Text’NDrive gets today in TechCrunch’s top 15 iPhone apps. The hands-free application which allows mobile phone owners to text without typing and looking at their device’s screen was only launched 3 weeks ago.

Granted, it’s only a guest post and it looks like a personal selection, not a list made from statistics or user ratings, but I still consider it as an achievement, since hundreds of iPhone applications are released every day, and making it on a TC “best of” usually requires expert promotion or having a truly excellent product, if not both. Amongst apps made in Montreal, Text’NDrive thus joins WhereCloud’s yellow pages app achieving massive popularity.

Congrats to Daniel Robichaud’s team.

Note: I am introducing a weekly and regular wrap-up listing new releases, mostly updates which couldn’t be covered in a regular article

Here are noticeable releases this week:

• Vanilla 2 It’s a significant release, with significant work done on the add-on functionality and the core. Existing plugins, themes and other customizable features might not work when upgrading from version 1 to 2. Vanilla brings a brand new design, and remains the friendliest, simpliest, cleanest and open-source forums available currently. Congrats!
• Ostrich app is at v0.2.1.1
  • Tweets not appearing when opening the Ostrich window. Seemed to happen when opening Ostrich too quickly, now the toolbar icon should be disabled until it’s ready.
  • New mentions were not indicated in the tabs at the top. Now they are.
  • Setting to tell Ostrich how to handle links opening.
  • Setting to change the refresh rate.
  • Setting to show the unread tweets badge or not.
  • You should now be notified if you’re using an older version of Ostrich.
  • Your connection to Ostrich via Twitter should now persist.
• Akoha iPhone application is at v1.3
  • Faster news feed loading when returning to application
  • Improved performance when browsing missions and user profiles
  • Various performance improvements throughout application

If you have information, don’t hesitate to send newstips at news@montrealtechwatch.com or @mtw on twitter

Text’n Drive has been launched today in the US and in Canada as a safe way for drivers to check new emails and send messages, without actually having to stop or leave their eyes on the road. The application connects to your email server, checks if there are new unread messages, has a synthetic voice to read them, and you can also speak to your device to start composing new emails.

The app in itself is available on the iPhone, and soon on Blackberry and Android. I like the concept because it actually tries to solve a customer problem, in a very simple way. Nothing fancy or glamorous, no sophisticated new technologies, just standard shiny buttons and a very simple homepage [n'est-ce pas ... but I digress]

The application is now in the top free apps list in number of downloads in the U.S. (no2 in productivity category), and should be no.1 in upcoming days.

As most mobile companies, HandsFree offers a free version, while the pro version is at $20 on iTunes music store. And as usual, everyone loves the free version, while paying customers are complaining about the service for the pro version. I expect the company to invest substantial efforts on getting customer feedback and improving their app in the next few weeks.

Text’n Drive was funded by Daniel Robichaud, serial entrepreneur/Montreal Angel investor. Daniel tells me he has seen recent figures highlighting “texting accidents”, and decided to then to work on this application. If you are a driver , a busy person, or just curious about a new Montréal-born mobile app, try out Text’nDrive

Fred Brunel, at WhereCloud office on St-Laurent, with the Yellow Pages iPad Application

As most of you knows, Fred Brunel (@fbrunel) and Martin Dufort (@mdufort) were the first interested in iPhone application development in Montréal. Fred Brunel had an unconditional faith in all things Apple, while Martin Dufort was a big believer in mobile and location apps. The collaboration gave birth to WhereCloud, with a first twitter application for the iPhone.

Fast forward to mid-2010, they have developed 5 different iPhone applications, ranging from location-based, business to reference to tourists, with their Yellow Pages application rated by more than 50.000 customers. They have also developed in the same time an expertise in product development, with an eye on UI design and product strategy. Projects are abound, to the point they have the luxury to carefully select their next customer. Their headcount is now 4, but they work frequently with freelancers, for instance to work on cross-platform delivery.

Fred Brunel tells this is just the beginning for them and mobile developers, since current apps currently under-exploit the iPad or iPhone 4′s capabilities. The application store with its end-to-end delivery mechanism gives also Apple an edge to Android. For Fred, the Android platform is less mature, and attracts developers who will create sloppy, buggy and aimless applications, typically hacked open source “hello world” apps. Apple’s strict QA will instead offer useful, beautiful and solid applications, while at the same offering a strong and reliable business model.

From video game developers to classical desktop apps and web developers, mobile apps seems to be the immediate space to move to. The prospect of using software on the go brings new challenges and opportunities, just like web2.0 was trendy, a few years back. However, compared to web2.0 and social media, the produced software is a tad more useful, with millions more potential users, and a sound business model. Something to think about, if you are an entrepreneur or a developer.

Jasmine Antonick (@jasmineAntonick), a Canadian living in the valley, calls out for Canadian startups to present at Under the Radar Nov. 09.

I’m looking to find some killer Canadian mobile startups, as I want to showcase innovative companies from outside the borders of Silicon Valley ;) And, I’m a Canadian living in San Francisco… It’d be great if you could post a “Call for Companies” on Montreal Tech Watch.

