The folks from Embrase are working hard on an upcoming Startupcamp in Montreal. An impressive 27 companies have signed up already for the chance to pitch, meet, and learn. And startupcamp Montreal 1 had a total of 180 attendees.

Informal events like Barcamp and Startupcamp are great; they tend to bring together the strange and sublime alongside the polished and driven. I remember watching a scruffy developer show something, half-ashamed, apologizing for the UI and mumbling uncertainly. But what he’d built was astonishing. This kind of not-realizing-how-cool-it-is happens a lot.

I talked with organizer Phil Telio about the event. “We’re excited to have this combination of seasoned speakers, eager entrepreneurs, and startup veterans in one place,” he said. “The first event was a huge success and it’s a testament to the thriving Canadian startup community.”

I’m listed as a Guru for the event, which I think means I help judge the various pitches. Or it could be I drink too much of Montreal’s immensely-superior-to-Redbull energy drink.

Certainly, it’s become easier to build a prototype to impress. Scaling is less of an issue with on-demand components; most monitoring tools are free or near to it; transaction processing through Paypal or Google Checkout is a snap; and frameworks like Ruby and Flex make interfaces that don’t suck, even for non-designers.

The companies slated to present include:

• Vencorps, a part of powered by Cambrian House applying crowdsourcing to startups. Basically Project Greenlight incubator.
• Startyourtube, which looks like Ning-meets-Youtube. Curious to see how this is different from Youtube’s existing personalized sites.
• Camwii, a screen sharing service like Webex that reduces all the complexity of what’s being shared down to a sliding window. And I thought it was a new Nintendo gadget.
• Healthivate, which while still stealthy sounds like Healtheon-redux meets Google Health (reminds me of Marissa Mayer’s famous “I’m feeling Yucky button” joke.) Hope founder Yan Simard has read The New New Thing.
• Loyaltymatch, which seeks to unite people with excess loyalty points with those who want some. Bit of a gray market there, and many loyalty programmes put specific constraints on selling things (like flights) for money. But it’ll be interesting for another, macroeconomic reason: Claim rates on many loyalty programs are low (relying on consumer laziness and unattractive offers like restricted travel times) — disintermediating this with the Internet will change the economics of prizes and loyalty programs as claim rates climb.

Looking forward to hearing their stories, and to finding out more from the other attendees. I’m sure the guys from MTW will be there recording all the goings-on, too.