Greetings from very chilly San Francisco where the 2nd edition of the SF Web 2.0 Expo, organized by O’Reilly and Techweb, is going strong. Yesterday was the kick-off to the geeky celebration of all things surrounding social computing, with a full-day of seminars and demos for those willing to shell out a few extra bucks. Attendees could choose from a whopping 14 3-hour workshops during the day. The most promising of the morning track was a presentation by Vanessa Fox (the lady who organized and promoted Google Webmaster Central) and Nathan Buggia (Program Manager for Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center) on “SEO-friendly web application design”: tons of tips and techniques to help search engines crawl, understand and index web applications and applets, as well as a list of dangerous pitfalls to avoid. There are pages and pages of great ideas taken out of this workshop, and you can get it all for free off of the private website janeandrobot.com (an already very valuable resource to be further enriched in the near future based on workshop participant questions).

The afternoon seminar was a promising one on making innovation happen on time. The fact that it was presented by an ex-Microsoftie is somewhat ironic (as it would be if the topic had covered bug-free code or open-source), but Scott Berkun has clearly learned from the depths of the trenches and came up with a toolbox of ideas and concepts useful for firing up innovative thought processes in teams larger than an entrepreneur and a few dedicated buddies (if you lead Facebook or a corporate MIS dev team, this one was for you; for startups the material beyond idea generation was academic). The “on time” part was a trifle thin on details (it was delivered in the last 20 minutes) and basically summed up to three ideas: account for weekends and natural downtimes when planning schedules, cut features before you get late on delivery instead of after, and build in a scheduling/design/experimentation dry-run stage before the start of any project to see how your expectations about tasks and times gel together.

The evening entertainment was an eye-opener. Held in Jamie Zawinski’s technodive-ish DNA Lounge, Ignite SF was a fast-paced Demo-like presentation platform where selected speakers could come and entertain the audience for 5 minutes on a topic of their choice; they were awarded 20 slides of presentation and usually not enough time to cover them all. Topics ranged from startups’ relationships to user commentary (metblogs.com), one lady’s particular love for giant Cloverdale-like monsters, Salim Ismail’s experiment with explaining startup growth through Pirsig-like metaphysics, Christian Crumlish’s hilarious take on social anti-patterns (the bit on how to send automated friend-plea rejection notices from social networks was priceless), an exploration of the open SMS-accessible digital signage around DNA lounge, and a few oddball speeches on successful interviews, the leveraging of your user base, and search engine optimization. The event was a bit like StartUpCamp but with more presenters and no experts, a lot less presentation time than at BarCamp, and a whole lot of hecklers droned out by the chatty crowd whose discussions were lighted up by the variety of topics at hand. This is great way to get to know local techies and entrepreneurs through a wide variety of quirky angles. It is also very fun — we should have this back home.

Here is a video of Austin Hill explaining his vision and motivation behind akoha.org, a startup to launch later this year.

The akoha website already gives a glimpse of what they are trying to achieve, but I found this video much more meaningful and more powerful than all the logos and colors. A beautiful project for sure, that I found echoed in one of Paul Graham’s recent essay; the question left unanswered now is if they can change people’s behaviour.

A Tara Hunt interview.

Note: this was published a few weeks ago, but I missed it as it was published when I declared a black-outhiatus for everything related to MTW.

Lavablast, which was featured recently on MontrealTechWatch, has won last week the local round of the Québec Entrepreneurship contest, a yearly competition organized by the Chamber of Commerce and other organizations like school boards.

Lavablast won in the Technology & Innovation category, with a cash prize and a one-year membership to the Chamber of Commerce.

It’s great to see a truly innovative company and its founders recognized by the whole business community, although it occured to me that they have already closed their first year of operations and were able to present a business model which was already field-tested, unlike other competitors who were still in the business plan phase. Nevertheless, I hope Lavablast gets more exposure from what they’ve done, especially in regards to students in high school and in universities, showing the new generation in Québec that it’s possible to start a successful software company.

Congratulations to Etienne Tremblay & Jason Kealey!

LavaBlast, which was started one year ago, markets a series of tools for franchise owners, letting them to centralize operations with franchisees, taking care of sales, accounting and stock management.

The “microISV”, as the founders like to call it, follows Joel Spolsky’s philosophy, which is 1 - build a profitable company from day 1, and 2 - eat your own dog food. They also chose from the company’s beginnings not to seek any VC or angel funding.

