This is the third and final post presenting the results of the tech entrepreneurship survey. The first one was about the current strengths of the Montréal technology community, the second exposed the challenges and problems met by technology entrepreneurs, while this post will present potential opportunities, for actors of the community and also anyone having an interesting in making Montreal a better place for technology.

The results are presented here. Like the previous 2, the items on top are the top answers, ranked by average from the 108 respondents. A few surprises, which after a little bit of thinking aren’t surprising at all after all:

Opportunity #1: A mentorship program to connect new and experienced entrepreneurs. This was the most surprising, imho, and it reveals how many entrepreneurs or tech developers are already on the verge of committing to their projects and startups, but lack guidance amongst all the diversity of paths offered to them.

The good news is that Gabriel is leading a mentorship event today at Café des Éclusiers (ha! ahead of the results), with @sebprovencher as a mentor. I’m excited for this event, and look forward to see how we can make it work.

Opportunity #2: More angel investors, seed funds and VCs. This is tied to the challenges presented earlier (see #5). Since it appears on both results, this appears to be a true limiting factor. Hopefully, there is the upcoming FounderFuel, but there is definitively more space for alternative means of funding

Opportunity #3: Global events & conferences promoting local startups Could we organize an event à la South By South West? or a conference similar to TC50? The answer today is no. It takes significant time and resources to organize events at that scale. The need is there though, so event organizers should see now how they can partner with other groups and key associations, and hopefully, we’ll see one in the near future.

Opportunity #4: Startup school program à la techstars This is doable although like #3, it would require most actors in Montréal to work together to make it happen

Opportunity #5: Initiatives bridging Montréal and global tech centers This is definitively doable. We had many startup instigators coming from other provinces, the States or Europe. We have also many Montréalers going regularly to other global conferences. They could be dubbed as “Montréal tech ambassadors”. In a similar way, there’s also something to do with MTW

Opportunity #6: More initiatives growing the community; bridge local groups There is a division currently amongst all the different developer groups (the Javascript people, the ruby, python or php folks), also amongst the marketing/entrepreneur groups. There’s a lot to do to make those groups talk to each other, through common events for instance. MTW played a role in the past of uniting those groups, and this is going be one of the focus in the future

See more results in the report

Again, thanks to everyone who helped promote the survey and took the time to answer it.

CakeMail, a Montreal-based email marketing service for agencies or consultants, has released just last week a major version of its software. The codename is Tiramisu and brings in all the shiny bells & whistles you could wish in an email marketing service: A/B testing, advanced analytics, dynamic content, an add-ons store, and more. The main new features are highlighted in a central page.

This version thus makes Cakemail more flexible to its users, especially power-users. For instance, a major marketing campaign targeting different demographics can be carried using the dynamic content feature. A marketer still doing market research and still working on advertising copy can make a smart use of  the A/B feature. Even more, managers can get raw market data from Cakemail’s new analytics function. The new features do not fail to highly impress, compared to the service’s debut.

There are also new features made for easier  reselling of the Cakemail. Client management and rebranding of the tool have been improved. Of course, Cakemail still has its unique advantages: available in multiple languages, and its pluggable dynamic back-end.

All in all, Tiramisu puts Cakemail proudly amongst CampaignMonitor or MailChimp, two very well-known newsletters and email marketing service. Go give it a try! And congrats to François Lane (@cakemail_ceo) and the Cakemail team!

This post follows last week’s about the strengths of Montreal as a technology entrepreneurship center, with results and analysis from the MTW survey. Those initial results highlighted Montréal’s characteristics, a creative, low-cost and friendly city, which are more or less its USP.

The report dedicated to the challenges met by technology entrepreneurs in Montreal is now online. Since the 2nd question had more choices, I will only comment the first 7 answers

1. Challenge #1: The community and its different resources are not visible enough to outsiders. Indeed, one can be a student or a 9 to 5 engineer in Montreal without being aware that the city has its share of startups. I believe 99.99% of Montréalers don’t have any idea that you could actually launch a technology “startup” in Montréal, nobody knows about MTW and even less about MSU or bolidea. I can see several explanations:

• The community uses in majority the English language while we are in a french-speaking city
• Technology is much less popular than say, cultural events (arts, music concerts, festivals) are heavily promoted and supported, by the media and the government
• There are physical main places promoting local startups and tech companies
• There is no offline media or newspapers promoting the community
• The events might too geeky and not open enough to the general public
• There are no Youtubes or Facebooks in the city
• etc.

