Montreal Tech Watch

Here is Ben Yoskovitz’s presentation of Standoutjobs. I have already reviewed Standoutjobs; in this video, Ben explains why companies needs RECEPTION and how they can manage and present their company to candidates.

It’s a great, although very quick, presentation of Standoutjobs, and I encourage you to view it. I wish we could have more of those in startupcamps and in democamps.I can’t help to think though it’s just the beginning and there is massive amount of work awaiting them in the upcoming months.

xtranormal won a DEMOgod award yesterday for their presentation of the service (from Maple Leaf 2.0)Congratulations to the company & team!

Last year, another Montreal startup, Tungle, won also a DEMOgod award thanks to the charismatic Marc Gingras.

xtranormal just gave a sneak peak of their technology to bloggers and conference attendees at DEMO. Webware has a great review of the product

In the demo I saw last night, Xtranormal’s Paul Nightingale wrote a simple script, where he wrote a few lines for two characters, added some emotion tags and gestures, and put them in a setting with a prop. He pressed the “render” button and generated a cute little animation. Quality was very good–certainly better than Saturday morning cartoons. The cuts and angles were automatically generated and kept things engaging.

The product does text-to-speech conversion so you don’t need human actors, but it will also lip-synch recorded speech if you want the voices to sound real.

xtranormal’s homepage shows a few samples. To my knowledge, it’s the first time that a company does 3D scripted scenes and interactions via a web interface, and I see huge possibilities for blogs, or any other social network allowing widgets, for that matter.

Also, I couldn’t help to think about LEGO characters when viewing these videos. Now, I know the lego star wars video games had a lot of success (which is an understatement), but I hoped previously that they would do something similar to The Movies game, where we had life-like characters and realistic scenes.

Of course, it’s just too early to tell. This is just an early release and they are going to do some significant work on their product in the following six months.

In related news, Standoutjobs also presented their product midday at DEMO and you should be able to re-view the video presentation tomorrow.

yulbiz, which started as a regular meetup for bloggers writing for business purposes, has now an official website and become an official organisation.

Like other similar meetups in Montreal, yulbiz uses the acronym yul — representing Montreal’s aiport code, and was started to extend online conversations between bloggers to an “offline” setting. The formula prooved to be popular, with profesionals in marketing, consultants, web entrerpreneurs, head of media and pr agencies attending the meetups.

The initiave sparked for instance the bloggers advertising network by Transcontinental Media, and it’s also the place where the co-founders of startup praized met. Their latest venture was publishing a book entitled “Pourquoi bloguer dans un contexte d’affaires”.

The initiative was so popular that it’s now also hosted in Quebec city, in Paris, Barcelona, Brussels and even Warsaw, in Poland. This is where yulbiz.org comes, as an organisation which would “manage” the growth, and also promote blogging, social media and networking.

Hélène Desmarais, qui dirige le Centre d’entreprises et d’innovation de Montréal, a publié aujourd’hui une lettre dans le journal de son papa La Presse, qui souligne le manque de capital d’amorcage pour les entrepreneurs en technologie.

Elle s’appuie notamment les résultats de l’étude du Secor. Dans la période 2006-2007, on aurait eu seulement 8 projets d’entreprise en haute technologie financés au Québec. Elle explique par la suite qu’après les recommandations du rapport Brunet en 2003, le capital privé s’est désengagé du secteur du démarrage d’entreprise, préférant se concentrer sur des entreprises en expansion (lire: des entreprises ayant des modèles d’affaires déjà prouvés)

Je trouve cependant la conclusion de la lettre surprenante, elle suggère en effet de mettre en place des programmes gouvernementaux pour stimuler les nouvelles entreprises en technologie. Compte tenu de la vitesse actuelle à laquelle les technologies se développent, je doute qu’un organisme gouvernemental puisse avoir l’expertise, le dynamisme et le leadership pour supporter des compagnies émergeantes en technologie. Elle mentionne à juste titre la Silicon Valley et la région de Boston, qui fleurissent justement grâce au libre marché, aux entrepreneurs, aux investisseurs, qui disons-le, prennent plus de risques et n’hésitent pas à faire les choses en grand par rapport au Québec. Est-ce qu’il vous pourrait probable de voir des fonctionnaires du gouvernement du Québec appuyer des projets d’applications facebook, des projets de réseaux sociaux, de développer des applications pour des librairies comme OpenSocial ou Android? Non pas que des applications facebook soient plus porteurs d’avenir ou meilleurs que d’autres technologies, mais ils sont justement plus risqués, avec des modèles d’affaires encore à prouver, même inexistants à l’heure actuelle.

