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Archives for January 2008

Shel Israel on Twitter

January 30, 2008 by Michael Boyle

Late last week Shel Israel wrote an An Open Letter to the Twitter Guys. He’s right on, and his post stands in stark contrast to the chatter a couple of weeks ago that Twitter proves that the only important thing is to aggregate users – leaving aside a biz plan for later.

No one seems to care about mobile Twitter (which seems insane to me), but my 250/week limit was reached in the early evening today – Tuesday. The limit is simply a cost-cutting measure by a company bleeding money on every tweet. The problem for Twitter is that I can easily defect – everyone I get messages from (more or less) is on Facebook, and I can subscribe to their status updates on my mobile – half the time they come from Twitter anyhow.

Part of the problem may be that US companies are backed by US VC – and so they focus primarily on US adoption and usage. The social networking world in general makes that a very dangerous position to take – social network adoption rates are generally lower in the US than most other “rich” countries. A company that is primarily concerned with US results for a US exit will throw the rest of us under the bus pretty quickly.

Tags: Facebook, Mobile, Web 2.0

Standout Jobs has launched

January 28, 2008 by Michael Boyle

Montreal’s own Standout Jobs has launched Reception this morning. Founders Ben Yoskovitz, Fred Ngo, and Austin Hill are in California for DEMO 2008, where they’re presenting on Wednesday morning.

Standout Jobs is all about providing companies with advanced tools to use for recruiting. Companies can use Standout Jobs to easily build customized recruiting micro-sites to publicize their openings and provide a rich experience for prospective employees, enhancing their ability to land the best candidates. As well, their backend gives companies enhanced tools to get their job postings out to a variety of different job sites. (More information at Mashable).

I think Standout Jobs is going to do very well both at DEMO and with customers. It addresses a real pain point for small and medium size businesses and I am sure it will pay for itself after one or two good hires. Congratulations to the whole team!

Tags: Business, Montreal, Startup

Problems in the world of Facebook Apps

January 27, 2008 by Michael Boyle

Alec Saunders has written a great post about the increasing backlash Facebook App developers are facing recently: F8ce the music. I know for my part I have been drastically reducing my adds of Facebook apps and have removed and blocked ones that don’t offer me something fun or interesting in a way that I consider fair or ethical.

Alec also points out that in the dev forums, “suggestions that developers build useful or richer applications are scoffed at by those who view Facebook as solely an entertainment platform for college students.” In fact this may point to the most important problem with the app platform at this time. Developers with that attitude are completely missing the boat. They don’t understand Facebook, the value proposition that it represents, and are ignorant of the demographics of Facebook. The idea that Facebook is just or even primarily for college students is factually incorrect, and a developer who assumes that to be the case will and should fail.

Tags: Facebook, Social Networks

New World HQ for mikel.org

January 25, 2008 by Michael Boyle

stationc.jpg

I haven’t mentioned it here yet but earlier this week I signed on to be an anchor member of Montreal’s own Station C co-working space. In the old days, there were desk-rental outfits where people could, for a small fee, go and work back when working at home was not respectable or even possible for most people.

Co-working is different than that. Co-working is explicitly about not only the facilities themselves but the community using the facilities as well. I’ve been discussing this idea with one the founders of Station C, Patrick Tanguay for several years now, and I’m really excited that he and and Daniel Mireault have managed to get Station C off the ground. And even more, that they have succeeded in landing a prime location and doing a top-notch job in terms of furnishings and recruiting. Judging by the list of people I know who will be joining us, it’s going to be a fantastic crew.

Tags: Community, Montreal

StartupCampMontreal Roundup

January 24, 2008 by Michael Boyle

Last night was Montreal’s first StartupCamp, which was held at the fabulous facilities of the SAT on St-Laurent just below Ste-Catherine. It was a very well-run event that featured 5 interesting startups and a couple of great keynote speeches bracketing the startup presentations.

