This might look as a last-minute recall (unless you are on twitter or facebook), but if you are into technology and startups, we’ve got a cocktail/get-together/startupdrinks at 5pm, at Café Santos, 191 St Paul Street. Everyone welcomed!
More about the concept
When Tanya McGinnity first told me about her idea, I was thrilled. Who wouldn’t be? The premise is simple: find a girl geek to speak about an exciting project, hunt down a restaurant that will host a group dinner, and let people mix.
Now simple as that sounds, it isn’t easy to organize. So after the first Montreal Girl Geek Dinner ended in a resounding success, Tanya’s been working hard to host one a month.
There have been talks ranging from starting your own business to hacking on open source software to innovative computer games. Because Montreal is fast becoming an exciting place for technology, there’s no surprise that it’s full of talented geeky women.
Recently, I found a chance to interrupt her busy schedule to ask her a few questions.
I’m a transplanted Maritimer who, due to cod-overfishing, needed to find a new job. So I landed a gig with Matrox Graphics way back in the pre-bubble days.
After the bubble burst, I got into digital marketing and project management with some cool web firms here in Montreal. Now I am currently freelancing with ihaveanidea.org as their Director of Social Medification and webology.
Montreal Girl Geek Dinners are an offshoot of the London Girl Geek Dinners, started by the awesome Sarah Blow who also runs the Girly Geekdom blog which I contribute to (albeit sporadically!)
Montreal is an incredible city and there are so many interesting and innovative things going on in all sectors—the music scene, startups, film, arts and so on. As a tech geek by trade, I would attend tech events and see that there weren’t too many girls in the crowd. I came across a video clip from one of the Barcamp events where Martine Pagé asked the crowd “Where are the Women?” and I felt like maybe there was something to be explored in creating some smaller scale mixers where girls could hone their presentation skills and meet other people who are as jazzed about being geeky.
Mainly girls, but we do get quite a few guy geeks too. Most people who attend are invited by someone who has attended a previous event and many others are new Montrealers who are looking to meet new people. There have only been four dinners, so we are a new group but we’re looking to grow and evolve.
We eat. We talk. We network. We exchange business cards. A featured speaker gives a presentation on a topic. Then dessert and the cheque. So far, we’ve had dinners featuring Heather Kelley, Angela Byron, Aleece Germano, Kim Vallee and Bronwen Zande.
Absolutely anything, as long as you are geeky about it. There are plans to do sessions on time-management, comics, nutrition, rock-bands, developing negotiating skills, crafts, as well as some “surprises” in the works.
Visit the blog or our Facebook group for more information.
I’m looking for speakers, restaurant suggestions, translators, event planners, help with promotion and anything else that could help this group evolve and meet everyone’s needs. It takes a village to grow a nation of geeks.
Girl Geeks
Originally uploaded by Simon Law.
Special article by Simon Law.
Photographs by Janina Szkut and Simon Law,
used under Creative Commons licenses.
The Web 2.0 Expo revealed the ever-growing fascination with everything mobile.
An expert in the field of Mobile Design, Brian Fling declared that the iphone is already 0.09% of all web traffic.This may be true . Remember, not long ago Google announced that it had 50 times more searches on iphone than on any other handset.
While Apple is preparing for the Apple Developers conference, Nokia is still the overwhelming dominant mobile manufacturer. They have 39% of the market , more than the three next suppliers combined! – Motorola, Samsung and LG. Recently, Nokia has announced the next stage of its Widget platform for Symbian Series 60 smartphones. The new stage will give developers access to GPS, contacts book, communications stacks, e-mail and SMS functions on the phone.
For Marc Davis, Yahoo’s social media guru, there’s no doubt that the future is about mobility . “The next web,” he says “will be about place and time.”
Last summer, I read a very interesting book called Mobile Web 2.0 by Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish.
In it they enunciate the seven principles of mobile web 2.0 :
1) Mobile Content captured at the moment of inspiration – like photo, twitter,etc. (Last week a student twittered his way out of jail!)
2) I am a tag, I am not a number- freedom from the restrictions of various network operators.
3) Multilingual mobile access.
4) Digital Convergence.
5) AJAX/Widgets.
6) Location-based services.
7) Mobile search.
Clear and concise definition of mobile web 2.0. Now bring on the applications.
With the (locked) iphone (3G version ? Probably) coming soon to Canada, courtesy of the sole GSM operator here, Rogers, it’s time to rrrummblllee.
