Montreal Tech Watch

Yesterday was the november edition of the monthly Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast, a casual meetup where montréalers interested in entrepreneurship could meet, connect and talk about their projects, an initiative which was started by Ben Yoskovitz.

Some new people I met:

Pierre-Antoine Fradet comes from Québec city but has started now an internet company in Montréal, called groupe x2. The two cofounders of the company have a business background, with web project management experience, and their business model is from what I guess, to create Québec versions of popular websites. There is a digg clone called QuebecBuzz, or a youtube clone called katode. They also created websites for underserved markets here in Quebec like atedra, which is an ad network for websites in French, or mon plan vert, which is a reference website for Green initiatives in Québec.

It’s uninspiring to see a company whose strategy is to create clones of popular US websites. Furthermore, each of the above websites seems they came out from getacoder, with infamous ads like “create a craiglist clone for me for $2000″. But I guess this is also a risk-less path to get local traffic and make money. I’ll track the company and see if they’ll get an innovative product for the future.

Another guy I met was Shai Alexander, who studies at McGill University. He is an entusiastic entrepreneur, who starts lots of technology projects, some of them underwhelming, some of them impressive. He told me he was building a rapid development framework based on the MVC model, a web interface, and using SQL language (???), and that it should be ready in 2 or 3 weeks. He also created a USB key for secure login, with biometric or audio identity. Its name is n-Tegrity, and I discovered today it was also the winner of Les Anges Financiers in 2007, a competition for young entrepreneurs in Montréal.

I also met Vasily Klimko, who started RollAName, previously reviewed here in MTW. Our paths crossed in previous barcamps and facebookcamps, but I guess we never had the time to talk.

Louis-Eric Simard was there too, we discussed a lot about the Internet and free flow of information. This was a great exchange, even though I am not even sure what his work is really about.

Laurent Maisonnave was there too, he is part of the Intruders.TV and it seems they are now covering systematically technology events here in Montréal. He brought with him his tools and was ready in a snap to do a video interview.

I also met Alexandre Bérard John Stokes and Daniel Drouet from montrealstartup, Robert Crecco, who has a ecommerce store for gadgets, and Stanley chan.

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