Belated congratulations to our friend Sebastien Provencher and his Praized Media team for getting $1 million from Garage Ventures Technology Canada. That’s $1 million Canadian … better than greenbacks right now.

Here’s all the company will say about it, publicly or privately: “Praized is a social media company developing software that connects blogs, social networks, and local search in ways never seen before.” The comment is attributed to CEO Harry Wakefield.

Mystery or no, you can do a lot with $1 million. You can hire key staff, pay salaries, build software, do some PR, travel (and hire consulting firms). In fact, a number of firms have recently landed deals for $1 million or so … like Outside.in ($900k) and City Voter ($1.1 million). Boston’s City Squares is also apparently funded at this level. And if you haven’t been on the site lately, it is building nicely.

A couple of years ago, the “must have” amount for a start-up was more like $3 million. Smalltown, Backfence and others got the larger amount (or said they did). I never could figure out what they needed that much for. I’d venture to say that $1 million is the new $3 million. (Seb, you can crash at my house if you need to.)

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