Montreal Tech Watch

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.