Montreal Tech Watch

In a recent post, the popular movement MontrealOuvert announced that the group has fulfilled their objectives, with the public launch of the open data portal by the City of Montréal. They have succeeded in promoting the cause to the public opinion, the press, and also key members of the administration. In terms of results, we’ve seen many applications using the open data, and also various organizations such as OpenNorth dedicated professionally to open data.

Yet, it’s just the beginning. Beyond applications, various projects are looking for long-term viability, such as financing, with a few choosing the open source code + consulting model, or others putting their applications on sale for smartphones. Of course, the movement has also been focused only in Montréal, with much more data held by the provincial government.

That’s where QuébecOuvert comes in, a new initiative officially announced today, with the goal of getting the provincial government be more transparent and release their data to citizens. It’s ambitious, and there will be friction in the process, but it has already been done on the federal level, as well as in many other countries, so there’s no reason the movement wouldn’t succeed.

In the inaugural statement, mentioned benefits are decreased corruption, economic benefits, and better governance. The group gathers MontrealOuvert, as well as the Gatineau and Québec groups, and plan to gather all interested citizens and groups in March 2012. Meanwhile, they invite everyone to follow the site, or on twitter and linkedin

Early this week, iNovia Capital announced that experienced tech executive David Nault has joined the iNovia team, complementing the already excellent mix of talents in the firm. We all remember the Fund III announcement, and Chris Emergui has also been announced as a new partner, paving the way for a great year at iNovia Capital.

For tech entrepreneurs, Chris Arsenault’s blog post on how they crafted the position and how David Nault joined the team is a must-read. It shows how the firm works and the focus they put on talent. It’s not always about numbers!

For me, it was also essential to know more about David, on a new position that not many VC firms in Canada have. What does exactly an Entrepreneur-In-Residence do? Read the following to know more.

Can you present yourself, in terms of experience, successes or failures that you would like to share?

I am an entrepreneur with a love for venture building and working with great companies. I graduated from John Molson School of Business in commerce then went to the school of hard knocks. I learnt early on the meaning of lean start-up while at VIPswitch when he had to first get large customer validation before raising capital. We raised $15 million but when the market changed we didn’t pivot quick enough. A mistake I would not make again. I then joined Pivotal Payments, an emerging payment processor and learnt all about creating traction when the company grew from a few to over 60,000 customers, 400 employees and more than $8 billion in transaction volume. After that I was named president of Callio Technologies whose intellectual property was acquired by Bell Canada soon after.

What will your role be as Entrepreneur-In-Residence? What will be your relationship with partners and the iNovia staff?

The full title is Entrepreneur-In-Residence and Quebec Investment Director. My focus is to work closely with the Quebec tech community, seek bright entrepreneurs with big ideas to back and finally help existing portfolio companies succeed any way I can.

Are there any special market(s) you are going to focus on?

Leveraging knowledge, relationships and providing direct value to portfolio companies is a key success factor for a VC fund. So we tend to invest in companies we understand and can help. The partners have deep experience in e-commerce mobile apps/ games, digital media and personally I am more familiar with e-commerce, software and the electronic payments space. What is important is that as a team we understand the company’s business and can help grow it. One of my favorite quotes: “markets come and go, good businesses don’t”.

Now for a bit of a more open question, any good advice you share with Montreal Tech entrepreneurs?

Validate the business by speaking to potential customers.
Convince the smartest people you can to work with and help connect you.
Speak to smart investors that can bring value add.
Get ready to work your tail off and deliver, deliver, deliver ! Rewards will follow.

Follow David Nault on Twitter : @VentureBuilder

C2-MTL, an international business and creative conference is due this spring. It’s curated by Sid Lee and brought together with the collaboration with a plethora of partners, including Cirque du Soleil, with an impressive line-up of speakers. It also has the promise of connecting executives of fortune 500 companies, and talks on how to enable innovation and creativity for your business.

For entrepreneurs, it’s a hard sell though, since the ticket costs $2700 in early bird pricing. It’s a prohibitive cost for most startup companies, and that’s why the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation, one of the event partners, is sponsoring 25 emerging entrepreneurs to get a free entry in the event.

We’ve had an opportunity to work with the foundation for Startup Weekend Montréal, and it’s good to have an organization reach out directly to entrepreneurs. Nancy Rosenfeld was at the final presentations, and gave entrance tickets to humm.it, highlighting their creativity and entrepreneurship.