I have ideas on how to go past this challenge, but this wouldn’t certainly be solved by one sole actor. NextMontreal plus other initiatives can certainly help.

2. Challenge #2: No urgency in making it “Big”; unawareness of global markets. This is a criticism found frequently when people compare the attitude in Montréal compare to what’s felt in other cities (say the valley, tel aviv, or places like hong kong). Often, it’s told that Montrealers like lifestyle business, and target only local markets with no desire to explore other markets.

This might be improved by highlighting more what’s done in other cities, and pushing Montréalers to expose themselves and also make them discover other places, with probably strong coaching behind

3. Challenge #3: Entrepreneurship and risk-taking are not encouraged. This is also probably related to the problem #2. Well, Canada is a developed country, life is easy, and there’s strong social support from the Quebec government. Whatever your plans are, people are cool with it. So why would anyone try to revolutionize the world? One has to be strongly motivated to have the guts to launch a startup.

Creating a focused, strong and entrepreneur-oriented community helps. That’s probably MTW

4. Challenge #4: Poor promotion strategy & practices I haven’t seen a Montréal-based startup who nailed an effective Twitter campaign, and apart from identi.ca, it’s hard to see any startup who managed to had a wildly successful viral product. For email marketing, I like what Cakemail does but well that’s a bit given they know how to use it. Same for facebook, adwords or any other promotion strategies. The fact is, for a city knows for its music, tv, cinema, advertising, and festivals activity, there is little creativity and thought given in promotion from Montreal startups.

5. Challenge #5: Difficult to find and convince investors I think we have good existing investors but there isn’t probably enough and there is no diversity either. In recent news, it’s always the same names (MontrealStartup or iNovia) so a new entrepreneur has very limited options. If there isn’t a match with MSU, where can you go? BDC? apply for grants at different SAJE or CDEC centers? which is crazy, since you’ll discover after 3 months they don’t understand high-tech

I don’t have any solid answers for this problem (well, read: I don’t have enough resources). Probably Teralys or the government only can help improve this

6. Challenge #6: No media site with a global audience to support local tech

Well the answer is easy, we need a site like MTW but with the 1 million rss subscribers.

Jokes aside, this is probably the same problem as #4. In a city knows for its creativity, we can find ways to create more buzz. Stay tuned for this.

7. Challenge #7: No focus on useful, user-friendly, sticky and complete products This was referring to the fact that many local startups are in fact technology projects, with one or a collection of features. Features don’t make a product. Features don’t ease anyone’s daily life. Features cannot be sold in a market. Features impress engineers but doesn’t solve any problem.

Technology founders should get inspiration from successful startups like Tungle, which makes a useful tool. There is probably a lack of great UI and UXP specialists, and not enough people knowing what’s product design. Montréal needs more Caterina Fakes or more of those guys

There are more problems listed. Go over to the report to see the details

I am working actively on #1 and #6, with major initiatives to be announced soon. Plus one potential for #2. We’ll see. But as written above, one can’t do everything. I hope you’ll join the fun and lend a hand gladly from time to time to get together a stronger community.

Again, thanks for all your help, first in promoting the survey, and second by answering the survey. I’m putting together the last and final report of the survey and it should be up very shortly.

StatusNet has announced early this week $1.27 Series A funding from FirstMark Capital, BOLDStart Ventures, plus also existing investors iNovia Capital and MontrealStartup. This brings StatusNet’s total funding to $2.3 million

The 2 new venture groups, FirstMark Capital and BOLDStart Ventures are from New York City. Scott Switzer, from FirstMark, joins also StatusNet as new board member. He previously founded OpenX, an open source advertising platform, well-known amongst fellow bloggers and media companies. The US investors, as well as StatusNet’s growing team in San Fran, shows ever-increasing operations and also sales in the US, similar to CoRadiant’s path. StatusNet announced recently a successful implementation of their software at Motorola, presented as a typical customer who’d get substantial advantages from running internally StatusNet.

