Montreal Tech Watch

As I mentioned yesterday, the two main highlights of Red Herring’s Innovation Illuminated Conference here in Montreal have been the delicious food networking opportunities and the presentations by small companies in the breakout rooms.

I’d like to do a quick round-up of those companies whose pitches I had a chance to listen to over the course of the past couple days.

SmartHippo.com
President: George Favvas
Location: Montreal, QC

SmartHippo, which announced the launch of its private beta yesterday, is bringing the social media phenomenon to the mortgage shopping experience. Their website allows user to shop for, rate and compare mortgage rates from any number of financial institutions, with the aim of increasing the amount of transparency and control to the consumer. Think of Digg and Amazon product reviews applied to mortgages. I liked George’s pitch, and given the recent sub-prime mess in the US, I think consumers will be eager to have a tool that allows them to make the smartest decisions possible when it comes time to renew their loans. My one concern might be around the accuracy/fidelity/meaningfulness of the rates that are quoted on the site, but I suppose the proof will be in the pudding. This is one to watch.

EQO Communications Inc.
CEO: Bill Tam
Location: Richmond, BC

EQO has built a very compelling communications suite for the mobile phone. The goal is to bring a Skype-like experience to your cellphone, which means: contacts, chat and extremely cheap long distance (notably EQO to EQO calls only incur local tolls). Their broader vision is to integrate as much context data from Web 2.0 apps into the mobile as possible, to make it a one-top-shop for your connected social interaction. It’s certainly a nice, convergent vision and the application seems to deliver (at least from the demo I saw). I had the opportunity to speak with Bill at length about the product and strategy, and I came away with the impression that he’s has the right offering at the right time. My concern is that if the mobile landscape shifts toward a purely browser-based world — the way the iPhone and rumored gPhone are moving — will EQO be able to adapt its application to the new reality.?I suspect yes, but it’s far from a fait accompli.

MOBIVOX Corp.
CEO: Stephane Marceau
Location: Montreal, QC

Mobivox is another company seeking to revolutionize the mobile experience — this is obviously a very hot space at the moment. Their solution is built around a virtual, voice-recognition bot whose job it is to route your calls to the desired destination in the optimal way. This is an interesting, centralized take on the mobile problem, and certainly innovative. I’m not sold on the concept of a voice agent, however. I generally despise speaking to a computer-humanized voice agents; it rarely goes well, and even when it does I’m left feeling a like a robot myself. Stephane did allude to the fact that Q4 will see big news from Mobivox (Series B financing?), but the only hint he dropped was the smile on his face. Despite my hesitations, I feel Mobivox has a bright future ahead.

Octopz Inc.
CEO: Ron McKenzie
Location: Toronto, ON

Octopz builds online collaboration software for the high-end creative professional market. A virtual environment is created where multiple people can simultaneous view, markup and edit pictures, videos, 3d models etc. (hundreds of formats are supported). Based on the demo, I’m not sure the integrated video/voice conferencing adds much value to the app (I think there are better 3rd party tools for that) but overall this seems like a handy tool for the design set.

CambrianHouse
CEO: Michael Sikorsky
Location: Calgary, AB

Michael laid out a surprising and very ambitious vision for the direction CambrianHouse (CH) will be taking in the months ahead. Currently, CH is an online “crowdsourcing” community, centered around the concept that people like to share ideas, in this case, software ideas. The current gen product has been largely lackluster. But the next step for CH is to leverage the technology platform they’ve built and add the “pillar” organizations that will transform the site into a veritable ecosystem for the development of ideas. Michael likened his concept to becoming the “Manhattan” of the online world. I like the city analogy for a web destination (as Sylvain mentioned, Michael is the king of analogies). Expect some announcements from the CH team soon about their new direction, and full rollout of the new platform in Q1 or Q2 2008.

ChoiceBot Inc.
CEO: Nick Desbarats
Location: Ottawa, ON

ChoiceBot is a product comparison engine that leans heavily on smart user-experience design decisions to help consumers make sense of lots of information quickly. The core concept involves users weighting the criteria that is important to them for particular product lines (with an easy slider interface), and the analysis engine then ranks products accordingly. There is obviously a large opportunity to then aggregate and sell consumer preference data, which is the clear monetization strategy. Product comparison is something that has been tried before, and I’m not sure this pitch worked for me. One big question I have is the completeness of the product database. This is crucial. Nick described that ChoiceBot would become the Wikipedia of shopping, and so I wonder if this implied that the product data would be user-generated? If so, this raises other troubling implications. Overall, this seems like the kind of idea that is fantastic in theory but momentously difficult to execute. I wish them luck.

Grey Mountain Mobile
Founder: Andrew Robulack
Location: Whitehorse, YK (that’s correct)

This is my dark horse pick from the conference. I loved the concept. Though more a content play than a technology play, Grey Mountain’s “Storylife” product is a mobile SMS storytelling system: they deliver stories, in real time, over text message. Why do I find this so exciting? Because the possibilities in blending real-world with fiction are titillating, and the mobile handset seems like entirely unchartered water when it comes to storytelling. You can imagine how marketers would naturally be attracted to such a service. And I think you could take the concept even further through increased interactivity - let the users direct the story - and even moved toward uniquely generated storylines. Heck, why not open up the platform and allow anyone to contribute narratives? This could be huge. So there you have it: a couple of guys in the Yukon (a northern Canadian city with 35K people) breaking new ground in the mobile, new media space. I feel like breaking out into “Oh Canada!” ;)

That’s all I had chance to see. Many thanks to all presenters who travelled here, especially those from more than 4000 KM; the conference was richer for your presence.

Mat Balez directs Business Development at Karabunga Inc. and blogs regularly at web1979.com.

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