Tungle has released yesterday a new BlackBerry interface for its calendar group scheduling service. The interface allows users to get updates from Tungle, and then interact with the service without their laptop and Microsoft Outlook, which was up to this day the only avalaible interface to Tungle.

The new feature means that Tungle is 100% committed to business users, who use Windows and a Blackberry handset. In comparison, many “fashionable” startups are after interfaces for iPhones or other popular clients like Gmail or Google Calendar.

Also, the move has certainly a lot to do with their investors who have just partenered with RIM.

I went to StartupCampMontreal2 last week. Like the first startupcamp, it’s an initiative from business consulting company embrase.

The event gathers entrepreneurs, investors and pretty much everyone in the technology entrepreneurship community in one night of presentations. This time, 5 startups were voted by “startup gurus”; other entrepreneurs who registered in the wiki could also present their idea and product at the end of the event.

I met Mehdi Akiki who is now working full-time on yourteledoctor, also looking for a partner for the telemedecine project; Dan Simard and François Lamontagne came from Trois-Rivières to present timmyontime; Alok Mohindra and his pal Gerry from Ottawa presented a new innovative light; also the usual suspects such as Fred Brunel and Martin Dufort talking about mobile applicaitons.

camwii’s CEO introduces their screensharing application, said to be more intuitive and lighter than any other solution in the market. They have proprietary technology and patents behind camwii but also spent time making it easy. The audience asked specific questions about where he plans to take the product, but Marc Krepec said they were currently exploring 2 different audiences for the product, which was either consumers or vertical markets.

240 startup gurus, entrepreneurs, students and service providers registered for the event. The red seats in front (with red nametags) were for the startup gurus, and for the presenters.

LoyaltyMatch is a new company from Ottawa. They’ve got an experienced executive team and are tackling the problem of un-redeemed loyalty points from loyalty programs (such as Air Miles). People can trade their points or get the goods on their website; they have in fact re-created a marketplace.

I don’t use at all loyalty programs; and so can’t give any judgement about the product.

One attendee raised the question about what would happen if companies tried to lock down their customer on their program and keep them from exchanging points. Mike Ball answered that loyalty points were a liability on the companies’ books and that it should be logical that they’d open up their loyalty program. This is where I lost him; in my understanding, companies setup loyalty programs because they want their customers to keep buying their products/services and divert them from competitors; and as such, they have no incentive (at least in my opinion) to let those customers trade points and end prematurely their participation to their program because they’ve found the remaining of the points elsewhere.

Yan Simard presents healthivate, a place to compare & purchase health services. At least, that’s how he registered his project; but his presentation was geared towards surgery services (for non-critical cases). A few attendees said that it’s misleading, and he should focus on the core, not on the “It will revolutionnize healthcare” part.

He is still in the picthing phase; while there is certainly a business case, I know this will take Yan Simard a lot of time and resources to get an initial offering (as opposed to pure web plays which can take next to nothing to launch)

StartYourTube was presented by Jean-Philippe Gousse, CEO of the new video sharing website. I’ve already wrote about the product, as the name suggests, it allows anyone to create a community centered around videos uploaded by members of the site.

Jean-Philippe Gousse said in his presentation that they have around 15.000 “tubes” created, which is impressive. They also hope to get 10 times that number in one year.

Another interesting comment he also made was that the majority of those tubes came from Techcrunch and Techcrunch France traffic, which reviewed the website. I am now curious on how they plan to get traction for their product, as you can’t possibly get on techcrunch everyday.

Pictured here is Will Pate, now community manager for VenCorps. Vencorps aims to crowdsource funding of startups, with the “community” voting for submitted projects. It will be avalaible for the US & Canada, with funds coming from Spencer Trask, a NYC private equity firm.

The logic behind VenCorps is that it takes less and less funds to build a company; it also surfs on crowdsourcing trends.

There is an immediate magic appeal when thinking about “crowdsource funding”; although one should be aware that this comes after Cambrian House is being terminated. I am especially skeptical about letting people selecting a project while they don’t have any financial incentive, they won’t share risks, nor will they have an entrepreneurship-driven mind in order to make “enlightened” decisions. Nevertheless, this is an innovative project, and as such, I am quite impatient to see how it works out.

Shortly after Will Pate’s presentation, Pierre Donaldson from JLA Ventures presented pitch tips for entrepreneurs. He especially made a point about teams hiring VPs and key members all around Canada & the US; saying that projects must be local; either you do everything in the same place; either you all move to a city.

Ater the event, the team from Embrase invited people to come eat at a fast food place, right in front of the SAT.

More pictures from the event.

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.