Montreal Tech Watch

TrainingMobs and MontrealOuvert both presented their development efforts and results to the Montreal New Tech audience today.

Jonas from TrainingMobs

TrainingMobs is a social network website designed to get its members to train together, for various sports and activities. You sign up, join existing groups or suggest new activities if you want something new, while making friends in the process.

The idea is not new, we even had here in Montréal a startup which tried to build a platform for those looking for team members, for sports such as soccer, hockey etc. In this case, the problem is traction and getting users to check back to the website.

TrainingMobs goes past this obstacle makes it fun by highlighting accessible and simple activities, and seen in its tagline is “flashmobs for training”. It’s not anymore about finding “long-term partners” for a sports you are seriously practising, it’s about having fun, right here, right now, and meet new people. TrainingMobs now have 500 users, a team behind its development, and has won a grant from the Fondation du maire. So it’s a good start. I hope they begin to do more creative marketing, plus also try to get a more lively website. Technically, TrainingMobs’s back-end is Ning, an easy solution to get a social network off the ground, but limited in terms of flexibility once you start expanding.

In the 2nd part of the evening, MontrealOuvert presented Patiner Montréal, a nice Rails app to find ice rings in different Montréal neighborhoods. The data was extracted with ingenuity and now avalaible to all on patinoires.heroku.com

I wrote more about MontrealOuvert here. What I found interesting tonight was the level of interest from the audience, which recognized the opportunity of open data, offered help, and asked more information about what MontrealOuvert was doing

As expected, there were also lots of good people to talk to at the meetup. Definetely a place to hear about new tech projects or get to know those who will be doing something soon…

Thanks to Felipe Coimbra for organizing Mtl New Tech!