Néanmoins, à part cette conclusion, elle n’a pas tort. En soi, le Québec a besoin d’encourager plus les entrepreneurs et ceux qui innovent en technologie, et j’espère cet article aura un large écho ici. Montréal commence déjà à s’organiser dans ce sens, et je suis sûr que cela va encore se renforcer dans les mois et années à venir, même si j’ai des points d’interrogations pour le reste du Québec.

oboro, which is a center focusing on interaction between art and new media, is starting a workshop mysteriously named : “Du tangible à l’intangible et vice-versa: un laboratoire ouvert sur les artefacts sonores”

The goal of the workshop is to make interactive stuff that responds to human interaction, via sound. If any of you is into hacking electronic and audio components, this is a fun way to interact with artists. Oboro is also getting a toy designer from LA to support soft interface making.

James Golick has setup a “reddit” for ruby-related news and articles. It follows reddit’s last week announcement that they will allow its members to create sub-reddits centered around “niche” communities. In practice, this means ruby.reddit.com will stay focused and on-topic, contrary to the main reddit page or other social news websites, such as digg.com, which inevitably begins to feature jokes, news specifically crafted for digg, and sensationalist items, in order to cater to its mass audience.

I’ve comed to the page and it’s already filled with news, blog posts and announcements. No doubt it will turn into a main reference for developers who use Ruby and Ruby gems, beginners and pros alike, from all over the world.

It’s a great initiative, and this comes after James was quoted in the latest Rails Envy podcast, for his ingenuous tips for Ruby on Rails programmers. In the last week, I have also seen him starting zookeeper, a project management software, which leads me to think we now have another Ruby guru. I know he also made plugins (attribute_fu and resourcecontroller) for the Rails framework, although I tend to use other alternatives like make_resourceful. This also shows how strong and innovative the Ruby and Rails community is in Montreal.

Standoutjobs has announced they received a 2 million $ funding from iNovia Capital, which does seed and early stage venture capital investments. This is a significant investment and speaks in itself about Standoutjobs’s team’s skills and continuous efforts. This is also the first major move from iNovia that I know of, after they relaunched from the previous MSBi name.

They also launched today, and received coverage on every main technology blog, namely Techcrunch, VentureBeat, Mashable, GigaOm and CenterNetworks. So far, they received very positive reviews about the new “RECEPTION” product.

These announcements mean they now have significant time, money and media attention ahead of them to promote and commercialize their product. I know the startup’s founders were spending a lot of efforts looking for investors; as for now, they can now focus on the product itself.

I joked once with Fred Ngo how they were going to promote their service, to which he replied Ben Yoskovitz is going to put all his marketing weight into it.

And boy did he deliver. Today is certainly Standoutjobs’ day.

Congrats to iNovia and Standoutjobs!

Fred Ngo and Ben Yoskovitz, two of the startup’s co-founders, are presenting standoutjobs today at DEMO, a high-profile conference for technology startups in Northern California.

Standoutjobs was started in March 2007 as a startup that would revolutionize the job market and give a way to companies to present themselves in a more attractive manner to job-seekers. However, apart from videos published regularly on their blog, there was not much info on what exactly they are doing.

I got to go through their product last week and it’s in essence a suite of tools that would allow companies find and hire the best talents.

Each company will have one page aggregating all relevant info - the company’s blog, comments, employees, job listings, perks etc. It’s presented in a widget manner, à la netvibes, with the objective of presenting the company as a great place to work at.

A company will also have access to an administration dashboard, which allows them to track buzz about their company, setup the page’s content and appearance, manage jobs and candidates.

I find the dashboard great, as it gives companies a solid and efficient way to manage their recruiting pipeline. There is for instance a nifty tool that can “broadcast” a job to popular websites, such as SvN, guy kawasaki’s blog, techcrunch etc. The interface is also very clear, and obviously, they spent a lot of time designing this section.

I think however they could spend more time on the client-side. I am not a fan of the “boxes” look (see first screenshot), it presents too much information, with no clear hierarchy, and I am not sure what first-time visitors will actually look at.

