The team at inpowr have published an “interview” of their Web2.0 expo experience, with plans to make the platform accessible to various portals and websites who already have a big audience. This will get more users but it’s also a direct revenue stream for them.

Michel Chioini also announced they would need $5 US (surely it must be $5 million) to develop the platform and reach those objectives. It strikes me that the post was published late yesterday and there is Founders & Funders tonight; and i view it as a direct message to local investors. This is quite bold & original, but why not.

They’ve also managed to get internet superstar Loic Lemeur to interview them. Loic does a great job on making them talk about inpowr.

The video format is powerful and delivers a great message about a product, imho. I might look iinto doing those here.

MSBi Valorisation, which works closely with research departments in 3 Québec universities, has announced last week they have invested in WideSail Technologies. If the name rings a bell to you, it’s also because it’s the old name of iNovia Capital.

WideSail is a semiconductor spun-off from McGill University, and has developed new error correction technologies with unique performance. WideSail has announced it will license the design to manufacturers, for use in WiFi, WiMAx, Ethernet, and next-generation telephony networks.

WideSail’s CEO is Gord Harling, a serial entrepreneur who alreay has under his belts 2 other successful technology companies.

The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

And here, you expect an industry analysis, but I have to say I know absolutely nothing about the current semi-conductor industry — last I checked I only did the theory in engineering, so I am in no position to state if widesail is going to be successful. Congratulations are in order though, it’s refreshing to see that the semi-conductor companies are active in Montréal.

The BlackBerry Partners Fund is launching today, and it’s a $150 million fund specifically targeted for mobile startups. The fund is managed by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners.

It’s announced as stage-agnostic and also platform agnostic, meaning that they are willing to take a look and fund a mobile application that is not specifically made for BlackBerry handsets, although one condition is that a BlackBerry version should be planned at one point in the roadmap.

The fund’s limited partners are RIM, RBC, and Thomson, although investment decisions will be taken only from the JLA and RBC Venture Partners. See Rick Segal and the Wellington fund blog for more details.

Things are heating up recently in the mobile space, with a radical shift from hardware to software. The iFund was announced just one month ago, when Apple launched the iPhone platform. Just late last week, Nokia’s CEO also announced that they are moving from being a traditional manufacturer to a stronger focus on software. This is amidst reports of huge projection for the mobile space ($15billion market in 2013) and huge amounts of money thrown at new mobile networks in the US, and right now in Canada. Undoubtably, RIM also realized that while they had a very strong core product, they were lacking in third-party applications that would enrich BlackBerry and make it more pro/consumer friendly.

Mobile applications are the new frontier, and needless to say, it’s exciting to see that the action is happenning right here.

The 2nd edition of StartupCampMontreal is due this upcoming thursday at la SAT, May 15th, from 6.00pm.

The event is dedicated to technology startups, the main feature being 5 new startups pitching the crowd about their product and business plans. You can view here a report about the first edition. This time, we will have:

• camwii is an easy-to-use screensharing application.
• LoyaltyMatch, a new website that allows trading of loyalty points, outside of the normal program and offers setup by companies. This is one of those services where you’d say why didn’t i think about this.
• Healthivate allows consumers to purchase high-quality health services on a global scale. Not sure if there is anything behind this apart from the concept.
• Startyourtube allows anyone to create their own youtube video website, around a community (see last post)
• Vencorps wants to do crowdsourced funding, which would be a revolution

The guys from Embrase are also bringing in Dan Mothershill and Austin Hill as keynote speakers. From what I saw last time, there was also lots of networking going on and also a section for other startups who want to present a demo, making startupcamp an unmissable event for this week.

Videorix is a new online service that allows video content producers to look for potential ads for their videos.

Videorix allows companies and brands to create a logo and a tagline, that video producers can include at the beginning of their video. In the current system, the producer is paid by video, and not by views (since the latter information is controlled by the platform (youtube, dailymotion, …) where the video is distributed )

Videorix is brought up by Nadim Elgarhy, who already did Brandfame. This was covered earlier in MontrealTechwatch. However, Brandfame was focused on product placement, and the video producer had to find a way to showcase the product somewhere in the story. This process is lenghty, fastiduous, and not always possible for the video producer. That’s how Videorix came up, which has less barriers of entry for video producers and might just be an easier pill to swallow for videographers who want to keep their independence in regards to sponsors.

This will undoubtably get more mass traction than Brandfame, although I am betting that it’s not the only service of its kind either. Even then, the day it will be massively successful, this is the kind of service that Youtube/Google could do in a snap. But what the videorix founders could do is prove that this means significant revenus for video producers, and also gain a significant market share — or better yet, prove that this can be a signicant revenue/business model for all the people who upload videos to youtube.

For those who came to Blitzweekend (view reports about the event), you might be interested in the Ottawa Web Weekend event, which is due in 10 days. The goal is to gather a group of entrepreneurs and developers to create a startup in one weekend, much alike the original startupweekend format.

Unfortunately, we hadn’t anyone from Ottawa coming to Blitzweekend, but I was in touch with Marc-André Plouffe for a while to get them to send a team to Blitzweekend. He’s been helpful in spreading the word there, and so I want now to publicize this.

So get there for one weekend if you want to know what’s a startup like, and have the thrill of creating a product in just 2-3 days. Who knows, maybe that’s what you were born for; and it might just be the starting point for bigger plans.

StartupIndex.ca was unveiled this evening at StartupCampToronto. It’s a joint effort by Jevon MacDonald, Jonas Brandon, Ali Asaria and Chris Long, and provides a crowd-sourced database of Canadian startups and investors.

StartupIndex has already in its database most Canadians startups and VC funds, and paints a broad picture of the Internet / ecommerce / web2.0 / media startup landscape. You are also invited to register and contribute if you notice incorrect or missing information.