Jason Kealey and Etienne Tremblay, the two founders who come from the software engineering program from University of Ottawa, knew that they just had to start a company dedicated on making great software. One year after the launch, it seems their business is doing great, and they are now giving back advice to anyone wanting to start a software company (part 1 - part 2 - part 3)

If you have some time today, read those posts. Some interesting excerpts:

…[the long tail] if you build and promote something worth buying, they will buy it.

The most important part of the company is not the idea but the people. A small and closely knit team of people who’ve worked together in the past is a recipe for success, regardless of the idea.

If you’re not happy in your own company, doing what you want to do, you have a problem.

because we’re self-funded, I feel we have a competitive advantage over our VC-funded competition. Our competitors want to skip the flat part of the growth phase and jump directly into the areas of highest ROI. Generally, this means developing one-size fits all software with (if you’re lucky) tons of configuration option

technology doesn’t solve conflicts

Business Plan: Before launching our company, we worked on a short business case and participated in a Technology Venture Challenge. We didn’t win, but it was a very beneficial experience because sitting down and thinking about what the hell you’re trying to accomplish is a very rewarding process.

They also explain in detail what tools they use internally to get the job done (Skype, SupportBlast, Microsoft Groove, Twiki, Lotus Unyte, MS Sharedview). They also advise Station C for any future web entrepreneur :-)

I like to see once in a while a web company that does things differently. They didn’t take any outside funding, they didn’t spend any time on financial projections or market studies, they didn’t chose the fashionable technology of the day (LavaBlast use .NET instead of your typical Ruby on Rails or Python framework), they didn’t spend time coming to our hyped camps, breakfasts and conferences, and actually shipped a product (and got solid revenues) within a year…

Maybe there is a lesson to be taken here.

Rick Segal, partner at JLA Ventures, a fund investing in emerging tech companies, is touring Canadian cities in a series of “VC Roundtables” to meet entrepreneurs and local startup community. The goal is to present and explain what really is a technology investor; and also present documents and information about the investment process.

The planned date for Montréal is Aril 16th, from 4.30 to 6.40pm.

This was the proposed format for the Roundtable:

The format will be something like this - and I’m open to suggestions:

• Evening, about 3 hours in length
• Informal/Free (super important!)
• Small Groups (super important!)
• Information on VC/Angels and the process.
• Sample Term sheets, documents, business plans, PowerPoints
• Example Pitch or Pitches to show what’s interesting/good/bad
• Open questions for a good chunk of time.

What it will not be:

• Demo/Startup/FooBar/Camp/Conference/MESH/MASH
• Me trashing your ideas
• You trashing somebody else’s ideas
• Three hours of me showing you PowerPoint slides

The hope is that at the end of the get together you will have:

• An understanding of my world
• A good set of reference documents/examples/materials
• Some of your top of mind questions answered
• A better feel for my industry and if raising third party capital is right for you.
• A good place to start

Here are some reasons why you might want to attend:
- it’s free and informal
- Rick Segal is one of the rare VCs who participate actively in the startup scene in Canada, he is an active blogger, sponsors and goes regularly to demoCamps, and is committed to support Canadia-based startups,
- you are planning to launch a startup, and looking to raise third-party capital,
- you might be an engineer/a tech guy, and clueless about term sheets and due diligence processes,
- you want to know how to approach angels and VCs and what kind of relationship to have with them,
- you want to know the business criterias (and other) that investors are looking for when investing

Registration is here. It is limited to 25 seats for each session.

There are also sessions in Ottawa on April 16th, and in Toronto the following day, if you can’t make it.

Yesterday, Branchez-vous reported that it acquired 2 niche successful websites in Québec, fanatique.ca and humourquebec.com.

I didn’t write about it, as I knew Branchez-Vous’s overall strategy is to become the #1 media destination in Québec, and their tactic is to acquire regularly new web destinations, on a bi-monthly basis, and launch new advertising partnerships. One of the websites’s price tag was $65.000, and well, for me… that was it, it closed the story.

And I moved on. It’s hard to report such a story when you hear about Bebo’s acquisition price or Meebo’s valuation.

I just read however a post that brings a new perspective about this. Jean-François Dubé thanks Émile Girard, who was behind both websites.