Congratulations to Evan Prodromou (@evan, @evanpro on twitter), StatusNet’s founder. Evan is a strong citizen and actor of the open source movement, but at the same time has a rare flair on creating successful businesses by leveraging open source dynamics, as demonstrated for instance by one his previously venture wikitravel. For those who didn’t follow StatusNet, here’s a quick recall:

• July 2008: Identica releases open source microblogging service
• July 2008: Identi.ca’s perfect launch
• January 2009: MontrealStartup announces funding in identi.ca
• April 2009: Status.net to offer paid hosted micro-blogging applications to companies
• July 2009: StatusNet wins open source award

What’s next? 2010 is a ripe year for social media, probably the year where many big companies are comfortable on getting company-wide social software to their employees. StatusNet can break in by selling its usability and popularity on identi.ca, as well as the fact that the source can be installed in a company’s server for more security. Its most obvious competitor Jive Software, which doesn’t have StatusNet’s usability, popularity nor does it have any open source code. BUT Jive Software sells installs of its “social enteprise 2.0″ software by millions though, and as a matter of fact, just got $30m funding from Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins. Jive is going for the home run and unless StatusNet hires an army of salesmen as well as bringing *major* enhancements to its product, it’s hard to see StatusNet’s edge… unless it is for single departments / groups in a company, or small businesses who can’t get Jive’s ticket entry price. We’ll wait and see I guess for news from StatusNet on how they plan to win the social enterprise market.

One week ago, a survey was posted on MTW, with the goal of assessing the state of Montreal technology landscape. The survey was setup to find first the strengths, second the problems and finally, the opportunities for Montréal as a technology and entrepreneurship center.

As a few noted, it’s not a scientific survey, with sometimes a few opinionated or incomplete choices. A more methodical survey is possible, but it would have required weeks of planning, analysis and then lengthy execution. I prefer quick results, and then refining and correcting from there. It’s a more spontaneous approach, and as seen from the feedback, most liked it.

Before presenting the results, I would like to thank each one of you who contributed on promoting the survey. More than 50 people posted the survey on Twitter, links were shared on Facebook, and I also saw it on emails. It’s with the help of your unique networks that we can get the word known and get the voice of Montréal out there. I’m thinking now that we could use something similar to help promote new projects launched by local Montréalers and help each other.

Now, the results.

Strengths of Montréal as a tech entrepreneurship center.

For those who forgot it, it’s the ranked results for the first question of the survey. Choices listed on top are the best strengths as seen by the 110 people who took the time to answer the survey.

1 – Montréal’s diversity, creativity, and coolness. Score: 3.4/4  I posted the link on a previous post, but you all know Montréal is a hotbed of innovation. Its music and arts scene, its multicultural diversity, its global success such as the Cirque du Soleil, its openness makes it an ideal place for innovation and creativity. All major video game companies have now recognized its potential and have all developers teams here.

2 – Low costs plus tax credits. Score: 3.2/4 Most people who’ve been to major US and European cities are surprised how cheap Montréal. You don’t have to dedicated half of your pay to live right in downtown Montréal. For companies, salaries are low, both for skilled and unskilled workers, and there are diverse tax credits for innovative technology companies, allowing them to go past the dreaded 1st year launch. This is a crucial element for developers and entrepreneurs wanting to dedicate a few months on a technology projects, without worrying too much about rent

3 – Friendly Community with regular events, making it possible to talk. Score: 3.1/4 We’ve come far from the early days of 2005 and 2006. Ben Yoskovitz started it with the Montréal tech entrepreneur breakfast, then we had all of a sudden democamps, barcamps, startupdrinks, montreal.rb, mtlnewtech, etc. Thanks to all the past and current event organizers @sfllaw, @fredngo, @sylvaincarle, @marclaporte, @ylarrivee, yannick gingras, @arach, @heri, @quebecvalley, @jeremyclarke, @bolidea, @twtfelipe, @ptelio, @rayluk, @robin_ahn, @jefftala, @startupifier, @uxmtl and I am surely missing many others.

4 – Its universities and higher education system. Score: 3.0/4 MontrealInternational states it better than me:

Montréal’s universities are focal points for research, discovery and innovation activities. With its international calibre of researchers, its 11 universities − four of which are major universities and seven are affiliated schools − and its partnerships with governments and the private sector, Greater Montréal is a leader in innovation. Moreover, the Montréal region is Canada’s university capital, as it ranks first place for the number of university diplomas awarded at the ubdergraduate and graduate levels. In 2007, more than 170,000 students were enrolled in universities in Greater Montréal, of whom nearly 42,000 students graduated, with more than 6,500 graduates in  the high technology sectors. In the future, innovative companies will be able to count on a large pool of university graduates to meet their needs for a qualified workforce.