The website has strong similarities with CrunchBase, a Techcrunch property which does more or less the same thing. In its current state, one can call it a clone of CrunchBase; although this wouldn’t be fair. As Jevon MacDonald writes, their final objective was to provide to the community a useful tool, and get better exposure for startups based in Canada:

By tracking startup activity nationally we can start to build more awareness of which startups are worth watching, we can also quickly find out which Investors are doing deals and which ones are less active. The “Wheat from the Chaff” as they say.

This is also an opportunity to find out the truth about the Canadian Startup community. Is it dead or alive? We can either put grand claims to rest, or we can light a fire under them.

There is a parallel to be made here with StartupNorth. With its focus in Canada, the blog has played a major role in raising the profile of the country, in levels unheard of one year ago, and convinced entrepreneurs that there’s actually a scene and an industry worth staying in Canada. StartupIndex becomes then a natural expansion in StartupNorth’s mission, a tool that will provide valuable information for future and existing entrepreneurs, investors and the media.

If you are an entrepreneur, you can use it for instance to get an initial list of potential investors in your space, or maybe try to connect with startups and work out partnerships. You can also use it to evaluate term sheets and typical VC investments. So it’s definetely a great project that I welcome. Congrats to the team!

SmartHippo has announced an advisory board, with Lori Collins, former VP and General Manager for LendingTree, Bill Rice, CEO of Kaleidico, and John Philip Green, Founder of LearnHub.

The first 2 advisors are in the same vertical as SmartHippo, while the last one has created an online community for education, and also advises community lend.

Finance, and especially finance services for consumers is a black area for me, especially since the financial crisis. I still find incredible that some big wall street investments banks can claim billions of new revenue streams every year, out of some *creative* financial schemes. Turns out that those were made of thin air while we still have governements still planning to save those institutions.

I’ve had a quick email exchange with George Favvas, SmartHippo’s founder on how exactly he positions his startup in this turnoil, and especially if it makes any sense to launch a service around mortgages.

Again, I am no finance major, but I understand from his replies that in the mortgage industry, a lot of money is made by mortgage brokers, companies, and intermediairies by the fact that they get access to privileged information while consumers and individuals don’t. SmartHippo’s mission is then to enable free, open access on data, provided and corrected by the community. Prior to the subprime crisis, if consumers had used the SmartHippo website, they would have known for instance about mortgages that looks like great deals but would be ultimately ripping them off after the first years.

Of course, it’s easy to say so when the crisis has already erupted, but it gives nonetheless a better light on SmartHippo plans. I like the idea of a free, open market. Have a look for instance at the new SmartHippo’s homepage, which features now daily blog posts from its members and partners, plus other new features like bank reviews and comments. The previous version looked like more a search engine for mortgage rates, while this gets now SmartHippo closer to the community/destination website as George Favvas described it.

Furthermore, George Favvas says the optimal time to launch a disruptive startup is when the industry is in crisis. With new advisors giving him valuable advice on key areas where SmartHippo is playing, this means good news for SmartHippo for the future.

OneBigPlanet has launched this morning, with a live videocast where they unveiled their product, and announced the first customers using the platform.

OneBigPlanet promises to have the answer on how to monetize social networks and also solve the problem of high membership turn-over on those websites. What the platform does essentially is offer a wide array of rewards, discounts, products and services to the users of those websites. OneBigPlanet believes then that this will be a compelling offer to the member who will keep coming back. It would also mean a stable and real revenue stream for the organization.

One of their main customer announced today was the U.S. Chamber of commerce, which has more than 3 million business members. It will use OneBigPlanet’s platform, its members then having access to a one-stop “consumer platform”, where they will be able to position products & services.

With this new platform, OneBigPlanet seems to be especially proud on how they have leveraged “web2.0″ technologies, and how they have solved on their own the problem on social networking monetization. They have announced it’s a patent-pending technology.

There are lots to be said regarding OneBigPlanet and its platform. It’s surpring to see that a company, which is up to today an outsider, announcing to have solved the monetization problem; while leaders like myspace or facebook haven’t managed to do so. I also find it disturbing they are branding the product as a social network platform while in fact it’s a platform to manage fidelity programs. But I guess that’s a way to be trendy. Neverthless, it’s a refreshing take on how to make more intereting loyalty programs.

The Montreal startup scene, Blitzweekend, 2nd March 2008

There is a great thread at Hacker news about the best place to startup now, outside of the U.S.

Hacker news is a social news website designed for the “ycombinator community”, and has been hailed by many (Michael Arrington among others) as a leading source of news for programming, hacking, and entrepreneurship.

I know many readers of this blog are either involved in startups, or are interested into starting or joining one. If you are part of the latter category, one of the questions you should ask yourself then what would be the best location for a startup.

Inevitably, Silicon Valley, and also Boston are shown as the reference, with its obsessive entrepreneurship culture, the abundance of investors, smart people and early adopters, which are all key ingredients of success.

There are some good news though as comments on the thread highlights many Canadian cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Waterloo, Ottawa, Winnipeg, etc.) as great cities for a technology startup. Some positive points mentionned for Canadian cities:

• community events and growing ecosystem,
• cheap rent and cost of living for many cities,
• accessible and friendly VCs,
• not much bureaucracy, it’s easy to register a company,
• great healthcare system compared to the U.S., plus healthier people than in the U.S.

Cons mentionned by the commenters:

• apparently, many shy away from Montréal and from Québec because they “fear” French
• might be a problem for those who want sunshin all year long

There are certainly many other reasons why it’s a great place to launch a technoloy startup in Montreal, in Québec or in other cities. I’ve got many in my mind, but I fear I’ll repeat myself. So I’ll leave it up to you, if you think of other reasons, please share them, either here or on the discussion thread.