StartupIndex.ca was unveiled this evening at StartupCampToronto. It’s a joint effort by Jevon MacDonald, Jonas Brandon, Ali Asaria and Chris Long, and provides a crowd-sourced database of Canadian startups and investors.
StartupIndex has already in its database most Canadians startups and VC funds, and paints a broad picture of the Internet / ecommerce / web2.0 / media startup landscape. You are also invited to register and contribute if you notice incorrect or missing information.
The website has strong similarities with CrunchBase, a Techcrunch property which does more or less the same thing. In its current state, one can call it a clone of CrunchBase; although this wouldn’t be fair. As Jevon MacDonald writes, their final objective was to provide to the community a useful tool, and get better exposure for startups based in Canada:
By tracking startup activity nationally we can start to build more awareness of which startups are worth watching, we can also quickly find out which Investors are doing deals and which ones are less active. The “Wheat from the Chaff” as they say.
This is also an opportunity to find out the truth about the Canadian Startup community. Is it dead or alive? We can either put grand claims to rest, or we can light a fire under them.
There is a parallel to be made here with StartupNorth. With its focus in Canada, the blog has played a major role in raising the profile of the country, in levels unheard of one year ago, and convinced entrepreneurs that there’s actually a scene and an industry worth staying in Canada. StartupIndex becomes then a natural expansion in StartupNorth’s mission, a tool that will provide valuable information for future and existing entrepreneurs, investors and the media.
If you are an entrepreneur, you can use it for instance to get an initial list of potential investors in your space, or maybe try to connect with startups and work out partnerships. You can also use it to evaluate term sheets and typical VC investments. So it’s definetely a great project that I welcome. Congrats to the team!
The Rogers group announced their Q1 results this morning, all very good news, great revenue by user, etc. And then Ted Rogers announced they’ll have the iPhone on their product line this year, in Canada.
The announcement in itself is less than 3 lines, and I refuse to speculate or add anything to the announcement. Just saying that since he likes to practise brevity, he should get a twitter account. Although I guess he will be too busy collecting the Rogers tax getting all of your paychecks in the bank.
SmartHippo has announced an advisory board, with Lori Collins, former VP and General Manager for LendingTree, Bill Rice, CEO of Kaleidico, and John Philip Green, Founder of LearnHub.
The first 2 advisors are in the same vertical as SmartHippo, while the last one has created an online community for education, and also advises community lend.
Finance, and especially finance services for consumers is a black area for me, especially since the financial crisis. I still find incredible that some big wall street investments banks can claim billions of new revenue streams every year, out of some *creative* financial schemes. Turns out that those were made of thin air while we still have governements still planning to save those institutions.
I’ve had a quick email exchange with George Favvas, SmartHippo’s founder on how exactly he positions his startup in this turnoil, and especially if it makes any sense to launch a service around mortgages.
Again, I am no finance major, but I understand from his replies that in the mortgage industry, a lot of money is made by mortgage brokers, companies, and intermediairies by the fact that they get access to privileged information while consumers and individuals don’t. SmartHippo’s mission is then to enable free, open access on data, provided and corrected by the community. Prior to the subprime crisis, if consumers had used the SmartHippo website, they would have known for instance about mortgages that looks like great deals but would be ultimately ripping them off after the first years.
Of course, it’s easy to say so when the crisis has already erupted, but it gives nonetheless a better light on SmartHippo plans. I like the idea of a free, open market. Have a look for instance at the new SmartHippo’s homepage, which features now daily blog posts from its members and partners, plus other new features like bank reviews and comments. The previous version looked like more a search engine for mortgage rates, while this gets now SmartHippo closer to the community/destination website as George Favvas described it.
Furthermore, George Favvas says the optimal time to launch a disruptive startup is when the industry is in crisis. With new advisors giving him valuable advice on key areas where SmartHippo is playing, this means good news for SmartHippo for the future.
Akoha has announced this morning $1.9 million in funding from various angel investors. The list of investors include David Chamandy (Lavalife), John Bromley, JS Cournoyer, Ron Dembo (Zerofootprint.net), Jake Eberts (film producer), Alan Gershenfeld (E-Line Ventures, Games for Change), John Meeks, Reg Weiser, Jonathan Wener, Rober Montgomery (Achilles Media), Chris Emergui (BAM Strategy), and Montreal Start Up.
The funds are supporting ungoing development and launch of Akoha.
