with or invested in are that the product you end up being successful with is usually not the product you started off creating.” – Derek Ball, CEO for Tynt

In the early stages, Tynt was a tool that could be used to add fun details to a person’s profile on a social networking site, such as drawing hats on a profile picture or altering the photos of friends by putting them in different clothing or drawing speech bubbles. In working with content publishers for these sites, Ball, Foster and Mackenzie unexpectedly recognized another use for Tynt: to monitor user engagement on websites and increase publisher revenues.

So in December of 2008, Ball, Foster and Mackenzie decided to rework Tynt to suit the needs of online publishers - and Tracer was born. Ball notes that this was a fairly quick and stress free process because the technology was repurposed, rather than developed from the ground up:

“Our software acts like an invisible layer that sits between the user and the content. Initially, we were using that layer to let the user do something fun. Subsequently, we are using that layer to help the publisher understand where their content is going and to better benefit from that. So it’s the same technology just a different stakeholder involved.”

Continued...