J’aimerais le féliciter pour cette belle réussite mais j’aimerais surtout le remercier. Pourquoi? Parce que sans même me connaitre, Émile m’a donné un solide coup de pied dans le derrière en me faisant réaliser qu’il est possible pour un jeune entrepreneur du Québec de réussir dans ce domaine de fou.

Tout comme Émile, j’aurai bientôt 24 ans et j’ai la tête (et le laptop) pleine de projets. Sans le vouloir, il vient d’envoyer un gros “FUCK YOU” à tout ceux qui n’ont pas cru en moi jusqu’à maintenant et qui m’ont dit que je devrais entrer dans une grosse boîte avant de tenter de voler de mes propres ailes.

And there I understood that this is really a meaningful symbol for new entrepreneurs. Émile Girard started both websites in his early twenties, was a solo-entrepreneur, gathered an audience, and through passion, hard, relenteless work, he made a substantial amount of money from it. The fact that we are not talking about digg or reddit.com might be even more meaningful for new entrepreneurs: it’s easier for a Montreal/Quebec/Canadian-based entrepreneur to see him/herself in Émile Girard’s shoes than say, in Kevin Rose’s, of Digg.com fame.

And I agree with Jean-François Dubé. Stories like Émile Girard’s needs to be heard more often. Yes, it’s possible to start something in Québec. Be it a “small”, dedicated website like fanatique.ca, or something big, like standoutjobs.

And I am now starting now a new section on Montreal Tech Watch, called it Technology Entrepreneurs Stars, and it will be dedicated to local entrepreneurs who succeeded, be it from a successful IPO or an acquisition. If you know anyone who fits there, feel free to comment and email at news@montrealtechwatch.com

The InterLogiq Network is holding a conference and networking event entitled Capital Innovation 2008 this afternoon and evening at the St-James Club, a “prestigious” club for “business leaders”.

The event starts at 2pm with 3 keynotes, by Dan Mothershill, president of the National Angel Organization, Austin Hill, Mario Limoges, who will talk about investment opportunities in technology.

6 projects/startups will also get to present to the audience, and a cocktail presented as a networking opportunity will close the event.

The MandelBrot project was 2nd when counting votes from attendees.

Can you present yourself? What is your background?

Ismail Negm: Ismail is a licensed options broker with nearly 5 years of experience in the industry, and is an experienced trading systems developer with a keen interest in risk management strategies. He is also completing the following designations: Derivatives Markets Specialist, Chartered Financial Analyst, Professional Risk Manager and Chartered Market Technician.

Julian Squires: Julian has been working professionally as a programmer for over a decade, and has been involved in the open source community for even longer. His professional interests include pure mathematics and optimizing compiler design.

Can you describe what is the MandelBrot project? How did you get the idea? What problem does it aim to solve?

The idea for the Mandelbrot project (working title) came through our dissatisfaction with standard methods of testing trading strategies, and specifically with the optimization phase of testing. It is standard to test a strategy using historical data for the security that is intended to be traded and to proceed with a walk-forward analysis using the optimized results, again on historical data. Using this standard method yields highly curve-fitted results which are not representative of the future performance of the system in live trading. Ideally, a trader would have access to an infinite amount of representative data on which the strategy can be tested, and that is what our project aims to produce.

What were your objectives regarding Blitzweekend? What did you expect from the event?

Our expectations were very slim: a suitable environment in which to work. Our objective was to build a framework for realistic synthetic data generation. To test our data, we also had to develop a simulation environment that could test various trading strategies on both historical data and our generated synthetic data. We achieved these objective using technologies that yielded performance and development time wins.

Can you talk us about your experience of Blitzweekend? any challenges? How did you overcome problems?

The Blitzweekend experience was wonderful in many respects. We achieved our goal in less time than was allotted to us. We also found that we had access to useful experts and that we were well fed and taken care of. The main challenge was breaking away from all the interesting people we met over the weekend to actually get more work done. We were not successful in overcoming that “problem”.

What is now your plans for MandelBrot?

We are continuing to develop an efficient, scalable commercial product that runs on a fractal-based data generation model.

Tripod Ventures is a new private company, with the management team made of 3 experienced entrepreneurs and executives coming from the photo industry, and they also have Vahe Kassardjian as the CTO of the new venture. Vahe K. was the founder of Integration New Media, a company specialized in multimedia products (think Macromedia Director-like products).