The news has been picked by many blogs, in Techcrunch, StartupNorth, Techvibes, and mashable
What’s curious is that the startup got featured on those high-profile blogs even though noone was able to tell what exactly Akoha was doing — it probably has a lot to do more with Austin Hill’s profile than the product. The funniest on the blog coverage was Fagstein’s post:
… It could be a social-networking site for fundraisers or it could be a giant multiplayer Pong game with the Sesame Street theme playing all the time. They’re still kind of being coy about it …
Of course, it’s due to the fact that Akoha is still under development. I can’t myself tell you more what Akoha is doing – other than they are playing with social gifting, both on and offline. There are couple of things to get though from the announcement:
OneBigPlanet has launched this morning, with a live videocast where they unveiled their product, and announced the first customers using the platform.
OneBigPlanet promises to have the answer on how to monetize social networks and also solve the problem of high membership turn-over on those websites. What the platform does essentially is offer a wide array of rewards, discounts, products and services to the users of those websites. OneBigPlanet believes then that this will be a compelling offer to the member who will keep coming back. It would also mean a stable and real revenue stream for the organization.
One of their main customer announced today was the U.S. Chamber of commerce, which has more than 3 million business members. It will use OneBigPlanet’s platform, its members then having access to a one-stop “consumer platform”, where they will be able to position products & services.
With this new platform, OneBigPlanet seems to be especially proud on how they have leveraged “web2.0″ technologies, and how they have solved on their own the problem on social networking monetization. They have announced it’s a patent-pending technology.
There are lots to be said regarding OneBigPlanet and its platform. It’s surpring to see that a company, which is up to today an outsider, announcing to have solved the monetization problem; while leaders like myspace or facebook haven’t managed to do so. I also find it disturbing they are branding the product as a social network platform while in fact it’s a platform to manage fidelity programs. But I guess that’s a way to be trendy. Neverthless, it’s a refreshing take on how to make more intereting loyalty programs.
The Montreal startup scene, Blitzweekend, 2nd March 2008
There is a great thread at Hacker news about the best place to startup now, outside of the U.S.
Hacker news is a social news website designed for the “ycombinator community”, and has been hailed by many (Michael Arrington among others) as a leading source of news for programming, hacking, and entrepreneurship.
I know many readers of this blog are either involved in startups, or are interested into starting or joining one. If you are part of the latter category, one of the questions you should ask yourself then what would be the best location for a startup.
Inevitably, Silicon Valley, and also Boston are shown as the reference, with its obsessive entrepreneurship culture, the abundance of investors, smart people and early adopters, which are all key ingredients of success.
There are some good news though as comments on the thread highlights many Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Waterloo, Ottawa, Winnipeg, etc.) as great cities for a technology startup. Some positive points mentionned for Canadian cities:
Cons mentionned by the commenters:
There are certainly many other reasons why it’s a great place to launch a technoloy startup in Montreal, in Québec or in other cities. I’ve got many in my mind, but I fear I’ll repeat myself. So I’ll leave it up to you, if you think of other reasons, please share them, either here or on the discussion thread.
StartYourTube is a new video platform, launched 2 weeks ago by Mark Bruneau (formerly CEO of Adventis & Bell Canada) and Daniel Robicheau (formerly Streamtheworld, also running Neotechcapital).
Their bet is that many want now to start their own community around videos, without mingling with mainstream video websites the likes of Youtube or Dailymotion. StartYourTube allows then anyone to have their own “tube”, with their customized design.
There is a strong parallel to be done with Ning, the get-your-own-social-network creator. We’ve all seen social networks like myspace, facebook or bebo sold at hundreds of millions a while ago, and now it’s Ning’s turn to get crazy valuations ($500 millions in its latest fundraising).
I am sure the StartYourTube founders have noticed the shift and are trying to replicate the trend in the video space. You can view “tubes” that were already created, since its launch early this month. I am sure this would be a great success for sports (one around the Canadiens would be an instant success for instance), for independent video producers who would want a customized place for their videos (like intruders), or for any other niche community that would want more control. Another path they can take is offering the platform for businesses who would want a video website around their company, without diluting their videos with catspoorly-produced videos.
One problem they might have overlooked though is that contrary to social networks where nobody is interested in getting thousands of contacts (at least in my case), it’s the inverse in videos. You don’t care who watch the videos, most of the time people publish a video to get the highest number of views. That’s why Youtube rules, and will probably stay the king of video in North America for a long time.
I’d like to believe though. They’ve got a top-notch executive team, funds, and, correct me if I am wrong, they are the first to launch this kind of product. Plus it’s also easier to monetize vertical communities than mainstream destinations.
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