Montreal Tech Watch

It looks like the folks at Embrase are dedicated to create a strong startup scene around Montréal. While the first StartupCampMontreal is still fresh in our memories, they have now announced the second edition for Thursday May 15th at 6.00pm, at the SAT.

If you missed the first edition, here is a detailed report with pictures about StartupCampMontreal #1. The goal of the event was to gather entrepreneurs and investors, and get 5 early stage companies to pitch attendees about their business model.

Philipe Telio, from Embrase, has more about the first edition:

The first edition was held this past January 23rd, with the intent of gathering 50 or so startups interested in the business side of starting a company. The event clearly struck a cord with the startup community, because 180 people showed up (140 entrepreneurs, 30 VCs and industry experts, 5 students and 5 organizers), representing some 15 cities in Quebec, Ontario and parts of the US.

Registration is here.

This weekend at Station C, there was Coder’s Saturday, a conference/meetup/camp which gathered 30+ web developers. The meetup was a joint collaboration between the folks from Station C, Nurun and Yahoo Québec.

The event came up with the venue in town of Christian Heilmann, from Yahoo! UK.

He gave a insightful presentation about how web developers should work with web standards, and also about the challenges about web standards. Christian Heilmann also gave his input about web accessibilty and usability issues.

We also had Ara Pehlivanian, who talked about web2.0 development. He works for Nurun, and said it’s important to understand usage of HTML, javascript, and CSS when developing a website. Great advice.

Sarven Capadisli also talked about microformats, and how it will help machines understand human meaning behind web documents. I am working myself with other fellow Montréalers on a microformat project and it’s great to hear about other developers evangelizing microformats.

There was also a presentation about the Google Web Toolkit, which allows web developers to build AJAX apps by using the java language, and Christian Heilmann sealed the day by presenting the tools made freely avalaible to web developers by Yahoo!.

This was a good surprise for me. I didn’t expect all the high quality and insightful presentations. Hats off then to the organizers for Coder’s saturday.

More pictures

Patrick Tanguay introduces the conference.

Introduction by Karen Bennet, Director of Engineering of Yahoo! Canada (Toronto)

Attendees

Last friday, a small group gathered at Station C to talk about developing services and applications for mobile phones.

The meetup was somehow improvised after rapid exchanges on twitter, around me, Martin Dufort, who started previously Kakiloc, a mobile “location-based twitter”, and Fred Brunel, who was already poking the iPhone SDK.

And so was born the idea for a meetup. Which is completely crazy for me to announce, given the fact that I am weeks late on my own current work schedule, and had about 0 hours to start a new project on mobile apps, let alone organize a new meetup, à la barcamp. But what do you know, it occured to me that the iPhone SDK completely changes the game and introduces a new paradigm on how we will access and use information. I have to thank though Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mireault for the support they gave for this meetup, and who are doing an awesome work on putting things together at Station C.

For the meetup in itself, about 10 people or so came up, with a good mix of developers/hackers/entrepreneurs/geeks/early adopters. Fred Brunel told us that he worked for a french company for 5 years, which was developing and distributing games for cell phones, and one of their biggest technical challenges was the diversity of platforms. For instance, they had a proprietary technology that would compile on the fly a binary for use for a given customer. Apple’s distribution system, on the other hand, completely overrides those challenges, and for the first time in mobile history, you can imagine a single developer capable of creating one application that would fully run on millions of devices. The beauty of the system is also the fact that it bypasses the user’s telecom carrier, whose standard business practices is to tax any service that its subscribers wants to use.

We also talked about Google Android, whose set of features matches Apple’s platform. But here again, the fact that cell phone manufacturer will have their own implementation of Google Android will be a huge burden to developers: for instance, you can’t be sure that your end-user will have access to 3D features, or you don’t know if the user has a touchscreen, a full keyboard, or a standard cell phone keyboard, amongst other things.

We continued afterwards the discussion at Chilenitas, a small family-run restaurant nearby with great food and drinks. While, Station C is a great place, you feel sometimes like being in a modern art museum, and Chilenitas was just the right place to take a beer, chill out, and get real on what we exactly wanted to do.

Rick Segal, partner at JLA Ventures, a fund investing in emerging tech companies, is touring Canadian cities in a series of “VC Roundtables” to meet entrepreneurs and local startup community. The goal is to present and explain what really is a technology investor; and also present documents and information about the investment process.

The planned date for Montréal is Aril 16th, from 4.30 to 6.40pm.

