Montreal Tech Watch

AngesQuébec announced this week that a $1.3m angel funding for digital publishing company Virtual Paper. Investors include Luc Vincent, CSN, FIER (Fonds d’Intervention Économique Régional), Fonds Soutien Relève, Écho Québec.

Virtual Paper enables magazines and newspapers to reach digital markets, with a HTML5 web edition for the basic version, as well as tablets and smartphone editions for the advanced service. Publishers can add basic multimedia features to the magazines, smart tools such as text search, online stats, DRM (calendaring control), and also offline access.

Like the recently reviewed Appifier, the tool is interesting for publishers since it allows them to grow easily their reach, without necessarily producing extra content or spending a large budget to build their own web app or iPad app. Unlike Appifier though, the content doesn’t look native, and reminds more the reader of a huge PDF than a great reading tool like readability. For newspaper who haven’t been able to fully transition to the web, the solution is good enough though.

Virtual Paper says 3,000 publications use the service every month, and with the new funding, they’ll have more resources for sales, and also build partnerships throughout the world.