Montreal Tech Watch

CultureCafe has launched in public beta late last week as a new social hub for cultural communities.

Ariadne Decker, of German origin, is the entrepreneur behind the new website. She now lives in Montreal and organises a german meetup group in Montreal. This, along with her experience in the media business, made her envision a website that would gather different cultural communities around events, businesses and organisations geared towards them. As mentionned earlier, it’s also a social media website, which means all the content are submitted and contributed by users. CultureCafe also has a strong social networking aspect to it, allowing you to view most active users, plus your friends’ activities and announcements.

While CultureCafe can manage different ethnical communities and cities (Colombia is coming for instance), it currently has a heavy focus on the german community in Montreal; and lists german concerts and music shows, different local groups, local places and businesses where you can find german food etc. It’s interesting to notice that while the website was designed for established communities, it’s also very useful for newly arrived germans in Montreal who would want a list of avalaible resources.

To my knowledge, a destination like CultureCafe doesn’t exist yet, although one could always join ad-hoc groups created in Facebook. But I certainly see a use for a specialized website like CultureCafe, one that was designed from the start to help, gather, and foster cultural communities. There is a catch though: to compete against Facebook and other dominant social networking websites, they’d need to deliver best-of-the breed features and product, do it as quickly as possible, while investing themselves on the community gardening.

Note: Roberto Rocha also has a write-up of CultureCafe