This was the proposed format for the Roundtable:

The format will be something like this - and I’m open to suggestions:

• Evening, about 3 hours in length
• Informal/Free (super important!)
• Small Groups (super important!)
• Information on VC/Angels and the process.
• Sample Term sheets, documents, business plans, PowerPoints
• Example Pitch or Pitches to show what’s interesting/good/bad
• Open questions for a good chunk of time.

What it will not be:

• Demo/Startup/FooBar/Camp/Conference/MESH/MASH
• Me trashing your ideas
• You trashing somebody else’s ideas
• Three hours of me showing you PowerPoint slides

The hope is that at the end of the get together you will have:

• An understanding of my world
• A good set of reference documents/examples/materials
• Some of your top of mind questions answered
• A better feel for my industry and if raising third party capital is right for you.
• A good place to start

Here are some reasons why you might want to attend:
- it’s free and informal
- Rick Segal is one of the rare VCs who participate actively in the startup scene in Canada, he is an active blogger, sponsors and goes regularly to demoCamps, and is committed to support Canadia-based startups,
- you are planning to launch a startup, and looking to raise third-party capital,
- you might be an engineer/a tech guy, and clueless about term sheets and due diligence processes,
- you want to know how to approach angels and VCs and what kind of relationship to have with them,
- you want to know the business criterias (and other) that investors are looking for when investing

Registration is here. It is limited to 25 seats for each session.

There are also sessions in Ottawa on April 16th, and in Toronto the following day, if you can’t make it.

The next meeting of the IGDA’s Montreal Chapter will take place at the SAT on Wednesday, the 26th. With 20 presentations limited to 6 minutes each, I’m expecting it to be a super condensed version of last November’s Montreal International Game Summit. GameCamp, like MIGS, appears to draw on a large spectrum of topics and presenters. Heri pointed out that at least one of the topics appears questionable — and there probably will be a few thinly veiled sales pitches — but I also expect some really informative and entertaining presentations (I’m personally looking forward to Clint Hocking’s “Games and Meaning”).

Click here for more info, including a full list of presenters and presentations.

7pm, Wednesday, March 26
The SAT, 1195 St Laurent
$5 entry fee, at the door

Company: Culture Café

Position: Chief Technology Officer

Responsibilites and Tasks:
Culture Café (www.culturecafe.com) is looking for a Chief Technology Officer. The candidate should have prior CTO experience as well as knowledge of the social media space. The ideal candidate has a multicultural background, with experience living or working abroad or exposure to multiple cultures.

Required Knoweledge:

Compensation:

Additional info:
Culture Café is a social media site allowing people interested in connecting with a culture, but living in a place where this culture is not dominant, to find other people and resources from that culture. Culture Café is being designed to become the one-stop shop for cultural information in cities and towns across the globe. The website is beta launching in April, 2008.

How to apply:
Please email Culture Café directly with your CV at info@culturecafe.com.

View the complete list of job listings
Submit a job ad

A Léger Marketing study reveals an impressive rise of voice Over Ip telephony in Québec in 2007. Figures in 2006 showed that only 16% of subscribers were using voip, but the new study shows that the rate is now 44%, nearly a +200% increase in just one year.

The figure is surprising, as voip technology was only introduced in the province in 2005, and it was then estimated that the technology would take over land-based telephony only in 2010.

If Québec experiences the same growth in 2008, then legacy telecom operators like Bell or Telus have a lot to worry. Companies that offer voip-based telephony services include Videotron, which offers to replace your telephone line via cable, Rogers, plus a myriad of third-party service providers like Kovasys, Groupe Neotech, Aheeva or Savoir-Faire Linux which offer to install Asterisk or another solution so that you’d get an entire phone system through your Internet connection.

These companies, especially Videotron, highlights value-added services like cheaper long-distance calls, and more options, like accessing your voicemail through the web, which would be impossible with a classic telephone land line.

It strikes me that in Québec, some technologies see impressive growth rates, seen nowhere in the world, like voip or broadband Internet, while other technologies like mobile Internet are still waiting to be adopted by most Québecers. Go figure…

In yet another dramatic but expected turn of events, Capazoo, the “black sheep” of startups in Montréal, has layed off all of its development team late last week. 60 developers, mostly .Net programmers, were asked to leave the premises immediately, and all that was left was a sysadmin to run the whole system. The official explanation was that it’s because of the legal problems between the Verville brothers. The judge refused to come up with a final decision and ruled that Capazoo’s shareholders should settle the dispute between the two co-fonders. But there was no settlement, and nobody is officially running the company.

