Montreal Tech Watch

This weekend, I stumbled into a review of ma-bimbo from Le Soleil, which apparently is one of the hottest websites in Québec right now.

The website is actually from a french company, with a french and an english version, but due to its popularity, I thought it would be interesting to mention it here.

So Miss Bimbo caters to *girls* teenagers, and is an online game where you “grow” a virtual character, with the objective of being the most popular and richest. The characters can get on diets, go to tanning salons, get breast implants, find a wealthy and handsome man to marry, do some esthetic surgery, become a social starlet, etc. In the article, the website’s founder compares it to a modern day version of the Barbie doll, and says it’s really an innocent virtual game.

Whether it’s “ethical” or not is a judgement I’ll leave to you; what’s interesting is that they’ve tapped into a niche that works very well in Québec (and in Europe as well). In just the past month, the website had a total of 893.000 visits from Québec (in a province with 7 million population !!!), with 130.000 visits from Outremont and 112.000 from Ste-Foy. And this is mostly word-of-mouth, as I haven’t noticed any advertisements in any media about the website.

I’ve spoken in the past with other entrepreneurs if a website catering to a local audience was viable, and most of their replies was that it had to be “generalist” — looks like this isn’t true anymore, if you’ve got enough imagination.