Montreal Tech Watch

The Praized website was launched last year, when they announced a $1m investment by Garage Canada, and the product in itself was presented as a new way for people to find local places and merchants, thanks to “praizes” from other users.

Unlike the textbook way of launching a web product, it seems like Praized is experimenting new ways to market their web product. First, one of the thing they did very early on was associating the praized.com domain to a blog. This blog is being regularly updated with new articles, and getting new exposure, trackbacks, comments, thus establishing an online & authoritive presence about everything local, even though there was no usable product (to be more exact: they didn’t have a working product a few weeks ago). I found incongruous though that it’s a personal blog, by one of the co-founder, Sébastien Provencher, who seems to identify himself as Praized, on twitter and many other places. But what do you know, I am not an expert in internet marketing and certainly a little bit lost in all those “personal brand 2.0″ discussions.

Fast forward, the startup has installed last week their product in 2 websites where you can get a peek of what’s coming.

The first one is mocolocal, where readers of the mocoloco art/design blog are invited to submit their favourite places. The goal here is to leverage an existing, dedicated community and get them to discover “artsy” places.

The second one is web2places, a blog where attendees to the Web2.0 Expo can find top places and events in San Francisco. In fact, the co-founders of the startup have planned an expedition are attending the conference. Compared to mocolocal, they are using here a different tactic, which is linking generously to other attendees, events, and places; the objective that the community (the conference attendees) notices the website and it gets adopted, in a viral way.

You can even try out the system, by creating a user account at auth.praized.com; although I won’t probably be using it anymore as I am neither in SF or an art guy. Even if I were an art guy, I’d think the interface could be simplified. Or could have more pictures. Less of the “list” feel and more content where people could identify to. Because that’s the kind of thing one would be need to be convinced to check a place. But as I said, don’t mind, because I am not an art guy, plus I have no idea what final objective this application is trying to achieve.

Like me, you might have now more questions than answers, such as: is this a test to see what works and what doesn’t with the product? or are those 2 websites a test to see if they can grow organically an audience with the existing product? or is this the “real deal”? or is it the first steps to an elaborate strategy, where they have taken into account every factor? You have to give credit to Praized’s executive team by trying out new innovative guerilla marketing tactics. This is quite creative, and I am curious to see what they have in mind next…

Here is a video of Austin Hill explaining his vision and motivation behind akoha.org, a startup to launch later this year.

The akoha website already gives a glimpse of what they are trying to achieve, but I found this video much more meaningful and more powerful than all the logos and colors. A beautiful project for sure, that I found echoed in one of Paul Graham’s recent essay; the question left unanswered now is if they can change people’s behaviour.

A Tara Hunt interview.

Note: this was published a few weeks ago, but I missed it as it was published when I declared a black-outhiatus for everything related to MTW.

Note: Thanks to Jevon McDonald for the inspiration for the title. We are indeed working towards a MontrealTechWatch 2.0, although the website will have a permanent “beta” status.

As posted earlier, I’ve taken a few steps back to consider what MontrealTechWatch means on the long-term. We’ve done an open meeting at Laika too last wednesday, many showed up, and there were lots of suggestions. Thanks to everyone who commented or went to the meetup!

I’ve found out that this was in fact related to the essence of “blogging” in general, and its viability. MTW is dedicated to a small (albeit very active) community, and its success relies on reporting about latest news and on relevant insights on what those news means, beyond simple facts reporting.

And that’s where the problem is. “Relevant insight” means you have to be an active actor of the industry, someone who innovates/designs/codes/markets products and then have the necessary background to give those insights. Which means blogging has to be restriced to a few hours, and can never be a full-time occupation.

I am sure this is a balance problem that many bloggers stumbles into, at a specific point of their lifespan.

My position on this is that I still want to contribute actively on MTW, but make no mistake, I will continue to design/develop/work on new innovative projects, and that’s not negotiable.

And my vision for MontrealTechWatch is a beacon of light, for technology and innovation, where entrepreneurs/hackers/students get inspiration and aspire to work on great projects.

Can the two visions/positions be compatible? Although I have no final answer, I’d like to think (for the moment) that it’s possible to do so.

A solution that rose during the last meeting was getting more actors of the “community” to contribute to the blog. See this for instance:

In this chart, there would someone taking care of developing MTW and all sorts of business-related/administrative stuff like getting partners, such as entrepreneurship centres or technology clusters, be it in Montreal or outside. This is not necessarily me, and I’m thinking about meeting a couple of persons here in Montreal who would rise to the challenge.

