Montreal

There are 68 posts filed in Montreal (this is page 8 of 23).

Year One Labs launches

Year One LabsIn case you missed it on TechCrunch, Year One Labs launched today.  Year One Labs is a startup incubator/accelerator in Montreal with a great team: 

This a team that is deeply steeped in the Montreal software/internet/infrastructure startup scene. They have a combination of deep technical chops plus the necessary hands-on operations with early stage companies looking for a scalable business model with customers.

If this isn’t enough they’ve surrounded themselves with great advisors including Dan “I’m Everywhere Man” Martell, Rails core team member and Shopify founder Tobias Lütke and others.

The Year One Labs Program

It’s an interesting program that provides:

  • $50k, issued in tranches based on milestones
  • Four partners who will work alongside you and your team
  • An international network of mentors
  • Direct access to Angel investors and VCs, both 1-on-1 and during our Demo Day events
  • Free rent, Internet, coffee etc. in the Year One Labs space

In exchange for “a minority stake in your startup, typically between 10-20% under standard Series Seed terms”.

NextMontreal.com launches – "news and opinion on technology and startups"

NextMontreal.com is going live today. It is the result of a push by Ben Yoskovitz to create a new source of information for the Montreal community after MontrealTechWatch went dormant over a year ago.

Why now?
When first thinking about this project, Ben wrote:

When the site was active it provided a great deal of exposure to Montreal, and helped build a stronger community. There’s a lot going on in Montreal for tech startups and entrepreneurs, but without adequate reporting, too much of it doesn’t get the attention deserved.

At that time, MontrealTechWatch had been more or less dead for over a year and the tech community was very quickly gathering momentum again.

What about MontrealTechWatch?
In the time since Ben began working on NextMontreal.com, Heri started blogging regularly on MontrealTechWatch again. I advocated for the community to restart MontrealTechWatch, so I was glad to see that. The existence of two community sites in Montreal will cause some confusion, but I think it is fine. Both sites compliment eachother, have very different operating models, and will most likely each find specific audiences within the Montreal tech and startup community.

The role of community sites
There is a broader discussion that we need to have about the role of community blogs in Canada’s tech hubs. We need blogs which aggregate people, ideas and events in order to showcase the activity in places like Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Quebec City and Atlantic Canada. There are cool things happening in all of these places, you just have to scratch the surface to see what is going on.

Running a community site is hard though, and it takes dedication. NextMontreal will be testing a new model, which will hopefully bring scale to this concept and a broader set of voices to the community.

No matter what, Montreal should count itself lucky to have so many people who are so passionate about making the startup community in the city thrive. Most do it for little or no direct reward, and those are exactly the people you want behind the wheel.

My favourite flavour Vanilla Forums

Vanilla Forums 2

Congratulations to the team at Vanilla Forums. In the past year they’ve attended TechStars in Boulder, moved to Montreal, and released version 2 of Vanilla Forums. What is Vanilla?

“Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable community forum.

Over 350,000 sites use Vanilla Forums to manage feedback, spark discussion, and make customers smile.”

There are competitors ranging from bbPress, phpBB, and punBB (like others we’re torn between bbPress and Vanilla – the proxyConnect plugin allows us to integrate Vanilla with WordPress). But Vanilla is a leading solution offering a great user experience, simple customization and hosting with a large user community. Plus they’re funded by our friends at Montreal Startup which makes them an easy choice.