Montreal-based Identi.ca recently closed funding from Montrealstartup, as I wrote yesterday on GigaOm. Sometimes, when I chat with people for a story, they have a lot to say that can’t make it into the 300 or so words of a blog like GigaOm.

Here’s the transcript of the chat I had with Evan Prodromou, the company’s founder, and Daniel Drouet of MSU. Evan’s travelled and coded pretty much everywhere, and started Wikitravel; and Daniel built out the île sans fil wireless network in Montreal. They had some great insights into the future of micromessaging in general.

Bitcurrent: Why are you investing in an open source micromessaging platform, when even Twitter, a closed-source platform with millions of users, is baffled at how to make money

Daniel Drouet: Before making an investment we try to understand where the true value of a service lies. Many online services require scale to succeed, typically millions of users and page views, but we don’t think that is the case with Identica. If you look at Evan’s answer to this question Identica is much more about providing an organization or community with a platform that can be adapted to suit their needs. So it’s not about who has the most users, it’s about providing a valuable service to many smaller groups.

Evan Prodromou: I’ll answer this one, even though I shouldn’t: we’ve got commercialization options that Twitter doesn’t. Because we’re Open Source, we can do commercial, enterprise, and public Web implementations on a fee basis. Because we’re federated, we can make a hosted service that works either for public use, for private group use, or some combination of the two. Those are two places Twitter just can’t go.

Bitcurrent: Why open source?

[Read more]

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.

On Saturday, I hung out at Barcamp in Montreal. Basically show-and-tell for geeks, with everything from new applications to the doom of DRM to pretty much anything technically or culturally active.

One person asked me how I defined “nerd.” I suggested that it’s a person who gets significantly more enthusiastic about a specific subject than their cultural surroundings deems appropriate and resists a dampening of that enthusiasm, usually by denigrating the status quo.

Pretty much like a cult. Mea culpa.

It was a great event. Montrealtechwatch has some pictures and a synopsis. I had a very interesting discussion with the folks at Cakemail (helped greatly by input from Ian over at Syntenic.) Cakemail is a product of Montreal’s thecodekitchen startup, which I wound up writing about over on WebWorkerDaily.

At one point I got up and showed some Coradiant to the crowd to fill in a gap; a bit hectic, but the audience is so web-savvy they understood a lot of it right away.

For future Barcamps in Montreal, check out the Wiki. Evan, the organizer, tells me the next one will be a Canada-wide one held in Montreal in the early spring.

(I think my favourite time-waster was the Powerpoint Karaoke, in which victims participants get up and deliver a presentation they’ve never seen before. Very funny stuff, particularly when you’re reprising an RIAA slide deck to a room full of people who think a CD is what games come on.)