Ça venait de @jeanlucs lundi.

Oui encore une fois, un article qui n’a rien à avoir avec la technologie, et qui n’a rien à avoir avec Montréal, mais comme je suis en plein dans le marketing ces jours-ci, on a l’impression de se regarder dans un miroir, surtout la séquence dans la salle de contrôle.

Probablement une vidéo qui va être encore plus vrai dans 6 mois, comme je sais que le buzz et le marketing viral peut maintenant être contrôlé et généré.

Felipe Coimbra released last monday twtBizCard, an add-on service which allows twitter users to exchange business contacts with replies, a virtual handshake if you like.

The story is not so much about twtBizCard. Of course, the idea is interesting, since after all, LinkedIn does 15 million uniques a month. But for me, your twitter profile is already your business card in itself, with its quick bio, website, and also features for sending replies and messages. Meet someone, add to twitter, keep in touch, exchange tweets, and you’ve done already so much more than what a simple business card can do.

So why did I write this entry on MontrealTechWatch? Well if you go through twtapps’s history and if you know Felipe Coimbra, you realize that twtBizCard is actually the 10th Twitter application in 5 months, which makes it about 2 new twitter applications every month. And you know that with that speed of development, twtapps is bound to get the jackpot, at one point of another. twtpolls, twtvite, all of those are already well trafficked, but I’m sure there will be one which will get massive traffic.

In comparison, a heavyweight app like TechEntreprise, or any other web app managed by n-person teams, seem to be developed in slow motion. One could argue that those “traditional” apps have more stickiness, user data history, and rich interfaces, etc. but developing twitter applications undeniably has a big advantage in release cycles and as a result, in overall products risks. Felipe Coimbra might not even be optimizing for stickiness: just view the quick description, and click a button to interact with the app, and voilà, you’re back to twitter. Those quick, short burts of interactions might be the future of web applications.

Interestingly, Felipe also makes I-stats, a real-time web analytics software. I’m assuming Felipe relies on those detailed data to do optimization and maximize metrics such as user interactions through split tests for instance.

While I was writing those articles, it struck me how practical for me (and the reader) they are. It’s an objective list of what’s up in Montréal, and could get people in the lopp, without necessarily reading long reviews or without me spending one hour or more to write an article.

In the age of Twitter, friendfeed, never-ending flood of emails, and activity streams on every new website, where everyone’s attention span is now in minutes instead of hours, I think this is a very good format that should now be on MTW. It’s the sort of thing you’d read in the morning, with tidbits of what’s up about technology or startups in town. See it as me being a curator, and it will be then up to you to follow links and get your own opinion about a particular piece of news.

One added advantage is that much more technologies, events, startups, and entrepreneurs can be highlighted on MTW thanks to this new feature. This is important since I think everyone should have an equal opportunity, regardless if they’re backed from a big VC fund, or if it’s just a programmer who is working alone “in his garage”.

Send a tweet at @mtw if you want to spread a community news, an event, a new job listing, new features for a product or a web service, updates on key people, or major blog posts. I won’t rely 100% on Twitter to get information, since they are many other sources, but Twitter has the replies tab which is handy for later reference, without necessarily the engagement you need in emails.

Of course, long articles and reviews are still going to be part of the blog if there’s a new major startup launch or a new major event coming up.

Open up the firehose then!

Kudos to Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s watchmojo, one of the biggest web video producers in the world, which announced they’ve reached viewership of 33,333,333. Ashkan has obviously a sense for communication and show. I’m sure he’s could work in the PR department of General Motors and still find a way to put a positive spin on things:

It took the company two and a half years to reach the milestone. To put the 33 million figure into perspective:

• Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird and One Hundred Years of Solitude have all sold 30 million copies since being published in 1936, 1960 and 1967 respectively.
• Nintendo has sold 30 million Wii consoles since 2006.
• The Grand Theft Auto video game series have sold 30 million copies since launching in 1997.
• The average Friends or Seinfeld episode and the finales of American Idol garnered around 30 million viewers each.
• Each year at baseball stadiums, 30 million hot dogs are eaten.
• Each week, 30 million people visit Starbucks.
• Canada, Uganda, Morocco and Algeria each have just over 30 million inhabitants.

We were 200 marketers with a passion for internet communications at MIXX Canada yesterday. I came back home with some nice takeaways even if some presentations were more sales pitches than passionate speeches.

(more…)

Michelle Blanc just finished her conference at MIXX Canada. I’m sitting next to Patrice Guy Martin and Adele McAlear. We are using the tag #mixxmtl on Twitter. Jacques Hervé Roubert from Nurun is next on stage. Video: 5 Ways panel is starting now.