Under the Radar will uncover the next wave of vetted, test-driven startups that have launched within the year, showcasing the newest companies created by founders with a quest for innovation and a plan for disruption. Under the Radar brings startups, industry leaders, press, and investors together with one ultimate goal: to get the deal done.

In the past three years 54% of presenters have gone on to raise funding and/or be acquired by Google, Microsoft, FOX Interactive, Salesforce, British Telecom, and others

Event page for more info

Buzzwords in a newly released product this morning:

• cloud
• twitter
• iphone
• mobility, location-based service
• app store
• apocalypse

Yes, it’s reportage!

(I’m sad there’s no mention of Facebook, that’s also a buzzword these days)

Now available on the App Store

Fred Brunel has a teaser and an introduction about Reportage on his blog

Reportage works with the way you already tend to use Twitter; by firstly, scanning for the avatar of people you care most about and then browsing for second tier interest people.

We’ve leveraged the ability of your brain to quickly recognize faces, especially on precious mobile screen real estate that’s unsuited to scanning a long timeline.

Reportage focuses on people. Instead of having a single timeline, Reportage shows you the most recent activity in a wall of avatars. Then, you can cherry pick who you want to listen to first — pretty much like with the tuner of a radio receiver.

Martin Dufort and Fred Brunel are also doing interesting developments:

• Twitpocalypse, a “reverse countdown” till Twitter reaches its limits
• There were also featured at the Gazette about the current iPhone scene in Montreal
• They’ve also buzzed about reportage three months before its actual launch

San Francisco is a cold and windy place this year. Even though O’Reilly’s European conference got canceled, attendance here is visibly reduced. There are fewer booths, fewer attendees, the parties offer a little more room to breathe than a year ago. We were still technically in a recession last year, a year of record attendances, but that was before we figured it out ourselves and helped tell the world (and our customers) about it.

But what the event lost in numbers, it more than made up for in content. The Web 2.0 Expo this year is all about business. Gone are the underwear gnomes, the flower children, and the googly-eyed hopefuls holding in diffident shame (or convoluted PR) the idea of wanting to make money. People come here with a revenue strategy, not to find one. They want to shorten the prototyping cycles, discover the customer sets offering them the deeper revenue streams, achieve visibility, deliver faster, and lower costs. Even the old euphemisms are gone: “Monetization”, the ultimate after-thought, dissipated in thin air and is barely heard of any more. Money is not in the mind last, it is clearly there ahead, as a way to sustain one’s primary dreams and ambitions of offering the best value out there. People here say what they want to say with pride: “I want to do good” and “I want to make money.”

Quirky Twitter is a business tool, and it now wants to work on Scala rather than Rails. Agile is being reworked. Vendors are here offering SDKs, not promises: eBay and PayPal offering a share of their revenue stream; Palm Pre is courting mobile devs; Windows Mobile Marketplace offering a 70% revenue share in 28 countries from the start. Mozilla is offering new, better cost-efficient ways to build software. “If you want to rebuild this economy”, they say, “we want to be partners”. The VCs are still holding court. People come up with products and services that they can reliably offer their users in sustainable ways.

I like that.

I think this is the best year so far.

Xobni, a startup offering a power plugin for Microsoft Outlook, announced last week 2 major news: their software is now officially out of beta, after 10 months of beta-testing, and the Blackberry Partners Fund has added $3.2 million in their series B round. The main investor remains CISCO, which puts in $7 million.

See original article about the Blackberry Partners Fund on MTW

Xobni was an original Y Combinator startup, with the goal of adding social features on top of outlook, as well as quick search. A Outlook user could then see the connections and history with other coworkers and any other email receivers.

Xobni received a fair amount of buzz; First Round Capital and Koshla Ventures came in then for the series A. Last year, there were rumored to be negotiating for a straight acquisition by Microsoft, up until Cisco came in to led series B.

The Blackberry Fund has announced other investments, such as Neuralitic Systems recently. Compared to Neuralitic though, an obvious connection could be made between Xobni and RIM. One could think about a mobile application; but if the key advantage of Blackberries is email, I don’t see any other way for Xobni’s future than to be integrated into the Blackberry OS. There’s potentially the behavioral aspect of a “mobile Xobni”, since delving through a correspondant’s data sounds impractical on the go, but that doesn’t seem like a challenge the Xobni team can’t solve.

Congrats to the guys at the Blackberry Fund, both in Montreal and Toronto!

Number of the day: 58 millions mobile phone subscribers now in France, with 1 million having 3G access. That’s a penetration rate of 91.3%, while Canada is at 51.3%62% (last stats from cwta.ca). So one could think:

1. Canadians don’t know about mobile phones,
2. OR they are “culturally” attached to landlines,
3. Canadian mobile carriers don’t know how to market, sell or package phones,
4. handsets manufacturers have all decided that the Canadian market isn’t worth it, so they aren’t releasing the hot phones here,
5. there is no true free competition,
6. the Canadian market is too small and/or too costly to maintain for mobile carriers