I went to StartupCampMontreal2 last week. Like the first startupcamp, it’s an initiative from business consulting company embrase.
The event gathers entrepreneurs, investors and pretty much everyone in the technology entrepreneurship community in one night of presentations. This time, 5 startups were voted by “startup gurus”; other entrepreneurs who registered in the wiki could also present their idea and product at the end of the event.
I met Mehdi Akiki who is now working full-time on yourteledoctor, also looking for a partner for the telemedecine project; Dan Simard and François Lamontagne came from Trois-Rivières to present timmyontime; Alok Mohindra and his pal Gerry from Ottawa presented a new innovative light; also the usual suspects such as Fred Brunel and Martin Dufort talking about mobile applicaitons.
camwii‘s CEO introduces their screensharing application, said to be more intuitive and lighter than any other solution in the market. They have proprietary technology and patents behind camwii but also spent time making it easy. The audience asked specific questions about where he plans to take the product, but Marc Krepec said they were currently exploring 2 different audiences for the product, which was either consumers or vertical markets.
240 startup gurus, entrepreneurs, students and service providers registered for the event. The red seats in front (with red nametags) were for the startup gurus, and for the presenters.
LoyaltyMatch is a new company from Ottawa. They’ve got an experienced executive team and are tackling the problem of un-redeemed loyalty points from loyalty programs (such as Air Miles). People can trade their points or get the goods on their website; they have in fact re-created a marketplace.
I don’t use at all loyalty programs; and so can’t give any judgement about the product.
One attendee raised the question about what would happen if companies tried to lock down their customer on their program and keep them from exchanging points. Mike Ball answered that loyalty points were a liability on the companies’ books and that it should be logical that they’d open up their loyalty program. This is where I lost him; in my understanding, companies setup loyalty programs because they want their customers to keep buying their products/services and divert them from competitors; and as such, they have no incentive (at least in my opinion) to let those customers trade points and end prematurely their participation to their program because they’ve found the remaining of the points elsewhere.
Yan Simard presents healthivate, a place to compare & purchase health services. At least, that’s how he registered his project; but his presentation was geared towards surgery services (for non-critical cases). A few attendees said that it’s misleading, and he should focus on the core, not on the “It will revolutionnize healthcare” part.
He is still in the picthing phase; while there is certainly a business case, I know this will take Yan Simard a lot of time and resources to get an initial offering (as opposed to pure web plays which can take next to nothing to launch)
StartYourTube was presented by Jean-Philippe Gousse, CEO of the new video sharing website. I’ve already wrote about the product, as the name suggests, it allows anyone to create a community centered around videos uploaded by members of the site.
Jean-Philippe Gousse said in his presentation that they have around 15.000 “tubes” created, which is impressive. They also hope to get 10 times that number in one year.
Another interesting comment he also made was that the majority of those tubes came from Techcrunch and Techcrunch France traffic, which reviewed the website. I am now curious on how they plan to get traction for their product, as you can’t possibly get on techcrunch everyday.
Pictured here is Will Pate, now community manager for VenCorps. Vencorps aims to crowdsource funding of startups, with the “community” voting for submitted projects. It will be avalaible for the US & Canada, with funds coming from Spencer Trask, a NYC private equity firm.
The logic behind VenCorps is that it takes less and less funds to build a company; it also surfs on crowdsourcing trends.
There is an immediate magic appeal when thinking about “crowdsource funding”; although one should be aware that this comes after Cambrian House is being terminated. I am especially skeptical about letting people selecting a project while they don’t have any financial incentive, they won’t share risks, nor will they have an entrepreneurship-driven mind in order to make “enlightened” decisions. Nevertheless, this is an innovative project, and as such, I am quite impatient to see how it works out.
Shortly after Will Pate’s presentation, Pierre Donaldson from JLA Ventures presented pitch tips for entrepreneurs. He especially made a point about teams hiring VPs and key members all around Canada & the US; saying that projects must be local; either you do everything in the same place; either you all move to a city.
Ater the event, the team from Embrase invited people to come eat at a fast food place, right in front of the SAT.
More pictures from the event.
Tungle has released yesterday a new BlackBerry interface for its calendar group scheduling service. The interface allows users to get updates from Tungle, and then interact with the service without their laptop and Microsoft Outlook, which was up to this day the only avalaible interface to Tungle.
Alongside the main dinner, 
