Montreal Tech Watch

We held the first edition of Tap In Tuesday at Café des Éclusiers last tuesday. It’s a mentoring event where one experienced entrepreneur will spend time with new entrepreneurs, discuss about his path and problems, and provides potential problems that attendees might be currently facing. In this case, Sébastien Provencher (@sebprovencher) was the experienced entrepreneur; telling how he went from the original idea, how the original Praized team was formed, how they looked for funding in the United States but finally managed a deal right here in Montréal, and how Praized managed for the past 3 years, with now the third iteration of their product, Needium. Sébastien was very open and didn’t hold out details that others might keep private, such as his discussions with VCs, the problems they faced in product development, the ups and downs at Praized, and also the excitement of building a product.

There were many questions by attendees, mostly about financing how-tos, relationships with VCs, building a startup in Québec. It was an opportunity for a dozen of entrepreneurs to get precise answers. This is not always the case for events like StartupDrinks, Founders & Funders, or any other event I’ve seen in Montréal, since most of the time, there is a long time dedicated to introductions and general small talk, then the inevitable discussion on “how can we work together”. Here, the focus is about learning and everyone is welcomed to ask questions about the “entrepreneur process”.

My impression is that this first edition was successful and that’s also the general feedback I had by talking with attendees. The fact that there is no other similar event in Montréal, and the fact that we had very precise questions confirmed this.

Gabriel also has a more detailed report, which I invite you to read

There are also more pictures here

Thanks to all the attendees for coming, thanks to Gabriel for leading the event, thanks again to Sébastien Provencher for his welcomed generosity.

Company: WebDirect

Position: Flash Engineer job

Responsibilites and Tasks:
The job will consist of building UI interfaces for embedded, resource-constrained platforms. This position is to be filled as soon as possible. The minimal duration of the assignment is 6 months, renewable.

Requirements:
The ideal candidate would have worked on automotive head units, media players, digital photo frames, smartphones, set top boxes and such like, developing user level applications and the user interface (UI) for companies such as Visteon, Denso, Delphi, Harman etc. The other type of products could be media players, set-top boxes and digital picture frames.

The mandatory skills are the following:

• Have prior experience with HMI (Human Machine Interface) development for automotive head units or tablet PCs or smart computing / telephony devices
• At least 5-6 years of relevant experience
• Desired: Experience working with any of the leading automotive electronics or infotainment companies.

Important note: Just Adobe Flash List experience on a Windows platform is not enough – the candidate must have at least 2 solid examples / projects where he used this framework in an embedded resource-constrained platform.

To apply, please send your CV to info [at] webdirectcompany.com

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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!

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.

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.

Feeling Software has released recently a new product, Omnipresence 3D Pro Design. It’s a software which allows security planners to view and optimize virtually camera placement.

I could explain the software with a full review, but this video is much more efficient

It’s interesting since when I met first the Feeling Software team when they were doing general 3D work, such as 3D graphics and modeling. They were already doing architectural work, but were not specialized in security. I find it’s a good example on how a company strategically realigns and refocuses, based on its forces and unique advantages.

Here’s a Q&A with Joshua Koopferstock (@Joshkoop), in charge of marketing at Feeling Software:

This seems to be the third product you are releasing since your “realignement”. Can u tell us more about the market and FeelingSoftware sales? Or at least sales objectives?

Feeling Software’s specialty has always been in 3D graphics and computer vision software. Since the beginning of 2009, we’ve been entirely focused on the physical security space, bringing in an expertise traditionally reserved for video games and simulators to this new industry. The three products we’ve released: Omnipresence 3D Security Platform (a Command and Control platform for security operations), Omnipresence 3D Pro Design (for security planning), and iGuard (a mobile surveillance application) complement each other well, and are part of the Omnipresence 3D product suite that we are continuing to actively develop. Our sales focus is on critical security facilities such as airports, universities, prisons, etc.

Can you name any names you can disclose (current customers)?

One client that should be familiar to all readers of MTW is the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. They are deploying our Omnipresence 3D Security Platform as we speak, to allow them to conduct faster investigations of incidents, and react more effectively in case of emergency situations.

Fun question: Omnipresence could be tied up with facial recognition software. If the u.k. Governememt wants to sign with you to help monitoring its 10s millions of cameras and wants to track and find citizens anytime, is it technically possible?

Yes and no. Tracking people anytime, such as when they go into private areas like homes would be very difficult to do, not to mention undesired by almost everyone. There has been a lot of innovation with facial recognition in the past few years, and this is starting to be applied in some cases to identify people on Most Wanted lists, such as when they pass through the door of a train station or airport. I believe we’ll see an expansion of this technology to more public spaces in the next few years, as it is extremely useful for police when investigating crimes.

Oh, and the UK “only” has about 4-5 million surveillance cameras (see: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/factcheck+how+many+cctv+cameras/2291167)

Compagnie: mTrip

Position: Développeur ruby

Responsibilités et Tâches:
Visant un marché mondial, mTrip développe des guides de voyage pour smart phones (iPhone et Android) tirant profit des nouvelles tendances technologiques et culturelles.

En collaboration avec l’équipe marketing, le développeur aura pour mission de concevoir une application web en Ruby.

L’application web, partie intégrante de l’offre destinée aux voyageurs, présentera des fonctionnalités avancées en relation avec les plateformes mobiles.

Exigences

• Très bonne connaissance de MySQL
• Bonnes connaissances des langages de programmation tels que PHP et Ruby
• Connaissance des standards Web (XHTML, CSS, XML, etc.)
• Bonne connaissance de jQuery
• Motivation, Autonomie, Esprit analytique
• Intérêt marqué pour les technologies
• Compréhension de l’anglais
• 3 années d’études universitaires

Devenir Candidat
Envoyez votre CV et votre lettre de motivation à jobs [a] mtrip.com

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The compiled survey results aren’t all out yet, but a first glance from last week’s survey shows that a mentorship program was the #1 most wanted, well beyond other initiatives such as organizing democamps, getting more investors, or getting a startup school or house.

It’s a surprising result. For me, it shows that there are already many developing their projects or already having a product online, but they lack guidance and experienced advice on how to tackle obstacles, or even basic advice on how to properly start their tech project.

Since a survey is useless without action, we’ve discussed about setting up a mentorship event. It’s called Tap in Tuesdays and is instigated by Gabriel Sundaram, whom you’ve surely met if you’ve been to various entrepreneur events. The first event is scheduled next week, at Café des Éclusiers (we’re back!).

Sébastien Provencher (@sebprovencher) will be the mentor at the first event, bringing with him 12 years of experience in the search and local business. With the Praized Media team, he has created active online communities, raised $1m seed round, launched 3 successive products, and secured partnerships with Yellow Pages and Google. Entrepreneurs, marketers, or even those of you who have a project in mind but can’t really see how to jumpstart the project would greatly benefit from a Q&A and discussion with Sebastien Provencher.

Of course, this is only the first event, and there are no elaborate plans on how relationships will be setup. We want to make is informal for the first time, and then see how it can be improved at the next sessions. Gabriel has more information on the event’s website.

If you want to come, get a spot by emailing tapintuesday@gmail.com

hope to see you there!