St-Valentine’s Edition — Demo Night by MTL NewTech
Romance was in the air at this month’s event
Ok, not really. But we do have mad love for Montreal’s tech and startup community, especially our partners, sponsors, demo participants and of course our volunteers. None of this happens without you guys!
Let’s dive in…
More than 150 people and several media turned out for this latest demo night at Concordia’s District 3 Innovation Center downtown. 5 impressive Montreal startups came to show off their work. First up, Aerial.
Aerial is really cool! We all know that we are surrounded by frequencies and signals pretty much everywhere we go. Broadcasters, cell towers and all kinds of other IoT enabled objects send and receive various signals. Aerial focuses on Wi-Fi signals, and specifically how they bounce off and flow around our bodies.
Any time you walk through your home, this causes distortions in the signal. If your dog runs down the hall, this too will cause a distortion in the signal, but a smaller one (unless you have a gigantic dog). This product will be able to tell from the distortions in the Wi-Fi signal what rooms in your home are occupied. It will be able to tell if you are standing or lying down in that room. It will be able to tell if a husband or a wife is home alone based on their size and walking pattern.
This has all kinds of potential applications. Most obvious would be for home security purposes. The system would know if your dog is moving around the house or if it is a human intruder. Other potential applications; let’s say I like the house a little cool and my better half likes it warmer, the system will know when one of us is home alone, and a smart home could tell the climate control system to adjust the temperature to your preference without lifting a finger.
Think of the possibilities!
I was happy to learn during demo night that a former colleague of mine is now working on the dev team at Keatext. He likes it, and says they’re a great gang to work with.
Keatext makes sense of unstructured customer feedback. What does that mean?
Most companies collect feedback from their customers, but it can often become just a data lake if they don’t have the necessary resources to actually analyse this feedback.
Enter Keatext. Through AI, they are able to perform extensive text analytics on customer comments and feedback, allowing you to see the greater trends in the data quickly and easily. This let’s you focus on the areas of most interest to your stakeholders first, by telling you clearly what those are. Smart!
If you work at a startup, you may often need help in a variety of areas. Scientists and developers don't necessarily have any skills in accounting, marketing, HR or legal. Enter CallSpot:
These guys are creating a network of resources around you that are willing to help. Individuals register on the app through their LinkedIn account. They they explain to the community what their expertise is, and provide a timetable of when they would be able to offer their services. This makes it easy to find the services you need, nearby. And it also helps you locate potential customers.
This app is currently available in the App Store for iPhone, and an Android release is coming soon (and when it does, you will find my name on there for sure!).
Do you have a smartwatch or some other wearable? Are you bored with it already? If you answered yes, The Nex Band is for you!
After 40 focus groups and multiple betas, The Nex Band team realized there was no consensus among people about what would make a killer app for wearables. So they made a smartband that you can modify on your own.
They’ve build in 5 magic buttons, which they call mods. You can program each of these 5 mods to do pretty much anything from making a call to opening your garage door. If you’re over 30, think of having 5 speed dial buttons on your home phone. Except in this case, it’s much easier to program your Nex Band than this thing was, and it does way more than just call your grandma! Check out the details here.
The 5th and final presenter for February is Lex Start. These guys work in the legal field and their mission is to help startups reduce their legal costs.
Lex Start is the place where entrepreneurs and lawyers meet. They are a forerunner in the practical applications of the Barreau du Québec’s strategic objectives. Lex Start offers start-ups turnkey legal solutions at a low cost, and helps connect entrepreneurs with the right legal experts, and other important legal resources.
If you’re a startup and you need help with contracts, liability, hiring and firing etc… you should hit them up. They’ll be able to help.
As always, after the demos there were a number of announcements from the community. A high number this time around in fact. And that’s yet another reason why it’s important for you to show up at MNT DemoNight. You never know who you will meet and what you will learn.
Stay tuned for the next DemoNight in early March and several events coming soon after.