Then, there would be an core team of 3 to 6 persons, who contribute weekly/daily to MontrealTechwatch. Patrick Tanguay wrote about having clusters, and that what we’re going to have:
- a section about entrepreneurship/startups
- a section about technology events (democamps, blitzweekend, breakfasts, etc.)
- a section about mobile technology (mobile platforms, telecommunications, mobile computing etc.)
- a section about video games
- a section about hacking + open source, which would be dedicated to the coder folks
- a jobs section
- and ideally, also a guide section, where posts like “Web entrepreneurship for students” or any other resource would be published.
If you would like to be part of this “elite”/official team and if the vision of MTW appeals to you, shout an email at news@montrealtechwatch.com or tweet a direct message at @mtw

Ideally, there should also be at least one person who would write in French, although as I wrote earlier, it’s difficult to do so in technology.

Around the core team, every other member of the community that MTW is geared to will also be invited to contribute, whether they post specific articles on a solution they worked on, or report news that might have been overlooked by the core team.

Next, there are the active readers, people who subscribe or comment on articles.

Now, here are the next steps that will be worked on, in no particular order:

• getting UI improvements done on MTW to allow more interactivity and more user-generated content
• finding the project leader / executive person for MTW, - work with other organizations like Alliance Numeriq, TechnoMontreal, universities and other partners
• write and publish a chart / a “declaration” to clarify the vision and the objective behind MTW,
• moving the MTW to a dedicated server, and also get an official status for MTW and all of its activities
• work out the workflow for the groups/teams as described earlier and publish this.

Note: if a company want to be an official sponsor (such as sponsoring development, or sponsoring gear or any other activity), shout an email at news@montrealtechwatch

We are also launching startupdrinks next week, either wednesday or friday late afternon (stay tuned for the final date/hour). The goal is to gather everyone interested in startups to get over a drink at a bar. No schedule, simple, free, an open source event, I will talk about MTW, but you are free to talk about anything you want to whoever you want.

I hope this will give you a better understanding on the future of MTW. I know there are some things that should still be worked on, but as one says, it’s about the journey, not about the destination. So here’s hoping you will enjoy the ride…

Austin Hill and Patrick Lauzon are hosting the 2nd Founders&Funders dinner. It’s scheduled May 14th, with 100 attendees planned, with each ticket costing $100.

A Founders and funders dinner gathers startup founders, venture capitalists, angel investors with the objective of meeting new business partners, or who knows, initiate an investment between an entrepreneur and an investor.

For the first event, I worked on the web2.0 map of Montréal, an idea which was started off by Austin Hill. Here are my thoughts about the first event, although strictly speaking, it’s not a true event report, but more an assessement of the event’s contribution to the startup scene in Montreal. It was an undeniable success, an event where every major actor of the startup scene should aspire to go to.

Unlike the open source technology events, where anyone and their friends can “join the party”, Founders & Funders dinners are private events, with attendees screened by the organizers. You will have chances to attend it if you are starting a solid startup/technology company. I guess you can think of it as an upscale Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast; without service providers, with definetely more VCs — the sort you would never meet in an informal setting; and where every other person is either a CEO, CTO, a venture partner or an entrepreneur in residence.

Unlike the previous event though, there is a registration form if you think you apply.
This is an effort to open up the event. In addition, they will also host an open after-hour cocktail for those who won’t make it to the dinner:

Given the interest we received after the first event and the fact that we won’t be able to invite everyone who has expressed interest to the dinner. As a result we are also going to be hosting an after dinner open cocktail networking (A nice roof top terrace party). The networking event will cost $20 and include two drink tickets.

Mediascrape has received a funding of $3.2 million, in a round led by Canadian investor Paradigm Capital. Previous to this funding, Mediascrape also took angel funding ($1 million announced in Sep last year).

Mediascrape’s main idea is to re-broadcast on the web live video feeds, taken from press agencies or major news broadcasters. It then allows users to “tune in” to any geographical region in the world and get video reports, with a 30-minute latency, the time necessary to translate the reports in english. Mediascrape’s added value is the maps functionnality as well as the translation of the reports in English. For users, it also means getting access to a wider array of news, and be able to choose news by topics and broacasters.

Mediascrape will be using the new funds to expand its product features and its business.

