StartupCamp Coming in November – Get Ready

startupcamp montreal

StartupCamp is a great event organized primarily by Embrase. It’s a less tech-focused unconference (versus DemoCamps and BarCamps) where a handful of startups get on stage and pitch the audience. There’s a group of investors (angels and venture capitalists) who provide feedback, and there’s the overall audience of entrepreneurs, etc. there as well.

There have been two StartupCamps in Montreal so far (I missed the second one), but I think it’s a good opportunity to take a more “business-focused” look at startups. One of the biggest challenges for startups is raising capital. I think StartupCamp can help.

The next StartupCamp is on November 27th – so it’s still some time away – but you might as well sign-up now and save the date.

There will be two speakers – Austin Hill and Patrick Lor. Both are great guys. Both have tons of experience. And both can present the pants off of almost anyone I know.

There’s also going to be a panel discussion with a handful of entrepreneurs that are currently running funded companies. I’ll be involved in that, along with Sebastien Provencher and Marc Gingras. They’ll be adding a couple more people soon to the list.

Right now, if you’re a startup and you want the chance to get on stage in front of an audience, and learn a lot about how to present for investment, you should submit your company for review. A group of folks will take a look and pick the 5 companies that get to present.

All the details are here: http://www.barcampmontreal.org/wiki/StartupCampMontreal3

You should definitely consider attending and getting a chance to meet a lot of the entrepreneurs, investors and business folk that live and breathe the Montreal startup community on a daily basis.


Enterprise 2.0 Startups – Know Your Market

I started my first company in 1996. A couple years later that company morphed from a service business (offering web design and development services) into a product business with the launch of our web-based project management application. Those were the early years of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In fact, we were referred to as an ASP (Application Service Provider) back then, and the biggest hot button issues were the fact that implementing web-based / hosted solutions was extremely new, security, and SLAs (Service Level Agreements.)

Truth be told, those were the early days of Enterprise 2.0.

Nowadays, very few companies are worried about hosting mission critical applications outside of their own networks. Security is less of a concern, because companies are generally comfortable with Web security. And SLAs still exist, but they’re not the predominant issue. Most companies understand that web-based / hosted applications stay up fairly well, but nothing is perfect.

But even with many of the biggest issues resolved over the last 10 years, companies are still not adopting Enterprise 2.0 at the pace you would expect. And many Enterprise 2.0 startups can’t get the traction they need.

So what’s up?

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Adding Disqus and AddThis to Make Blog More Social

Disqus

AddThis

It’s almost impossible to keep track of all the latest widgets, gadgets, plugins and features available for bloggers. New stuff is coming out daily, which is understandable, there are millions and millions of bloggers, and many of them are very dedicated to blogging — that’s a nice market with interesting opportunities.

Few companies have really capitalized on bloggers (except those helping them generate revenue). I expect a lot of those that offer “nice add-ons” will fall off the radar eventually. But some will survive, do well, and ultimately get acquired.

Blogs are meant to be social things. (Just ask folks like Chris Brogan and Liz Strauss.) Blog success can be measured by many things (and it varies for each blog owner) but the social nature and social quality of a blog is certainly one measure. I would measure the social nature of a blog through a few things — including comments and content sharing.

With that in mind, I’ve added two features to improve Instigator Blog’s “socialness”:

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About Ben Yoskovitz
I recently joined GoInstant as VP Product. GoInstant changes how we use the web, making it shareable like never before.

I'm also a Founding Partner at Year One Labs, an early stage accelerator in Montreal. Previously I founded Standout Jobs (and sold it). I'm a hands-on startup guy, helping companies grow successfully from the idea forward. You can reach me at byosko at gmail dot com.

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The opinions and commentary on this site are mine and mine alone. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of my employer, GoInstant.