Since MTW and FlowVentures began Montreal startupdrinks last summer, we’ve had regularly an attendance of 60 to 90 people each time, went to two different places (Café des Éclusiers and now Brutopia on crescent), turning into what I call the de-facto meetup for the Montreal technology community.

It’s a great way for new tech entrepreneurs to meet other entrepreneurs, discuss about venturing into the technology space, along with tech-oriented programmers, speak about business with fellow startuppers, angel investors, or VCs, every last wednesday of the month.

For this month, we’re making exceptionnally 2 worlds meet, with a joint event with the Montreal Girl Geek Dinner. It’s a regular event instigated by Tanya McGinnity. Like StartupDrinks, it has now a regular and growing audience, filling rooms every time for their girl geek presentations.

I’m excited to see this happen, as we’ll get most probably 150+ people for the event, and a new talks + drinks formula. Of course, the most interesting thing is getting the 2 communities to mingle — who knows, you might meet a co-founder or get expert help for your startup, or get to know new ideas.

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed. June 17th, 5pm: A Talk by Christine Renaud from e-180 (@180) at Montreal Girl Geek dinner
• Wed. June 17th, 6pm: Montreal StartupDrinks, where it’s all about taking a drink and talk about tech startups and entrepreneurship.

The event will be hosted at Brutopia again, upstairs, on 1219 Crescent Street. Look for Tanya McGinnity, Robin Ahn, also Raymond Luk

If you are interested, DO register here. It takes 30 seconds and we need it to make name tags.

Once again, it’s a community event, and FREE. As such, we need your help as much as possible to get the word out. If you can put it on twitter, or facebook, forward the registration page to friends, then the better it will be. 

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.

Poly9, the same company known for its famous 3D browser globe, has released last week mapspread, a web service which lets anyone to manage geographical data, in an easy to use interface.

In the same way that Google Maps democratized maps, mapsread democratizes advanced mapping features, the typical use case being the case of organizations having databases of geographical data. Previously, those organized had to get expensive geographical information systems, an expensive step both in terms of money and time need to setup.

Poly9 is based in Quebec city, a city with many experts in GIS (for instance phds at Université Laval). You can see it as one of those Canadian companies having unique technologies and IP in one specific field. They did setup a blog though, so they might actually be looking to market mapsread. A company to follow.

Chris Arsenault wrote about the unique opportunity for technology startups in a recent post on MontrealTechWatch, when the provincial budget was announced.

The new fund was announced shortly afterwards, named Teralys, with a capital of $825million, coming from FSTQ, La Caisse de dépôt, and Investissement Québec, as well as $125m to come from private sources.

Heading Teralys is Jacques Bernier, a serial technology entrepreneur, executive and investor in many technology companies. Jacques Bernier was approached by FSTQ’s president back in early 2004 — he found the offer interesting but still had his heart in building technology companies. Moreover, at that time, the FTQ was interested in having a tech fund, but Jacques Bernier thought there wasn’t any seed funding in QC, and that the Fonds FTQ didn’t have the tools to execute what they were wishing for.

If you read Jacques Bernier’s profile on Fond FTQ’s website, it’s interesting to notice that he has a strong operational background, and had the same entrepreneurial mindset when asked by the FSTQ to implement the funding strategy.

The first phase of this strategy was started in 2004-2005, with the FSTQ and Investissement Québec funding several VC funds in Québec, which would in turn seed technology startups. This made headlines back then, and inspired many other institutions (the Ontario Government recently for instance), with varying levels of success.

Teralys in itself is then the second phase of this strategy. This time, Jacques Bernier is setting up a better skilled team, more tools, and with a strong vision of building Québec’s high tech industry. He plans to be operational in May/June and announce their first deals in autumn 2009.

Teralys will invest in VC funds, at a base line of $100 million for each VC fund, with 50% of funds to be invested in QC, 25% in Canada, and 25% internationally. Jacques Bernier tells that there will be a multiplicator effect. Teralys will also seek strategic international partners, such as Vantage Point VP, Rho Ventures, Vertex, amongst others. At the same time, he will also highlights programs such as the 10×20 Program with MIT.

