1 – Cozimo
2 – Tungle
3 – Streametrics
4 – iGotcha Media
5 – YourTeleDoctor

Selected companies will each give a 10 minute presentation, then they will receive 5 to 10 minutes of feedback and questions from the audience.

There are still “paying tickets” available (service providers @ 200$ and sponsors @ 1000$) so if you want to participate as a service provider or as a sponsor, please do not hesitate as there might be  startups looking for help (lawyers, accountants, consultant and so on).

Non presenting startups will still have the chance to present their company informally so please join us!

I spoke with the Embrase folks whom are organizing the event along other very fine and interesting folks yesterday but Sebastien Provencher got the scoop out first.

This will be an exciting event where 5 lucky startups will be choosen and will be invited to “pitch” in front of an audience.

As most “startup” related events, this will take place at the SAT [map] on January 23rd, 2008 (6-10pm).

Think of it as a BarCamp for Entrepreneur. It will be very interesting and if you want to come, hurry up as seating is limited. You can register using EventBrite.

My startup, YulNews will participate and I hope to be chosen as one of the lucky ones but even if I’m not selected, I know this will be a great even to socialize and meet great people. Come on, come all!

But we can do much better. Students from universities are still unseen, the image of Montréal as a startup city is unknown outside the local early adopters, with Quebecers going to other Canadian cities or to the US, there are still too much Montréalers and companies who are not aware of what is being done in the city, and most importantly, the level of local talent, skills and experience must be raised to an international level.

To make it happen, our answer is Blitzweekend, a brand-new, innovative, shifting event, for early 2008. Inspired from startupweekend, RailsRumble, mashpits, Ycombinator school, the event is a challenge to create a product in 48 hours, from design to deployment. It is made now possible by open source technologies, rapid development frameworks, and libraries freely available on the Internet.

The main goal of the event is to provide an opportunity for talented and bright people to build something in a relatively short time span. There are also secondary objectives:

• create an environment for rapid learning, success, and failures,
• provide an opportunity for entrepreneurs, developers and creatives to network and connect,
• get a « playground » to see breakthrough technologies and innovative designs emerging,
• raise the level of cutting-edge talent in Montréal,
• raise the profile of Montréal as a startup platform,
• bridge the gap between the French and English tech communities in Montréal.

If you want more information, I encourage you to visit the official site. http://blitzweekend.com

So… every event needs help and we’re looking for sponsors and volunteers. As far as sponsors, anything will help: food, drinks, winning prize and of course money as we’ll probably need to rent some space. If you think you can come up with sponsors, please let me know (denis@quebecvalley.com) and I will forward the information to the organizing committee.

Media coverage is also welcomed so I’d appreciate if all of you could spread the word. We want this first event to be as big as possible in order to make any subsequent events even bigger. Finally, if you are an angel or a VC firm, please let us know as well as this is a great opportunity to discover local startups.

From my experience, I believe that starting a business is 80% of yourself (your time, efforts, knowledge, promotion, selling yourself, etc.) and 20% money. That 20% money actually helps you move closer to the 90/10 as you can delegate some work to other people (since you now have money to hire someone). When you get a lot of money (big VC deal) then you can work 100% on the project while not having to worry (too much at least) about money.

So why get $5M if you don’t really know what to do with it? It’s definitively welcomed when you want to expand aggressively, but it is too much money just to come up with a deliverable product. Sure, I’d like to have the latest clustering / blade system and a big SAN but why now? These days, it seems like big guys are buying smaller guys so why worry about growth? Let the big guys worry about it when they’ll buy you. They have the money anyway. If you really need storage, consider Amazon’s S3 (Twitter is using it), DabbleDB or even Google base (entire sites are using it). If you need bandwidth, consider unmetered hosting.

Kevin Rose for example, started Digg with $2000, a web developer working for $10 per hour, and a $99 per month hosting plan. They did raise some money (at least $8+M) but now they have a much larger team and a lot of salaries to pay…