Fill this form to get a chance to win one of the tickets. It’s your chance to connect with CEOs, media executives, key influencers to get your startup to get to the next level.

Montreal NewTech demos has been going on for 3 years, and as such, the vast majority of local startups have used the opportunity to officially launch their startups at that event. It draws a large crowd, and at the same, all presentations are recorded on video.

Here’s the video of TagMyDoc, a QR Code tagger for digital documents, which added recently versioning, premium accounts, and more.

If you want to see the presentations of recent startups, such as ziliko, wikimeta, rummies, echoer, remtl.ca, and more, do check out Montreal NewTech main site.

MTL DGTL, a festival which inaugurated its first edition last year, has announced a new 2012 edition. It’s planned from 12th to 15th November, and is based on the same principles: gather in the same banner several independent events, in order to offer a bigger and more attractive platform to Montréalers as well as to an international audience.

The most important event in the line-up is the MIGS or Montréal International Game Summit, which has been running for years in the city, and has gathered big players like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts, with as well creatives and professionals from all over the world. New edgy events such as Web-In for the web digerati, Mobiz to accomodate those working on mobile applications, or the “Atelier Innovation Cinq” complete the line-up, to wholly represent the digital industry in Montréal.

For those who follow events, there’s an interesting parallel with the International Startup Festival, who is also vying for an international audience, bets on first-class keynote speakers, with the objective of gathering everyone from the industry, create connections, and generate publicity for the businesses going to the event. The International Startup Festival goes even further in the festival concept since it’s planned during the summer, in the same way the Jazz festival or other well-known festivities are planned in Montréal to attract an international audience. It’s in 2 related but different industries though: MTL-DGTL caters web agencies, video games companies, media, and small & medium businesses, while Startup Fest is explicitly aimed at startups.

It would be interesting to have a startup-related event in MTL-DGTL. I’ve seen the Web-In crowd in the Notman House, and a few dedicated “startup tracks” in Mobiz or Web-In would bring in good people.

A new Modasuite venture, Frank & Oak has just launched this week a new service to deliver affordable and high-quality clothes to its customers.

What’s interesting from other known made to measure sites like Modasuite or Indochino is the approach: it’s presented like a SaaS service, a commodity where guests select the “level of service” they would like, and then customers don’t have to worry anymore what best fits them, nor spend time shopping, or loose valuable time finding the most appropriate item. It’s convenient and customers will get directly at home new items every month. For pricing, they only get to pay what they keep.

There’s a consistent attention to detail to the venture, beginning from the design of the site, to interactions, and even for the items: they are designed and manufactured by the Montreal workshop, a bold choice in the fashion industry. Everything else is meant to convey a sense of exclusivity and a “select club” approach, aimed at the young-male-urban-professional-with-disposable-income, an audience that likes “special” clothing items, but doesn’t have the time either to hunt for clothes.

You can see above a selection of the items featured in the first edition, between blazers, gingham shirts, a couple of vintage cuffs, crew necks, overall a style I’d bet “safe” and “comfortable”, but probably a little bland to the creatives and trend-setters that Frank & Oak wants to aim. I’m also not sure about giving right away my credit card details after 5 questions on my styling preferences, a design choice that will drive down conversion rates in the abysses.

Neverthless, like manpacks in its time, Frank & Oak delivers a well-crafted service that many young lawyers and entrepreneurs will find very tempting. We’ll be following the service and see where it goes.

Check out Frank & Oak

With Google Montreal, MTLStartupTalent announced yesterday evening a challenge open to anyone interested in solving a Montreal-specific problem. Interested participants are invited to register on the contest site (deadline: monday). The winning team will get a $2500 cash prize plus also an invitation to the google Montréal new offices, and have a special meeting with Google engineers and staff. There’s also a $500 cash prize for the runner-up, plus also an invitation to tour the Google offices.

Closing on March 10th, the challenge runs for around 3 weeks, and should be very interesting to any student, professionals, entrepreneurs, or freelancers interested in putting their talent to good use, see what they can really do in 3 weeks, and hope to be first, of course to win the prize, but also because of the generated publicity.

What’s also interesting is that the contest is not a pure “programming” contest: videos, simple pages with minimal interaction, or any other work will be considered … as long as it uses google+ (such as logging in, adding to Google +, leveraging the social network etc.). You could also get together an all-star team of programmers, but if you’ve been to recent hackathons or launched new services, you know that a project becomes much more interesting if you get together people with different backgrounds : hacking, design, product management, communication, etc. Also, as explained on the site, you can’t submit on-going projects, so you must work with a team on a new site or application.