Jacques Bernier presents Teralys as a unique opportunity for Québec and for its tech entrepreneurs. At a recent investor funding, when other LPs were lamenting about the failure of the VC asset class in Canada, Jacques Bernier answered in very strong words that he refused to live in a country driven by natural resources and Wall-Marts. It’s the line I think that one could remember from this interview. It’s not just about financiers looking at a spreadsheet (not that there’s something wrong with that), but a heartful desire to stirr up the tech landscape in Québec.

At the end, we were joking how different things were different in Montreal compared to tech scenes in Israel and in California. He recalls how a 2 days visit to Israel made him meet 40 entrepreneurs, with his venue spreading like wildfire, even though nothing was planned. Since there’s no reason Montrealers should be less active than Israelis, I suggest that we get 40 + 1 entrepreneurs to meet with Jacques Bernier. So well, if you are a tech entrepreneur willing to shake things up, leave a comment and your email, and we’ll arrange something :-)

There are 6 “big” upcoming tech events in Montreal this upcoming week, one of the busiest weeks in recent times. Either you’re in marketing, in development, in social media, or into startups, there’s an event for you this week to meetup.

A group of programmers and developers from the SAT are doing Code Forum monday 4th. It’s an open event for all Montréalers, with the event format modeled after unconference principles.

Felipe Coimbra, the instigator behind TwtApps, is doing a NewTech meetup this upcoming Tuesday.

NewTech meetups are opportunities for startups and new projects to showcase a new piece of software or a product.

There’s a potential problem with the venue, and Felipe is looking for a space to replace Laika. If someone has a potential solution, do contact him.

Wednesday evening, Yulblog gathers Montreal bloggers in its first wednesdays meetup in may

StartupCampMontreal edition 4 is Thursday at the SAT. So far, StartupCamps are the events which gathers the most tech people in Montreal, with an attendance well beyond 300, for an evening of presentations and pitches by 5 startups. Selected startups to pitch the audience are Control Yourself, SiteZoogle, PraizedMedia, Klaxa, Twtapps.

Sylvain Carle is also doing an early session, with a more open format.

In the same day, php Québec is also holding a very interesting evening for php programmers: Rencontre php Québec at ETS. 1 presentation about the Facebook API, and 1 presentation about Atomik, an easy framework.

Also, of interest: Charles Sirois (TeleSystem, Enablis) and Robert Calderisi (World Bank) will present their views on entrepreneurship & africa at a Fraser Institute event, on May 7th.

A brand new fund has been announced in Québec today, named Teralys fund. It’s an initiative of the Caisse de Dépôt ($250m), the Solidarity Fund FQL ($250m), the Québec Government ($200m) and also private investors and institutions ($125m)

It’s the biggest fund of this size to date in Québec, and in Canada. Another surprising point is the relatively short period of time between the launch of Teralys and the budget announced by the QC government (see previous post by Chris Arsenault). If there were any doubts (see comments) left about potential bureaucracy, then today’s announcement crushed all of those doubts.

From the $825m announced for Teralys, half of it is planned to be dedicated for technology, while the balance will be shared between biotech and clean tech.

See a post by Chris Arsenault (iNovia Capital) commenting the creation of this fund of funds.

See Press Release by La Caisse (PDF Document). A quote for instance from the excerpt:

The strategy not only attracts foreign capital to Québec, but also enables Québec companies to develop business relations with foreign companies. Our financial ecosystem has all the attributes to anchor Québec in the components of the knowledge economy: from education to R&D, product development and marketing. With the creation of the Teralys Capital Fund, we are starting the second phase of the strategy, and this stage will be instrumental in ensuring the success of our entrepreneurs.

Since it appears that they had indeed a plan from the start, I’m curious to know what was meant behind those words, especially the first part. Apart from that, things are getting very interesting now. The people behind this wrapped up everything in a record time; the government chose to bet on private Venture Capital instead of bail-outs; and there’s a strong focus on everything tech.

If you are interested in entrepreneurship, NOW is the ideal time to work on it and get to do something serious. In a few months’s time, new funds targeting new entrepreneurs and startups will be announced, with funds pouring in from Teralys, and they’ll be looking actively for new deals. Better get to work on those prototypes, demos and business plans already.