It makes business sense to make sure your end-users (here, companies) get an easy-to-use product; but they would actually come in droves if job-seekers get persuaded to join thanks to outstanding/awesome standoutjobs pages.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, and as I mentionned before, Standoutjobs has an “A” team that can make it happen and improve the product. Furthermore, we live in a time where people are switching jobs easily, staying a shorter time at companies, the result being that companies will actually have a harder time finding key talent. This is where Standoutjobs comes and where they can go big.

First, I would like to thank the folks at Embrase, who organized StartupCampMontreal. They approached me in early December, and even though they haven’t been to local democamps, barcamps or other events, were eager to organize a startupcamp. They delved in less than a month into the startups/bloggers/entrepreneurs world in Montreal, reached out to potential attendees and resources, and get a promising program for the first edition. Heads up for Philippe Telio!

Vincent Guyaux, who heads Embrase, was our host for the night. He originally went to Waterloo and Toronto, where the first startupCamps where organized in Canada, and introduced the idea the startupnorth team.

Graham Hill was the first speaker and made a list of 9 principles for entrepreneurs. Sylvain Carle wrote down the list.

The cozimo team was the first startup to present. Stuart Feldman and Juan Pablo di Lelle have both a design background, and they have engineered a solution which allows design teams to collaborate in real-time on design documents, be it images, vectorial documents, or videos. ConceptShare, a Toronto-based startup, also allows designers to collaborate, although it’s not real-time. Instead, ConceptShare has chosen to brand themselves as the “basecamp for designers”.

I have tried the product and I think that at its core, it has a lot of potential, although their message could be sharper. I also think they could try other usages. I have seen the “widget” they offer for third-party websites which allows real-time annotation on a picture … but more on this later.

Marc Gingras, Tungle’s CEO and founder, was the second presenter. He is a great spokesperson for his company.

Tungle in itself is a tool that allows people to arrange easily meetings that would be perfect for professionals working in large teams and have a hard time finding a free slot to meet. Marc Gingras also compared heavily Tungle to Skype. I think he needs to launch now his product so we can have all a final opinion about Tungle.

We had afterwards Loic Guillard from Streametrics. They have engineered a solution that would deliver metrics for video publishers — think google analytics but for web videos. This is most certainly a great idea. Most video portals like youtube or dailymotion provide stats like total number of views or number of favorites, but I imagine marketers would kill to have metrics like country and city of origin, age, language, where they come from etc.

But this is just a theory. In practise, people just want to get their videos to be in front of many visitors as possible, and would send it to youtube and other video portals, regardless if the website provides quality stats or not. As I understand it, a video publisher would have to install streametrics in their web infrastructure to make it work, restricting views to the website’s visitors.

One idea is to sell the solution to youtube — but Google, or any other video portal for that matter, has already their ample share of engineers to do that.

The fourth company to present was i-gotcha media. Michael Terni and Greg Adelstien offer an interactive digital signage solution. They had the example of passers-by interacting with a touchscreen and accessing either a website, or a new interface created specially for the retail store.

It’s a great solid idea, and they already have clients, small and big. However, I am not sure it’s a startup. It’s a technology company, yes, but there are few risks, there are few barriers to entry, and their success relies only on having a talented sales team.

The last startup was yourteledoctor. It was presented by Younes Alaoui, a new entrepreneur who wanted to offer a new telemedecine solution via mainly video conference. His plan was ambitious, although I wished it was more precise and sharper, and he reminded me of a young explorer whose goal was to conquer a whole new world by himself.

Nevertheless, it’s a great idea. I know the guys in the team and they are working on it, every single day since they started it.

Our last speaker for the evening was Albert Lai, a serial entrepreneur who failed a lot, but also had successes.

It was the first time I saw him, and it was quite a good (and entertaining) surprise. Albert is stubborn in his ventures and pragmatic. For instance, he says consumers-oriented startups should design for virality and for the market not by your ideas of “good” product.

Overall, I think startupcamp is an unvaluable event for the startups and tech community in Montreal and in Quebec, although I wish we had more of the “camp” spirit, and more echanges between the presenters and the audience. Instead, it felt everytime like a pitch to investors.

Props to Jevon MacDonald, Jonas Brandon and David Crow for coming to Montreal.