Run in partnership with the good folks at Google Montréal, one of the main reasons to put together this challenge is to support innovation and talents in Montreal, and at the same time, why not fix a problem that you and most Montréalers are faced with? Here are a few ideas taken from the contest site: blind dates or flirting in a foreign language, , working out with people, discovering events, discovering good food spots in Montreal/venues etc.

Register on the site

Big smiles all around

I'm guessing these are mobile developers :)

Startup talent attendees

Wajam

Thiago of Team up showing a live demo of a Physics engine

One of the first Founderfuel teams Oohlala was also at the event

Projected slides facilitated talent to company match making

The color codes on the name tags to easily identify talent type

Pablo of Foulab

Great team of volunteers ensured line ups were small

Big thank you goes out to all the event sponsors

CakeMail

Spacious locale of 'The Maqruis' let participants circulate freely

Startup talent attendees

Greg, one of the event organizers and Steve of Google's Montreal office

Pictures by ildar khakimov

Developed in evenings and weekends by a few student-entrepreneurs for the past year, UniYu rolls out finally in beta today. As the name suggests, UniYu is deeply rooted in university culture, and has already won a large following of students who love the social aspect and the features made specifically for them.

To get a user account, you need an email adress from your school / university, and that will set up the network you belong in. After that, you can check out courses, teachers, and rate the services offered by the universities. That’s where things become useful and fun: you can see which courses are the most useful, the most popular, or with lots of pretty people to hook up with. You can also rate the whole university or different services/departments. That means that upon entering university or a new session, the student already has a good bird’s eye view of what to do and what to check out. No need anymore to go through boring flyers or “betting” on courses based on a short description.

Another useful feature of the service is being able to connect with other students, based on their skills, courses or other criterias. If you’re looking for help to understand a maths course, or just connect with someone who’s good in video, UniYu can also help you connect with other students, something that Facebook doesn’t offer. It’s a great service, that universities don’t offer.

Right now, the service is offered to HEC Montréal students, McGill, Concordia, and UQAM. Since the only requirement is to have an email adress, you could theoretically sign up if you still remember your old passwords, if you are a member of the teaching staff, and begin friending and prying on ol’ regular students. The service is based on trust though, and is really only useful to students who want to share notes and meet other students.

UniYu has been fully bootstrapped for the past year, and hopes to take universities by storm this session and in the summer. There is currently no revenue model implemented, since the cofounders are only interested in generating traction first, and then hope to monetize later based on the service they offer to students.

Check out UniYu if you have a university email!

Over in Ottawa, a new legislation is going to be presented today to the press, and there are consequences for the digital industry in Canada. The new online security bill gives police access to personal details without a warrant, and the government has taken a hard stance on the legislation.

The new bill would require ISPs and cellular phone companies to install equipment for real-time surveillance and create new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data. That means that data centers, telecommunications companies like Bell or Rogers, web hosting providers, and also web startups will need to add new networking equipment to automatically log in email addresses, names, IP adresses and other personal information.

The rhetoric is that the new measure would help fight online child pornography, but in many developed and non-developed countries (with –cough– extremist regimes), the same rhetoric has been used over and over, and once the physical infrastructure has been put into place, police and security forces have always found a way to use the new surveillance tools for other means. It’s even more puzzling when you think that security officials (such as provincial police or RCMP) can already seek that kind of information with a warrant 95% of the time. Why do we need all of a sudden to add new surveillance infrastructure, accessible directly by the police? Does the government have bigger plans to track every citizen on the Internet?

This is a big blow for civil liberties. It’s also very worrying for the whole digital industry in Canada. Many US startups and Internet companies worldwide are choosing to have servers in Canada, supposedly because it’s out of reach of US legislation and it’s better protected. If this bill comes through, there are thousands of web companies who are going to think seriously to move their servers elsewhere, back to the US, or to countries with no Internet surveillance. It might be too late for companies like OVH to move to other locations, but this is definitively the kind of legislation that’s going to drive back companies like Google or Facebook out of Canada. Other consequences include digital innovation being stifled, and more barriers for improvements of existing telecommunications infrastructure.

We’d love to hear what you think should be done about this new proposed legislations. There are dire consequences for web and mobile startups, and there should be serious action done by anyone who think the Internet is important.