Things have been busy, but there’s now a new feature:

Technology Map of Montreal [@techentreprise]

This map is replacing the map found on MontrealTechWatch here. It was a popular feature for MTW, but as a google map, it required manual updating, a time-consuming and opaque process. John Beales helped by providing a more interactive map, but I always wished companies, venture funds, consultants, and anyone else would add themselves to the map, and change details.

All of this is now possible at TechEntreprise. If you want to be on the map, and want to be seen by entrepreneurs, startups, developers, designers, angel investors, VCs, incubators, add your project / company / organization to the map.

And as a sidenote, it also allows me to know about new ventures, such as David Usher’s deqq or challengeyourworld which were discovered somehow weeks [unfortunately] after their launch.

This is late news (as in 11 days ago), but a few readers might have missed it so here are the (good) news: Tribal Nova received $3 million from iNovia Capital and ID Capital

Tribal Nova produces multimedia games (similar to Flash games on web browsers, but with more elaborate environments), made for kids. The games are done in partnership with different media groups such as CBS, the CBC or printing media groups, who would use Tribal Nova’s expertise to engage kids and offer them a world to discover. You can see products in this page.

I’m thinking about the video games industry in Montreal and in Québec, and Tribal Nova with its new funding could have the opportunity to crystalize world-class video game talent, creativity, and expertise found in Montreal.

One could think for instance of Club Penguin, maker of a virtual world for kids, a Canadian startup acquired just last year by Disney for $700 million… I’m not stating that Tribal Nova should go play into that market, but if there are looking for the moment, it’s certainly now to do the turn.

On a sidenote, it’s noteworthy to see iNovia Capital on a funding spree for the past month. There’s Tribal Nova, on Apr.13th Collective Media got $20 million, CoolIT Systems had $6.2m in March 24th, Tynt Multimedia was funded ($5m series A) march 2nd, Airborne Entertainement had $2m Jan 20th. It’s a striking difference compared to last year, even more striking when remembering the current economic conditions.

Congrats to teams at Tribal Nova, iNovia Capital and ID Capital.

If you’re an user experience specialist, here’s a chance in a lifetime: Akoha, the social gaming startup, is actively looking now for one.

The video explains it very well:

We’re looking for a key User Experience guru to help the passionate team at Akoha take our design skills to the next level. For the right candidate this is the opportunity of a lifetime to join a well-funded, experienced team with a killer idea on the brink of a break-out success. We believe that creating incredible product design expertise throughout the company will be a key component of Akoha’s success and we’ll stop at nothing to ensure we find the right person to lead the charge.

You know you’re the right candidate if you’re a self-proclaimed design-freak. You notice great design everywhere and anywhere. From the simple pen that writes perfectly to the five-star hotel that provides your every whim before you’re even aware of it, designing these experiences makes you as giddy as a schoolgirl. You have a great combination of practical, theoretical and team management experience and has demonstrated the ability to instill a world-class internal design culture.

For more details (job description, compensation, required skills, perks, etc.), see full listings

There has been a lot of great chatter going on the last few days regarding the best way to turn the ignition on Canada’s Startup engine. So much so that it has prompted me to dive in with a guest post here on MTW.

I’ve heard similar ideas spreading at local events, private meetings, and captured in Heri’s post a few months back (A plan for digital creativity) Here are a few thoughts:

• Newbie’s need a lot of hand holding and support to be…
• Promising players need special teams with more practice time and better coaching to be…
• Stars need funding to free up time to learn specific tactics and benefit from strict guidelines to be…
• Superstars need exposure, a national playing field to show there stuff.

This is a big part of why hockey works in Quebec, or football in Texas. One system feeds the other; none can exist without the other. As Chris posted, it is about the “eco-system” or “about fostering the community of start up/entrepreneurial spirit”.

The problem is how do we build a “business model” to support an eco-system that will unavoidably flow investment to many entrepreneurs that aren’t cut out to make it? VC’s understand the probabilities of the best of the best providing a return is near to 2 in 10. Can one truly expect a return on helping everyone?

Does the answer lie with: 

• Government support?
• The BDC?
• Angels and VC’s donating time, space, or money to the community?
• Successful entrepreneurs sticking around to support the system?