Montreal Tech Watch

iNovia Capital announced this morning that they’ve participated in a Series A investment in web startup tynt. Other investors include AVAC, a government-sponsored not-for-profit startup fund, based in Alberta.

Tynt provides a small javascript snippet for website publishers, which then allows the publisher to track dissemination of published content. Tynt provides for instance analytics, to measure user engagement; they do also auto-include a linkback to the original webpage url when you copy/paste from the website (I guess they “hijack” the copy action and adds at the end the linkback, when you paste the text excerpt in an email, a new blog post, or on another web platform).

Tynt is interesting in a user-generated-content filled Internet, where users freely blog, tweet, email, facebook content they find in the internet; and where original content producers have no means to know where their content are being taken to. It’s also very interesting for marketers who would want to track the impact of a new marketing campaign, PR professionals to measure brand engagement, or more traditional usages such as copyright infringements.

The service seems to be free, and I guess they are planning custom services for big content publishers, especially significant web2.0 producers or media groups.