They will for instance allow its users to access the live raw video feeds, and voice-over, translate, or edit them, in the wiki way. This means essentially mediascrape users will have the same tools as the company. I am not sure what is the benefit for the user to do this, but I guess it’s a way for mediascrape to get additionnal languages, meta-information and more interesting content in a more “scalable” way.

Mediascrape will also announce a new partnership with Reuters — they are currently installing a 3,000 pound satellite receiver on their office roof to broadcast the Reuters 24/7 live raw breaking news feed.

Finally, they are also bringing in Chris Dingle as President and CTO. Chris Dingle was previously the founding CTO of 24/7 Real Media, sold last summer to WPP for $637 million.

There have been questions by a few industry observers, but I guess it’s mainly because nuvu.tv/mediascrape is not from your typical “web-native” people, but from an outsider who thought about addressing a need for diverse and hyper-local news.

ADISQ, which represents the music industry in Québec, is holding a series of talks and roundtables in hopes of understanding the Internet and how they can possibly fit with the new media. The talks began yesterday; high on their agenda is cooperation with ISPs, bandwidth throttling, net neutrality, new strategies and new business models, and new public taxes.

Yesterday, most speakers seemed to agree that ISPs must pay a compensation to the industry.

I have no words to state how stupid this would be (although less stupid than their last common declaration), and for the first time, was feeling sympathetic to the Bell representative, who claimed they shouldn’t be the only responsible. For ADISQ, here is a bunch of facts which happenned in the music industry for just the past month:

• iTunes is now the #1 music retailer in the US, with 19% market share, just in front of Wall-Mart (apr 3rd 2008)
• Myspace has opened a new music business, with 3 music majors, (Apr 3rd)
• Amazon is now #2 in digital music sales (mar. 26th)
• Univeral Music has launched Jiwa in the US, a freely avalaible website where users can listen to +250.000 tunes. The website is monetized by advertising and part of the revenues go directly to the artists (mar. 25th 2008)
• Nine inch Nails got $1.6million from their latest exclusive online album (mar 14th 2008)

ADISQ just proved again they are a dinosaur, clueless about the fact that majors are dying, that albums sales, as we know it, is a thing of the past (except for those rare moments where you buy them as gifts), and the key is having artists embracing the new distrubition channels and talking directly to their fans.

Daniel Turp, a long-time sovereignist and member of the Parti Québecois, is currently lobbying and asking the ICANN to create a .qc extension. His vision is to create a “true” Québec web, in the same way that the province has already its own flag, parliament, and all kinds of symbols to represent its nation/culture.

While the ICANN hasn’t formally said no to the request, it has replied that Québec must be either a country member of the United Nations or a territory managed temporarily by the International Court of Justice, which isn’t the case for Québec.

Daniel Turp, who didn’t seem discouraged, said that territories like Catalonia have now their own extensions (.cat for the Spanish province) and it would then be logical to get a .qc extension. He plans next to mobilize web users from Québec and get support for his idea, in the form of a petition.

I am sure there are lots of local businesses who would love getting a .qc domain name (think hotels, restaurants, or other small businesses where geolocalized websites matter), in the same way that it makes sense sometimes to get a .ca domain instead of trying to get a .com. The proposal sounds then as a good idea, although the arguments used by the MP are a bit far-fetched and dishonest for me. It doesn’t look like there are millions of active, innovative and unique websites in Québec up to the point that we would need to get a dedicated .qc domain to accomodate for that. I think Daniel Turp should first focus as a MP on getting a great Québec web, and make sure entrepreneurs, innovative companies and organizations get the conditions to do that, and then we will worry about symbols and those two letters afterwards.

Tungle, a local startup, is a plug-in for Outlook that allows its users to share their availability with the people they are working with; finding then a common free time is then immediate and pain-free. The product is targeted at large groups, in a business setting, where colleagues, managers, and assistants typically spend hours, days and countless emails to check back and forth if someone is avalaible.

Tungle works for the moment with MS Outlook, but if any of your collaborators don’t have Outlook, they can go to a “Tungle space”, a temporary web page where they will have the same functionnality.

Tungle’s founder is Marc Gingras, who on many occasions highlighted the ease of use of the product and the attention they gave to the user interface. There are many associations to be done here with Skype: Tungle is also a p2p application but instead of using technical or software-related words, it explains in very straightforward words what the tool means for end-users.