Sylvain Carle liveblogged Graham Hill’s keynote so I won’t write much about it other than to say that guys like Graham are important to listen to. The message is essentially quite simple – listen to and respect your clients/customers, don’t complicate things, and be wary of money and strings.

The startup presentations were generally good though not great. In a couple of cases the products being presented were significantly more interesting than their founders’ presentations, and frankly that’s an important problem that Montreal-based entrepreneurs are going to have to improve on as we continue to develop the web/tech startup space in the city.

First up was Cozimo, which is an online graphical asset sharing application that allows companies to create collaborative workspaces in which to work on graphics (and video) files in an iterative fashion with virtual teams and clients. There are a lot of collaboration tools out there, but having gone to the site after the event last night, Cozimo is clearly raising the bar in terms of the overall quality of the experience and the richness of the tool they provide. Unfortunately the presentation given didn’t make that nearly obvious enough – they should have devoted most of their time to simply demoing the site rather than talking about it. Cozimo is going to be at DEMO 08 next week, and I think they’ll do much better in that very strict format.

The second presenter was Marc Gingras from Tungle, who is also a veteran of DEMO. I already knew something about Tungle having watched the video of their demo at DEMO (!), and Marc is a very good speaker whose product and value proposition came across very well. Tungle is all about providing tools to coordinate meetings beyond the corporate network, and from what I can tell, they’re getting a lot of the details right. One of the questions following his presentation was important though – if most people don’t know that meeting management functions are built into Outlook (and that is a key point in Tungle’s presentation) it’s not clear how making it even more remote from users is going to foster adoption. You can take that further still – I don’t remember the last time I tried to set up a meeting consisting of 100% Outlook/Windows users – but nevertheless Tungle plans to go to market without any real solution for Mac users let alone Linux folks.

Next up was Streametrics who have a solution that enhances the ability to measure and monitor online video presentations. Although it’s pretty clear that the ability to measure online video usage is important, I wasn’t at all clear on how Streametrics can really enhance this in practice. Their dashboard seemed relatively interesting, but for such a solution to work it has to be platform agnostic, I would think, and Streametrics confused me as to whether they are or are not able to integrate with all of the existing video sharing sites (i.e., YouTube, Facebook, etc.). Nevertheless it’s probably a good target for a VC because the exit strategy is clear – sell out to one of the incumbent monitoring companies whether or not the tech is ready for prime time.

Fourth was iGotcha Media, a company that is trying to establish itself in the interactive display medium. One of the founders presented and did a pretty good job, although comparing adoption rates of interactive displays to the Internet was a big mistake – it’s not a reasonable comparison because the scope of the audience of end-users is radically different. Although iGotcha has some interesting clients, it seems that their model is essentially an agency/service approach, which can be profitable but is an entirely different proposition for a VC.

Last up was YourTeleDoctor.com. There’s not much to say about it, frankly. The presentation was distracting (although I was happy that at least one presentation was given in French), and the business itself needs a radical re-think before it stands any chance of success. I have worked in their field for a dozen years, on and off, and I know that they won’t be able to do a credible public launch for a long time – there are too many structural issues in the Canadian health care environment that they don’t seem to be addressing in any way. Most importantly, their message seems that they will enable clients to engage with their existing physicians – but in fact the service will only be an option for physicians who opt out of the public system entirely. In general, they don’t seem to understand their business environment very well, which is a killer for a startup.

The end of the evening was given to Albert Lai, a serial entrepreneur from Toronto who gave a fantastic, tongue-in-cheek, self-deprecating presentation about how he is a huge failure (not!) and how failing quickly has allowed him to be pretty lucky. I think some of the audience didn’t really get the art of his presentation – but it was one of the best conference keynotes I’ve ever seen.

Update: Denis at Quebec Valley has also posted a recap of last night’s event

Update 2: Here’s Heri Rakotomalala’s summary from Montreal Tech Watch.

Tags: Business, Internet, Montreal, Startup

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