What happened to MontrealTechWatch?

Ben wrote a post about reviving MontrealTechWatch and how the Montreal startup community needs MontrealTechWatch now more than ever.

Heri started MTW about the same time that we started writing StartupNorth. He has become a good friend of mine over the years and is someone who always has the best intentions of the community at heart in everything he does.

The main complaint is that there just aren’t any posts on MontrealTechWatch anymore. The blog which was once the center of the Montreal startup community is now more or less dead. The simple reason? Heri just doesn’t have the time to blog anymore. I think there is more to it than just that however.

StartupNorth might have met the same fate as MontrealTechWatch this year if David Crow hadn’t joined in to bear the brunt of the burden. Since the sale of my company last year I, like Heri, have had practically no time to devote to the blog, and Jonas was similarly stretched for time. In the case of MontrealTechWatch, Heri didn’t have a Dave or Jonas to put their shoulders to the wheel. The community that was once so loving lost its leader and didn’t even realize it.

So, what’s going on here? Do we need startup communities? Do you want a community? Are people really willing to pitch in and spread around the work? Do communities need community, or do they really need leaders? How do we create more MontrealTechWatch’s and keep them around?

There is a push in Montreal to make some plans and to get a group together to revive what was MontrealTechWatch. Montreal does not need some coordinate effort, it needs someone to open their email client and send Heri a message “Hey, can I get an account on MTW as a writer? I would like to make some posts, perhaps profile some of the amazing startups we have here in town and cover some events.”. Then, when you have the account: just start posting. Just do it.

Find what it is about startups, community and your city that you love and then do something about it. Share it. That is what Heri did and that is what we need more of. Nobody else is going to step up. As soon as you start writing about what is happening in the community, you will quickly learn what else the community needs in terms of events and content.

The problem, as Heri found out, is that this is hard and very unrewarding work. People rarely say thanks, and even less often step up to actually help.

Heri put his heart in to that blog and he didn’t ask for anything in return. This is your chance to show him that you understood what he was doing and that it meant something to you. Pick up the torch, but please don’t kill MTW by committee.

Meet The Woz

Ontario Centres of Excellence are hosting their innovation-to-commercialization conference again in Toronto. The OCE Discovery 10 conference is happening May 17-18, 2010 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. They have a history of bringing great keynote speakers including Clayton Christiansen, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Sir Terry Matthews. 2010 is no different, the OCE team is bringing Steve Wozniak to Toronto.

Sure we know Steve from the Apple I and Apple II computers. You might even know him from Dancing with the Stars. You probably didn’t know that the Gipper awarded him the National Medal of Technology, the highest honor bestowed America’s leading innovators, in 1986. And Steve Wozniak is still working on new technology. He’s a the chief scientist at Fusion-io working flash-based memory architectures for storage. He’s on a member of the board for member of the board of directors for Jacent, a developer of cost-effective telephony solutions, Danger, Inc., developer of an end-to-end wireless Internet platform, Ripcord Networks and others.

He’s an engineers engineer and knows a thing or two about tech startups. He’ll be at OCE Discovery from 2:00pm – 3:30pm and this includes a book signing opportunity (Mac nerds rejoice, even more impressive if you have an Apple I or Apple II to get signed).

“Every engineer—and certainly every engineering student—should read this book. It is about the thrill of invention, the process of making the world a better place, and the purity of entrepreneurship. I, Woz is the personal computer generation’s version of The Soul of a New Machine. It is, in a nutshell, the engineer’s manifesto. I hope that the so-called “innovation experts” and MBAs choke when they read it.” – Guy Kawasaki

The rest of the OCE Discovery 10 schedule is packed full of startups, policy makers, innovators, academics. We’ll be hosting a DemoCamp, while not currently as cool as the “Ontario’s Next Top Young Entrepreneur Start-up Pitch” happening on Monday, May 17 which will give grant the winning startup a “non-recourse micro-loan of up to $18,000 ($6,000 per team member) to launch a new start up, have access to advisory services and have the opportunity to network with key mentors and private investors”. It is a great opportunity for local startups to demo their wares and do demand generation with local investors, government agencies and businesses.

We’ll be doing a bunch of work to clarify what type of startups can maximize the value from presenting and start accepting nominations for demos in the next couple of weeks. What DemoCamp for details.

Discovery DemoCamp
Tuesday, May 18, 2010 3:15pm-4:15pm EDT
Inspired by Toronto’s Tech community, see showcase technologies presented in 5-minute demos by some of the communities hottest inspiring web, mobile and social media startups.

Calling all enterprise startups: Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference hosts a startup launchpad every year that has proven to be a great way for high quality Enterprise 2.0 focused startups to get in front of a group of potential partners, analysts, press and customers. In return, the Enterprise 2.0 conference audience has a chance to see the most promising and innovative enterprise Social Business software coming to the market. This has always been my favorite part of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

I will be one of the judges this year and would love to see some Canadian companies in the running. Brainpark was one of the finalists last year.

To enter the first round of judging, simply tweet about your startup using the #e2conf-lp tag!

The competition invites all companies and developers, large and small, to enter their application. Their is no fee for entry, nor do do you need to be an exhibitor at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (although if you are, that’s cool too). The bar for entry is set very low – simply Tweet to #e2conf-lp and tell us in 140 characters or less why you are ‘Launch Pad worthy.

You have until April 19th to complete your Twitter pitch – we’ll close submissions at the end of the day. Upon Tweeting your entry to #e2conf-lp, the Launch Pad Jury will make note of your entry. Our Jury will then vote to whittle down the Twitter submissions to 8.