Meeting coordination tools is a competitive space: Timebridge especially has received acclaims for a solution that does the same thing, JiffleNow is another competitor which launched last week, although there is not (yet) a clear winner. It’s sure noone is going to use more than one tool to coordinate meeting times, and even if I know they spent more than one year developing & fine-tuning their product, it’s just the beginning of the battle for Tungle.

Another last factor to ake into account with Tungle is that it’s a peer-to-peer application. Good: it means it goes beyond firewalls, doesn’t need servers, and is scalable (or more easily scalable than tradtional architectures). The problem is that for the past 6 months, ISPs are doing whatever they can against the protocol. Comcast in the U.S is known to send “reset” packets to its subscribers, while Bell Canada and Rogers are throttling p2p traffic. Factor also into the equation the whole net neutrality debate and we’ve got challenging times ahead for any p2p application.

I wish though good luck to the team at Tungle; they certainly have one of the best tools in the category, and ultimately the atention to detail & work done with the user interface will certainly pay off in the long run.

150 people attended Mobile Monday Montreal (MoMoMo) on April 14. A friendly and welcoming ambiance prevailed throughout the 3-hour event which paved the way for lots of networking opportunities for the attendees.There were four speakers and each one had to address one topic.

• How can Traditional media like radio create value with SMS ?

• Sylvain Langlois from Astral Media talked about the excitement the radio broadcaster feels when he sees the scrolling SMS messages on the screen.At the same time, it saves him/her time answering the phone and chatting with the listeners. He also talked about the obvious value for publicity people.In addition, he mentioned the Boutique Mobile where listeners can purchase content. 

Here, I would like to open parentheses to talk about a similar business model in Europe: O3 is the largest radio station in Austria. They have implemented a mobile service solution called Radio Hitservice. The solution is comprised of several steps: 1)customers would send an SMS (price 0.30 EURO) in order to receive information about the artist and song title currently playing.2) After receiving this info, customers could easily access any associated product like ringtones, wallpapers, CDs…3) Based on the information gathered a customer profile is built in the CRM database. 4) Customers can then take advantage of this profile and use more services like the hit reminder - it allows listeners to sign up (via WAP,web or SMS) to receive an alert when a song is played next.This solution has become very popular :1) 150,000 customers + 250,000 requests/month. 2) 80,000 mobile club members- in the CRM database. Consequently, the number of listeners grew and advertising revenues increased.       

• How can Radio Canada position itself within the mobile community with its demographic?
• Stephane Bousquet of Radio-Canada mentioned that the listeners are still mostly interested in getting the news data. He added that there could be better alternative to SMS, like MMS and the mobile portal.In addition, they plan to target the enterprise users like the Blackberries and the other smartphones like the iphone.     
• Why did RDS acquire the mobile rights to publish video clips of the Canadian Hockey Club ?

• Robert Turcotte of RDS remarked that the users still do not know how to access all their handsets features. He added that there is some work to be done from the vendors side in order to raise the awareness of the subscribers to their hansets features. He also said that the audience for the last Hockey match reached a peak of 1.2 million.

• How can advertising agencies demonstrate to clients the importance of mobile media?

• Luc Cornier of Cossette Communications said that they have created focus groups of heavy mobile users so that they could understand the mobile ecosystem and be able to identify the rising opportunities.In addition, he said that evangelists should be chosen from within this industry in order to guide the users.

I want to note that the questions of the audience revealed frustrations when it came to the high costs that the mobile end users incur.

Finally, I sensed lots of positive energy and enthusiasm within the crowd in this first Mobile Monday Montreal that will eventually be held on a monthly basis.With this bonding of energies it seems that lots of major hurdles can be overcome in order to make Montreal a shining example in the mobile industry .

If you are an entrepreneur, I am sure you have seen it: Daniel from montrealstartup is wondering about having a startup school in the city, which would cover the basics of a startup:

What I think the local scene needs is its own Startup School, running once or twice a year, to cover the basics. Yes, there is a ton of material in any library or online, but as the old saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know!” With experienced entrepreneurs and investors drawing up the curriculum, aspiring founders will at least know what bases they need to cover.

This is a fantastic idea, that would really grow the local tech scene, and we’d have a steady stream of new entrepreneurs & ideas. I am not sure how MSU is far away in this idea, or if they are just testing the idea. I have been thinking about the idea with a couple of friends, and while it would be undoubtly a successful idea, the resources & time needed for this kind of project is not for the faint of the heart.