5 – The city is a bridge between North America and Europe, and attracts new talents. Score: 3.0/4 Quebec is unique in North America, due its French roots. Montréal is the 2nd French-speaking metropolis in the world, is located in North America, in one of the continent’s densest region, the St-Laurent valley, and as such, has attracted for dozens of years immigrants, from Quebec of course, Europe, Latin America and Asia, but especially is dear for all french-speaking countries in the world. It’s the equivalent of NYC or San Francisco from all West Africans, Belgians or Swiss. Paris is the de-facto capital of course, but it has heavy and historical structures and traditions weighing on innovation. Most youths and entrepreneurising individuals thus prefer to settle in Montréal, french but definitevely rooted in North America.

6 – Support from the Government, such as the launch of the Teralys fund. Score: 2.6/4 Support from the québec government is more visible than in any other province. Read previous article with Jacques Bernier

7 – No Facebook or Google Headquarters who would capture top talent. Score: 2.3/4 Compared to the Valley or Seattle, there is no huge technology company who would draft all the top developers. Any startup with a decent team can hope working with bright developers, designers and marketers without worrying (too much) about other companies snatching them up in a few weeks.

8 – Dynamism of investors and VCs. Score: 2.2/4 VCs like Chris Arsenault, or investors like @msu are going to local events, talking to entrepreneurs and even doing more than their roles by launching local initiatives such as the Notman House. But most importantly, they believe in local companies, announcing regularly new funding rounds.

What can we get from these results? If there is any marketing planned for Montréal, then we’ve need to highight first #1, which is Montréal’s innovation, creativity, diversity and openness. That makes a difference when settlers choose the city over other Canadian, American or European cities. I’ve mentioned it in a previous post, but it might be worthwile to talk about the music, design, fashion, or video games creative forces in Montréal, even on technology blog like MTW, because after all, that’s why most people are attracted to the city.

Also, #2 and #3 are obvious too, and even easier to demonstrate than #1 .

More results are coming in the next days. There are very interesting results about Montréal’s problem and opportunities. Stay tuned, folks!

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

NextMontreal.com is a new project instigated by Benjamin Yoskovitz, who called a few months ago for a news site in Montréal, and since then Phil Telio, Sylvain Carle and Patrick Tanguay have joined the project.

As you will read Ben’s blog post, there is a focus on making NextMontreal a business, and also making it larger than the tech entrepreneurship world. Ben mentions for instance gaming and biotech, and perhaps even more topics. There is also a corporate focus, right from the start.

Montreal Tech Watch will be partnering from the beginning with NextMontreal, with selected posts from MTW published on NextMontreal, for instance articles about new product launches or event coverage. I will be collaborating with Ben, and as stated again and again on MTW, our common goal will be making a stronger Montreal and getting our voices out there. There will be of course differences, the main being:

• MTW will always have a very strong technology base, with an insight about current and new groundbreaking technologies, while NextMontreal will be stronger on the VC/angel/business and corporate links
• MTW will not cover biotech, aerospace or other technology fields. There is already a lot to do with web, gaming and mobile projects to actively cover those topics

The way I see it, MTW can be compared to a “Hacker/Entrepreneur’s journal” while NextMontreal will be the “Business of Technology”. But those are of course quick generalizations and there will be frequent times when both websites will cover the same topic, in the same way, since we have the same goal after all. I am sure that together, we will make a stronger Montreal Technology industry, provide better support local entrepreneurs, startups and developers to make startups and projects bloom, locally and abroad.

If you read MontrealTechWatch and if you are thinking towards tech entrepreneurship, NextMontreal (see also @nextmontreal) is definitively a website to follow and read.

I met yesterday Yaniv Rivlin, who is responsible for the Comtribute’s launch, starting with a North American tour.

Part 1 – Comtribute.com

Comtribute.com launched this tuesday new tools allowing everyone to fund their favourite non-profit organization, without actually giving any money. Fans & friends are invited to install a toolbar, and also use a customized homepage, instead of google.com or yahoo.com. Every time there is a new web search, a few cents will be donated to the non-profit.