Tripod Ventures is neither a startup or a VC fund, as the name might suggest. It has an original business model: the partners pools money into the venture, and they then partner with experts and external consultants to build and develop products they think will be successful on the market.

One of their first announced product is for instance “Fusion”, which is presented as web platform that would allow consumers to simply upload, process, “beautify” pictures and finally order transformed products. Fusion is meant to be sold to photo retailers, as a solution for digital printing, and a unified platform that would take in charge marketing/distribution/sales.

Tripod Ventures’ partner for Fusion is Future Image, a San Mateo CA, firm specialized in consumer digital photography.

The photo industry is currently reinventing itself, giants like Fuji or Kodak are closing film production and transformation centers by dozens, and I have to say I have no idea whether this new product would be successful. I hope they’ll bring something quickly to the market and see if this fits into the digital market.

Can you present yourself? What is your background?

Alwin Tong (nick: alwinian) UI & Multimedia Design
Alwin is a freelance designer and a classically trained musician. His passions include art, music, design, and financial futures trading, in addition to web development. He has been exposed to technology since youth, growing up with a family-owned computer business. Over the past 10 years his career has enabled him to work in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Toronto and now Montreal where he plans to make his home and contribute his creative skills.

Gerry Briggs (nick: gbriggs12) Hardware Hacker & Quant
Gerry is an electrical engineer, mathematician and long-time electronics enthusiast. His first notable hack was a 10 watt FM broadcast station he designed and built at the age of 15 and subsequently used to operate an unlicensed radio-station for nearly a year until receiving a surprise visit from the CRTC. This inevitably led to a career with the federal government where Gerry has used his analytical expertise in spectrum regulation and geo-mapping and recognition for his work on Canada’s rural broadband strategy. Gerry has several hardware inventions at full prototype or in market test, developed using his expertise in integrated circuits, assembly and C.

Alok Mohindra (nick:alok) Entrepreneur & Innovator
Alok is an engineer and entrepreneur. Over the past decade he has held technical and management roles in industries ranging from aerospace and industrial automation to enterprise software and web-based technologies. Alok is a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of New Brunswick and holds an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business. He moved to Montreal in July 2006 and has been active in the local technology and cultural communities since. Alok lives to develop and commercialize solutions that employ emerging technologies for the betterment of mankind.

Joshua Layton (nick: josh) Tech Ops Ninja
Like SneakSend(TM) Josh is rather sneaky and chooses to use his skills in stealth mode.

Can you describe what is SneakSend? How did you get the idea? What problem does it aim to solve? a paragraph

SneakSend(TM) is a communication solution that offers users a truly private and secure channel for online correspondence pioneering a new take on a well known encryption technique called Steganography where encoded data is hidden inside of images. What makes SneakSend(TM) unique is the combination of both encryption and obfuscation solutions designed for the way people communicate online.

While multiple competing encryption solutions currently exist on the market, none offer the level of discretion and anonymity of SneakSend(TM). Our proprietary Crypto-Secure(TM) algorithm offers strong encryption combined with a high level of obfuscation along with reasonable cryptographic overhead. Crypto-Secure(TM) encodes text or binary files using standard digital images (png, bmp, jpg?) as public/private key pairs. The sender and recipient can transmit data securely over public channels by transmitting innocuous-looking images via email, instant messaging, photo-sharing, or social-networking websites. Detection is highly unlikely and decryption impossible without possession of the private key image. Public key images appear otherwise ‘normal’ with only minor distortion barely noticeable to the naked eye.

What were your objectives regarding Blitzweekend? What did you expect from the event?

Our original goal was to make something useful while we learned a new programming language (python) and to have some fun in the process. We succeeded.

Can you talk us about your experience of Blitzweekend? any challenges? How did you overcome problems?

We initially planned to develop web application to demonstrate SneakSend(TM) but that plan proved a bit ambitious in the time available. We decided instead to limit our scope and develop a working prototype of the Crypto-Secure(TM) algorithm.

What is now your objective for the project? Any plans to continue the work?

We are excited about the market potential for our technology. We are currently discussing a variety of compelling use cases and supporting business models while we continue to refine the technology. We are currently working on adding support for JPEG image keys and hope to have a web-based demo to announce soon. We’re also actively looking for a final co-founder with skills in Objective-C and an interest in iPhone application development. If that sounds like you please drop us a line.