Roberto Rocha also reports that there is now a “a louer” (to rent) sign in front of Capazoo’s offices, and I was also told that remaining employees were layed off Monday. There are also rumours that Capazoo is trying to shop itself, to a Toronto-based venture fund interested into acquiring the technology behind Capazoo.

For those who didn’t get the story, the Capazoo adventure was started 2 years ago. It was advertised by its founders to be the next Facebook, and the founders proclaimed they would reach $650millions monthly revenues. Soon, they managed to get funding from athletes and wealthy individuals, up to an announced $10.6 million. The fact though is that audience and revenues never came, probably because the “executive” team knew nothing whatsoever about technology and how to design and market a web product.

So here we are. Lots of talk, lots of money, lots of weird ideas and creative “marketing schemes” thrown around, and now the end of a local company … which, in my opinion, doesn’t even deserve a post on Montreal Tech Watch. But I guess we have to write down history and facts so as the next new entrepreneurs would learn the lesson.

Mark Greenshields has written a brief criticism of the government tax credits used by Quebec (and recently Ontario) to attract developers and foster industry growth. I found it to be an extremely interesting and surprising article, as I had previously never read anything but praise and support for the tax credits offered to companies in Montreal and the rest of the province. His points are honest and hard to argue with, given what I know of the companies that exist in Montreal and the types of games being produced. This is the kind of candor you just won’t find from the CEOs of Ubisoft or EA or Eidos:

“Montreal is not an efficient place to run a video games development business. Personal taxes are high, and a good number of the available staff do not have the required attitude. There are some commercially successful games coming from Montreal studios, but can you show me one that did not cost many millions and require a huge team? Unless you have big pockets you’ll need to spend a lot of money developing your games using bigger teams than are necessary, a situation created partly by the tax credit system and partly by the speed of growth in Montreal.”

Read the full article at Develop: Tax Breaks - Panacea or Pestilence?

Greenshields is one of the founders of Glasgow-based DC Studios. He operated an office in Montreal for several years before closing up shop and deciding to focus solely on racing games with his new company, Firebrand Games. Still based out of Glasgow, Firebrand’s North American office is now located in Florida.

Yesterday, Branchez-vous reported that it acquired 2 niche successful websites in Québec, fanatique.ca and humourquebec.com.

I didn’t write about it, as I knew Branchez-Vous’s overall strategy is to become the #1 media destination in Québec, and their tactic is to acquire regularly new web destinations, on a bi-monthly basis, and launch new advertising partnerships. One of the websites’s price tag was $65.000, and well, for me… that was it, it closed the story.

And I moved on. It’s hard to report such a story when you hear about Bebo’s acquisition price or Meebo’s valuation.

I just read however a post that brings a new perspective about this. Jean-François Dubé thanks Émile Girard, who was behind both websites.

J’aimerais le féliciter pour cette belle réussite mais j’aimerais surtout le remercier. Pourquoi? Parce que sans même me connaitre, Émile m’a donné un solide coup de pied dans le derrière en me faisant réaliser qu’il est possible pour un jeune entrepreneur du Québec de réussir dans ce domaine de fou.

Tout comme Émile, j’aurai bientôt 24 ans et j’ai la tête (et le laptop) pleine de projets. Sans le vouloir, il vient d’envoyer un gros “FUCK YOU” à tout ceux qui n’ont pas cru en moi jusqu’à maintenant et qui m’ont dit que je devrais entrer dans une grosse boîte avant de tenter de voler de mes propres ailes.

And there I understood that this is really a meaningful symbol for new entrepreneurs. Émile Girard started both websites in his early twenties, was a solo-entrepreneur, gathered an audience, and through passion, hard, relenteless work, he made a substantial amount of money from it. The fact that we are not talking about digg or reddit.com might be even more meaningful for new entrepreneurs: it’s easier for a Montreal/Quebec/Canadian-based entrepreneur to see him/herself in Émile Girard’s shoes than say, in Kevin Rose’s, of Digg.com fame.

And I agree with Jean-François Dubé. Stories like Émile Girard’s needs to be heard more often. Yes, it’s possible to start something in Québec. Be it a “small”, dedicated website like fanatique.ca, or something big, like standoutjobs.

And I am now starting now a new section on Montreal Tech Watch, called it Technology Entrepreneurs Stars, and it will be dedicated to local entrepreneurs who succeeded, be it from a successful IPO or an acquisition. If you know anyone who fits there, feel free to comment and email at news@montrealtechwatch.com