Montreal Tech Watch

NewTech #33 was yesterday at McKibbins, and it was awesome. Great selection of startups, plus also good inspiring people. Above, we’ve had Liam Martin who made the trip from Ottawa to present Timedoctor. What’s interesting is that we have now startups who begin to be complentary or in competition. It’s going to be hot in September!

As always, early comers use the opportunity to network and exchange tips, such as legal advice or just talk about business.

Naysawn Naderi is doing an inspiring art venture called ArtSumo. We also had Geneviève, community manager from MatchFWD and Felipe Coimbra (63Squares), who’s behind NewTech events

Getting ready to pitch…

Felipe present other technology events in Montreal, plus also partners and sponsors of the NewTech series, which help make the event a reality, such as SDEVM

Naysawn Naderi is “El Presidente” at ArtSumo. He spent a few years at Microsoft in Seattle, before travelling around the world, and now connecting artists from all around the world to buyers. A bootstrapped venture, ArtSumo now has 3000 members getting the deals every day.

You can see here a glimpse of the NewTech crowd. I’ve talked to most of the people at the event, and everyone loved the event!

Naysawn Naderi talks about ArtSumo’s business models, such as how the site connects buyers with art hunters & artists.

He reveals that about 50% of the paintings are sold, and generally most works are sold just a few hours after they’re posted.

After each sale, paintings are shipped in bulk to the states, where they’re re-dispatched to their individual respective owners. It’s a smart distribution system, since art deliveries can still be a headache for many art lovers. If you try to import a painting individually, you can pay as much as $100, depending on the country! Better then to us ArtSumo.

Gadi Shamia from San Francisco / Israel, presents Bizzy. It’s essentially an iPhone / Android app that allows you to rate very easily local restaurants and bars, with an optional picture and a short review, and also get recommendations from friends about places you’d like. Bizzy also has an accompanying web application to support the mobile application.

You can download Bizzy from the Canadian iTunes music store, as it was launched yesterday at the NewTech demo.

Brendan Sera-Shriar aka @digibomb present PressWork, the hot new HTML5 framework for wordpress, aimed at designers, developers and publishers. It enables drag & drop editing plus you can also change fonts, size, colors, width, in a very WYSIWYG fashion.

The team bets on new browsers such as Chrome or Firefox, and hope their target audience is betting on the future as well.

PressWork is the most innovative add-on for WordPress I’ve seen in years. It makes the job easier for everyone, plus it’s also open source, which means other developers can help extend and support the framework. @digibomb said web agencies have already contacted them to deploy PressWork on dozens of properties.

For the business model, the team will be releasing soon premium templates, at around $60.

Check out the demo video. Rocking new startup from Montreal!

Liam Martin is presenting TimeDoctor, a mac/windows/linux desktop application which can measure the time spent on each task. You can transfer a task to one of your team members, and managers get at the end screenshots of their staff, plus also pie charts and graphs of what each person is doing. TimeDoctor really has an impressive set of features.

Liam reports +20% boost in productivity when companies deploy the software. The task assignment feature is also interesting, since it cuts down on emails and in-efficient communication.

TimeDoctor is actually free to download, and will be priced later when out of beta. For now, the company is looking for companies doing outsourcing, or having distributed teams who need this kind of tool and get their feedback.

Unlike past NewTech demos, many attendees stayed up until late to talk about technology and startups.

One of attendees, Tiago here presents his past work in physics and computer graphics, an original work used by major video games agencies and special effects houses.

A Bizzy meetup was also scheduled, with entrepreneurs like Sylvain Carle coming to talk about local technologies.

See you at the next NewTech event!