Comtribute hopes to capitalize on the search advertising business. Non-profits are invited to design & customize the toolbar, with a very wide variety of features available, from news ticklers, rss feeds, search fields, to quick links and web bookmarks.  Since the platform is hosted by Comtribute, they receive a portion of advertising revenue from Google or Yahoo (view Google’s CSE program) every time the user clicks on an ad or use the search engine. You can see for instance what Make a Wish or Students On Ice could do with Comtribute.

Yaniv Rivlin showcases Comtribute.com platform

A multi-level marketing mechanism was also introduced in the platform, since users are invited to refer friends. At any time, they can see how much their overall network contributed. It’s hard to criticize Comtribute, since they cater to non-profits. There’s something magic in creating value in an area where there wasn’t any in the first place (web searches), and one begins to wonder how much money can be raised from those tools. Comtribute can certainly win users by highlighting the fact that you can raise money for a non-profit without spending money. I would also like to see a more polished and simpler tool but in an era where Internet users are entertained by Twitter or Facebook, why not use your web time for good?

Part 2 – A case of Israeli Entrepreneurship

But enough of Comtribute, this is not really why I contacted Yaniv Rivlin. The company behind Comtribute was in fact an Israeli startup, funded there months ago by 2 local angel investors.

It’s striking to see a brand-new startup to launch right away with a North American Tour. Of course, amongst Montréal startups, Ben Yoskovitz with Standoutjobs and Austin Hill launched at a US web2.0 conference, but theirs was a relatively cozy move compared to what Comtribute.com is doing. It’s akin to a Montréal-based startup who would launch in Berlin and then start right away an European tour. It takes courage, imagination, not fearing to talk to foreign audiences, plus certainly a little bit more.

Why Montreal? Yaniv Rivlin has some family in Montréal and also participated in the Sauvé program and that’s why the North American tour is starting in Montreal. Yaniv also says it’s a good audience for their tool, and allows them to fine-tune the product as he goes through other cities.

I have noticed several blog posts on StartupNorth and also here and there seems to be a consensus that canadian companies should better focus on the domestic market and also should better focus on quiet niches.

Meanwhile, there’s a little country with only 7 million population and also 1/10th the size of Québec which is 2nd in the Nasdaq (71 companies, 2nd only after the U.S.), and new startups actively gaining audiences in North America from day 1.

I don’t think any Israeli entrepreneur tinkers long about what are his limits and what he can and can’t reach, like what I’ve read on the StartupNorth comments page. I’d like to see more entrepreneurs not stopping there, mobilize & leverage all the resources they have, and go everywhere they can go today.

I’ve met Hugo Duncan (@hugoduncan) at the first Blitzweekend; he wasn’t the most vocal but yet he’s one of the programmers who impressed me most, having managed to develop a UML interpreter based on 2 new languages, Cat and Heron. Everything was against him: his team was setup just late Friday evening so there was no prior work, there had to be a working prototype in less than 2 working days, he worked from an OLPC, and he also told me his background was in mechanical and hydraulicelectrical engineering.

On the last final day of Blitzweekend, when we saw the results, I knew we had one of the most brilliant programmers in Montréal.

Since then, Hugo has been involved in tech entrepreneurship in Montréal as a consultant and also as a lead developer/co-founder. One of his latest projects is cloudhoist, a web application for easier cloud hosting management. It was recently featured in Montreal New Tech. I’ve met Hugo and also asked him the following questions:

Can you describe in a few words what cloudhoist would do?

CloudHoist.com is a web site that aims to make it easy to configure, manage and scale servers in the cloud.

Who is targeted for? developers or sys-admins? experts or beginners?

The aim is to simple, flexible console that will appeal to both developers and sys-admins. We provide a simple form based configuration system for those that want to get started quickly, and are looking to allow the use of advanced scripting if required to pin done the fine detail. ClouHoist aims to provide a way to grow from a single monolithic server, through split database/web architecture, to load-balancers, message queues, etc.

Why a cloud management software? Companies like rackspace, slicehost already have their own control panel. Also, there are lots of third-parties management software available for Amazon EC2

At the moment, cloud companies provide interfaces that make it simple to launch servers, but provide little in the way of configuration tools.

