The Praized Blog

Montreal Gazette’s Roberto Rocha writes about the effervescent Montreal Web ecosystem today and the Praized team is featured. Excerpts:

But now Montreal is witnessing an Internet renaissance. New Web companies are sprouting up and venture-capital firms and “angel” investors who fund early-stage ideas are starting to pay attention, sowing the seeds of a new economic sector in the city. The activity is being driven not by government subsidies or by tax incentives, but by a desire to create something new and to meet like-minded people who see the Internet as the great new business frontier. (…)

Inspired by the collaborative nature of the Internet, local geeks with bright ideas started meeting at informal, community-organized events called BarCamps. The global movement that began in the Silicon Valley was the grassroots retort to stuffy, invitation-only tech conferences. In a BarCamp, computer whizzes show the first drafts of their garage projects to anyone who will listen. (…)

In a nondescript downtown office, Harry Wakefield and Sébastien Provencher are having one of their final meetings before taking their own startup, Praized Media, global. Their walls are barren save for an expanding pile of empty Guru cans by the windows and diagrams scribbled with the lingo of the new Internet economy - words like widgets, Ruby on Rails and tags.

“These kinds of get-togethers help good ideas bubble to the top,” said Provencher, who met his co-founders at YULbiz, a monthly gathering for business bloggers. Through their BarCamp connections, they assembled a team convincing enough to raise $1 million in venture capital from Garage Technology Ventures, a Silicon Valley VC firm that opened a Montreal office. Established industry groups “haven’t clued in to the fact that there’s a vibrant Web community here,” Provencher said. (…)

Praized Media is also mentioned in this list of Montreal networking venues and start-ups.

Yesterday night, portions of an interview with Sylvain Carle (Praized Media’s CTO) and myself were shown on the national news on Radio-Canada, Canada’s French public television network. We talk about Facebook and social media. You can see the results here (in French). I believe a second portion of this feature will be broadcast tonight at 6:25pm on the Montreal news.

I’m finally back from my vacation and caught up with my e-mails. Tonight, I’ll be attending the first ever Facebookcamp in Toronto (also called Facebook Developer Garage in Facebook).

Toronto was for the longest time the city with the most Facebook users but was recently overthrown by London. “Canadians account for more than 10 per cent of the site’s total population and according to web measurement firm ComScore, in June 2007, 11.4 million Canadians logged onto Facebook, compared with only 343,000 in the same period last year.”

Initiated by my friend Colin Smilie, who recently left Trader Media Canada to start his own business, the event has now grown into humongous proportion with 383 confirmed guests signing up by word-of-mouth in the last few weeks. The un-conference is at MaRS Discovery District. BTW, my friend Sylvain Carle is organizing a Facebookcamp Montreal this Fall.

What it means: yet another proof of the strength of social media. By starting the event, Colin managed to get the attention of the Facebook people (who will be presenting tonight and are sponsoring the conference) and signed up almost 400 people, a large crowd by any measure. If you’re attending and you’d like to connect with me, shoot me an e-mail ( seb AT praized.com).