Montreal Tech Watch

This is a guest post by Scott Lake, who cofounded Jadex Pixel and Shopify. It provides great insight about Ottawa’s tech entrepreneurs and startups and should inspire Montreal Tech Watch readers

Devshop | Craig Fitzpatrick

Devshop.com produces a web-based software project management tool. As Craig says, it doesn’t do weddings, it doesn’t do family reunions, it does software and software only. In addition, Devshop also helps managers to build realistic schedules by factoring in trends like Time Estimation Error and Distraction Rates. Craig tells me that the software will actually learn over time and adjust projected release dates accordingly. Craig also writes a great blog called uncommonsenseforsoftware .

Spending Profile | Lisa Wall

SpendingProfile.com keeps an online record of all of your finances. It allows you to track your spending by recording your purchases and assigning them to categories. The graphing features then shows you the overall breakdown of your personal spending profile. The website also offers features such as the ability to import transactions from a chequing or credit card account, an income versus spending graph and a monthly summary statement delivered to your email.

Ramius Corporation | Sonny Juane

Although Ramius is beyond the start up phase themselves, they are very involved in the start-up scene in Ottawa. Their product, Community Zero, builds secure, scalable web-based communities that exchange, communicate and expand knowledge.

Kakiloc | Martin Dufort

Kakiloc is a location based social networking application that helps you discover where your friends are, follow their journeys in real time using Google Maps and send messages to them. It can also notify you when your friends reach a specific place like your favorite pub or their apartments. The other cool thing that Kakiloc can do is tell you when your friends are in the same place as you.

note from Heri: Kakiloc has moved to Montreal, Québec now

iMapia | Miles Yang

Miles Yang’s iMapia is a mobile mapping application for all your mobile devices. It enables you to get maps, driving directions and local points of interest such as banking, restaurants, shopping centers directly from your cell phone, Treo, Blackberry.

iotum | Alec Saunders

I first heard of iotum when they won the Demo God award at Demo 2006. Since then they have been busy developing some very cool products for your cell phone. The first is “iotum Call Handling” which uses the iotum Relevance Engine to identify who a caller is and what their relationship is to you then, depending on the preferences you have set for that person, the call will either be put through or go to voicemail. The second is iotum’s Talk-Now for Blackberry which operates a little like your status on IM, it tells people on your contact list whether you are available for calls or not. As well, it also lets you know the talk status of your contacts.

Jump Social | Darcy Whyte

Darcy Whyte has been working on Jump Social for a while now and it is definitely starting to get some user adaption. Essentially, this tool helps you discover and promote events in your city. You can search either by activity or location as well as see what events your friends are attending.

Daily Pixel Network | James Cogan

James Cogan is one of the most impressive people I have met in Ottawa. He is responsible for the creation of the Daily Pixel Network which is a conglomeration of almost 30 different blogs on a variety of topics. Until recently he was also the host of the Ottawa Blogger Meetup. He is constantly recruiting different bloggers for his network, so if you have something to say you should get in contact with him.

Choicebot | Alfredo Coppola

ChoiceBot is a feature-based product search tool that integrates seamlessly into your e-commerce site. I have used the demo quite a bit and it seems to be really useful. Essentially it takes all the big decision points that you would make when buying a complex product and gets you to rate their importance. Once it has all that data it tells you which product best matches all your criteria. It works well for products like digital cameras or computers but could be applied to anything.

City Sales | Justin Clark

CitySales.ca is a website where Ottawa residents can find out about sales happening at local stores. Shoppers can search for sales by product category, view the flyers online, and register to be notified by email of upcoming sales in their selected product categories. Merchants can list their businesses on CitySales.ca and post their sales for shoppers to view. Once it is well established in Ottawa, Justin and his team plan to expand CitySales.ca across Canada. They want CitySales.ca to become THE place where everyone in Canada looks for sales before going shopping.

inspire2go | Bob McCallum

Inspire2go Inc. recently started “the Travel Discovery Project”. They’re building the www.inspire2go.com site where visitors can join a community of travelers to help build a massive database of people’s travel experiences and tastes. The site will use that data to generate personalized recommendations that help members discover new places to visit and things to do. The company was founded late last year by two Ottawa-area tech CEOs who were frustrated when trying to use existing Internet travel sites to find ideas and trusted recommendations of places to go that matched their personal tastes.

Mercury Grove | Scott Annan

Mercury Grove is a very interesting company as it is located in both Ottawa and Lexington Kentucky. It’s founder Scott Annan is really involved in the start up see in Ottawa and regularly takes part in Democamp, Barcamp as well as his own invention CommunityCamp. Mercury Grove’s primary tool is called Team Collaboration and it provides customers a hosted site where groups are able to exchange ideas through a team blog, access a “master calendar,” manage projects, and collaborate on documents. Its a very simple and elegant application and they are having great success selling it to large corporations in the US. The coolest part about their app is Scott swears it promotes “Thundering Brainstorming”. You can’t do much better than that.

bOK | Aydin Mirzaee

bOK is cool because it gives users the opportunity to make free unlimited phone calls anywhere in the US & Canada. Unlike services such as skype, you can use bOK with your cell phone. All you do is text the number to the bOK people and it makes the call for you and when the other person picks up, you are both connected and the call is free. If you make alot of cell phone calls this may be worth checking out.

Shopify | Scott Lake

OK, its a little weird reviewing my own company but here goes – Shopify is a simplified hosted e-commerce application that allows users to set up an online shop in minutes. We help businesses by providing the smartest, most easy-to-use e-commerce tool for becoming and staying successful at selling online.