One of the key reasons to use the cloud is to cope with varying traffic/work-loads (if you have stable server requirements then dedicated hosting is often cheaper). The longest part of getting a new server up and running is configuring it to do what you want. I remember starting my first cloud server. It took about 10mins to sign up, 10mins to select a server size and operating system, and then a few days to configure it. As Clayton Christensen points out in his book, “The Innovator’s Solution“, it is the “not-good-enough” point of solution that creates innovation and can lead to disruptive innovation.

I think the range of current innovation in cloud offerings reflects this well. If we look at Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers, such as VMWare and Amazon, we see that they are trying very hard to provide value added services (eg Amazon’s Simple Message Queue, SimpleDB, etc) that simplify infrastructure configuration. Services such as Google’s AppEngine, or Heroku, which offer Platform as a Service (PaaS), take this a step further and provide platforms that scale with little or no configuration. At the other end of the spectrum we see the rise of the DevOps movement and interest in automated infrastructure management tools, such as Opscode’s Chef, which aim to automate the configuration of any server.

The cloud providers themselves have vested interest in providing value added services, as IaaS becomes increasingly commoditised. Tools such as Eucalyptus and Abiquo are going to make it increasingly easy to set up clouds and even second tier ISP’s are becoming interested in offering cloud services. The current offerings however come at a price for the user, as they create lock in to a specific cloud, and also constrain the architecture of a user’s product. If you use Google AppEngine for example, you do not have a choice of database, you have limited ability to use network services, and so on. If your application fits well with the constraints of a particular service then you can definitely reduce your time to market and infrastructure administration costs, but you pay the price in reduced flexibility in architecture and in lock-in to a provider with a specific price/service profile.

The automated configuration tools such as Chef or Puppet give you the freedom to run on any IaaS cloud, but require very detailed knowledge of server administration. They work well if you have a team of sys-admins who can set the whole thing up and run it, but they are definitely not simple to use without the sys-admin expertise.

CloudHoist aims to provide simple configuration of cloud infrastructure, without tying you in to a particular cloud provider. We aim to provide the power of the automated configuration tools, with the ease of use of the Platform as a Service providers, allowing you architecural flexibility, and the ability to use whichever cloud best fits you price and performance requirements.

The current homepage mentions pricing. Are you planning a software-as-a-service company? I’ve seen lines of code on github and it seemed an open-source projet at the time

CloudHoist uses the Pallet opensource project (which in turn uses jclouds). Pallet will continue as an open source project, and is similar in some ways to automation tools like Chef, and to Command and Control tools such as MCollective and Capistrono. The distinction is quite clear; CloudHoist provides a user interface, abstracts away the need to write scripts, and provides configuration services that package up some of the “best practices”.

We are still working on the details, but we aim to make it possible to run your custom Pallet “crates”, which are configuration functions, from within CloudHoist. This will enable advanced users to use the full power of pallet, while still having a console to provide easy access and overview. At the same time this also lowers the risk associated with a company coming to depend exclusively on CloudHoist.

Can you tell us a little bit about the back-end? Any goals on speed, (possible) real-time feature, periodic tasks, reporting, or technologies used?

Technology wise, CloudHoist will make use of many of the new features of HTML5 to provide feedback on the status of you cloud and your configuration actions. The backend is written in Clojure, a JVM language that provides many concurrency primitives that will simplify the scaling of the service.

The current site is aimed initially at configuration, but reporting is an area that would be a natural fit, especially when we implement automated scaling strategies

And the key question, when it is going to launch?

The site itself is already self hosting, in that we use a local instance of CloudHoist to manage CloudHoist on the cloud. The site is in alpha – we are accepting registrations for early access at this time. We are opening up the service to anyone that expresses a strong need for help solving their cloud infrastructure issues, and as we discover a business model that works.

We are very much believers in the Lean Startup and Customer Discovery methodologies, and we are looking to get users involved immediately – so let us know if you think this service will be of immediate benefit to you, and we’ll give you access.

Hugo Duncan tells me that while the website isn’t ready for production usage, he’s definitively open for feedback and collaboration. If you have a django, .net or rack application, he’s ready to make cloudhoist compatible and make it a compelling cloud management tool for developers. Go have a look!

VC-TV has published the videos covering the Canadian Venture Capital 2010 Conference, which was organized in Ottawa in May

Head over to the blog post for the full coverage (4 videos)