- Adrien O’Leary

Bloom Digital has launched officially late this week, with the announced goal to address the current issues in online advertising.

The Bloom Digital team comes straight from Cossette, a leading integrated marketing agency, and as such, their team is composed of communication, advertising and marketing experts, as well as key technologists (Yves Poiré, Vlad Stesin, Bosko Milekic among others) . On their initial blog post, they’ve recognized the failure of current advertising platforms, unapplicable because of media hyperfragmentation and the very nature of social media, blogs and social networks. It’s well known for instance that Google AdWords is the worst for focused blogs or web startups. It’s often irrelevant, un-engaging, and can even bring a negative value; unless you have a mass audience, with millions of pageviews.

Saying that their vision is a new paradigm would be far-fetched, but it’s quite refreshing to see that one of Canada’s biggest communication agency recognized the problems of the market and launched the BloomDigital upstart. I’m especially looking forward to the platform they are building for blogs. Web publishers, startups and web entrepreneurs building online audiences and looking to monetize via ads should also be on the outlook for their platform. Of course, building this platform is a challenge in itself. Traditionally, leading brands frown upon advertising on small “unnaccountable” web destinations, preferring established websites such as newspapers. But if there’s a team in Montreal who can do it, it’s this team, with their expertise in putting together technology/publishers/ad networks and its advertising expertise.

If you are feeling benevolent today or have 5 minutes to kill, Marc-Antoine Lacroix, Msc student from HEC Montréal, is conducting a survey of needs of website owners for his final research project.

I have created a very short online survey that requires less than 5 minutes to complete. The survey is confidential and contains no personal questions.

To take the survey, follow the link below:

http://www.hec-questionnaire.com/index.php?sid=12

Thank you very much for your collaboration!
Marc-Antoine Lacroix

If you have any questions:
lacroix.marcantoine@gmail.com
phone number : 514-393-3955

The survey is bilingual and the HEC system does not make it possible to identify who answered what.

This weekend, I stumbled into a review of ma-bimbo from Le Soleil, which apparently is one of the hottest websites in Québec right now.

The website is actually from a french company, with a french and an english version, but due to its popularity, I thought it would be interesting to mention it here.

So Miss Bimbo caters to *girls* teenagers, and is an online game where you “grow” a virtual character, with the objective of being the most popular and richest. The characters can get on diets, go to tanning salons, get breast implants, find a wealthy and handsome man to marry, do some esthetic surgery, become a social starlet, etc. In the article, the website’s founder compares it to a modern day version of the Barbie doll, and says it’s really an innocent virtual game.

Whether it’s “ethical” or not is a judgement I’ll leave to you; what’s interesting is that they’ve tapped into a niche that works very well in Québec (and in Europe as well). In just the past month, the website had a total of 893.000 visits from Québec (in a province with 7 million population !!!), with 130.000 visits from Outremont and 112.000 from Ste-Foy. And this is mostly word-of-mouth, as I haven’t noticed any advertisements in any media about the website.

I’ve spoken in the past with other entrepreneurs if a website catering to a local audience was viable, and most of their replies was that it had to be “generalist” — looks like this isn’t true anymore, if you’ve got enough imagination.

Picture taken by Alistair Croll

A Net Neutrality Rally was organized yesterday midday in Ottawa, where customers of Internet provider Bell Canada and sympathizers gathered to protest traffic throttling by large ISPs.

The rally is a consequence of Bell Canada admitting that they were throttling P2P traffic, even if the traffic was in fact managed by third-party resellers. These companies, and customers alike, felt abused by Bell Canada. Their position is that ISPs should not monitor or throttle Internet traffic; or in other words, that it should be “neutral”.

The Net Neutrality movement was in fact started in the US when cable companies and other ISPs voiced that Internet companies like Google, and applications that consumes a lot of traffic, like Bittorrent, should pay a fee to ISPs for the heavy use of their telecom infrastructure. Companies like Google argued that it threatened everything on how we view the Internet.

Bell Canada’s case is exacerbated by the fact that they are the dominant telecom company in Canada, and also they advertise their Internet service as “unlimited” and “consistently fast”.

Furthermore, P2P is 100% legal in Canada; and that’s why p2p throttling looks like a complete arbritrary move. Come to think of it, it also doesn’t make sense to throttle plans when you offer plans with download speeds of 16mbps. Of course people are going to use it to view and download videos and bandwidth-intensive apps, otherwise they would have taken the slower plans.

More photos of the event