Laurent Maisonnave

While doing our startup interviews at the LeWeb’10 conference, Benoit and I welcomed Stephane Le Viet, co-founder of Work4Labs, creator of WorkForUs, a recruitment application that integrates into corporate Facebook pages.

Work4Labs is not the only company working on Facebook recruitment solutions. I’m connected to BranchOut myself; BraveNewTalent has similar functionality.

Considering that with 80 million users, LinkedIn has emerged as the standard network for professionals and recruiters, how can a Facebook application compete?

Paper.li is the winner of the startup contest presented at LeWeb’10. During the Inside LeWeb’10 series of startup interviews we spoke to Iskander Pols, co-founder of paper.li, the newspaper that delivers the best stories of your Facebook and Twitter friends.

Paper.li by SmallRivers is not the first service to aggregate and deliver news from the social network. Personally I prefer Twittertim.es and Feedly.

But the paper.li stroke of genius is the addition of a viral angle in a daily post to Twitter that automatically includes the names of everyone mentioned in the story.

Two weeks ago, the HEC Montreal organized an event on IT, with stands and conferences. Jacob Glick, Google‘s Canada Policy Counsel, took 2 minutes to talk about copyright & innovation on the Canadian Internet. Jack was kind and politically correct. To fully understand his point of view, you have to take a look at his article on “What is a “balanced approach” to copyright reform?“. This is making a reference to the recent controversy about the restriction of some Canadian Internet provider and their bandwith use (P2P & Co.), which is likely to have an impact on the economic development of the country.

I met Erik Wright at BarCampMontreal3 and he made a presentation about StickyCal, a new Web app from Canada. Founded by Erik, David Lemieux and Hamish Macpherson, StickyCal turns your plain old calendar into an interactive social-networking engine for publicizing your events and connecting with your fans. Currently in Alpha (another one), SyickyCal is music-fan oriented, but it could be useful for all people who would like to stay in touch with their community.

BarCampMontreal is a good place to discover some great projects. Librivox is one of them, simple but very useful for the society. In a short interview, Hugh McGuire, founder of Librivox, presented us this unique digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read only by volunteers.

As Hugh explained it, they don’t need money (very rare at BarCamp). Same as Wikipedia, they just want your contribution to read, listen and organize new open-source audiobooks. Make your choice amongs over 1,400 books in 23 different languages.

On October 9, Infopress, a Montreal press group, organized a conference about new business models. Even if I saw good speakers, I came like everybody else for the very famous keynote speaker of this conference, Chris Anderson, editor in chief of techno/trendy Wired magazine.

After a complete and interesting biography of Chris Anderson made by Pr Christian Dussart (HEC Montreal), the Wired‘s editor in chief started to explain how he embraces the francophone culture. The best example is that their five children speak French at school. Then, he introduced his presentation by discussing changes in consumption mode: small business versus blockbuster, David vs Goliath. And… that’s it!!!

Chris Anderson didn’t give his permission to videocast his presentation and to spread it on Internet. For him, Internet is a new place of freedom where everybody can share contents without any restrictions… except HIS content.

No hard feelings, you can visit Amazon and buy his book entitled The Long Tail (go fast & you could save $6.54). If you come from Mars and have never heard about this theory, it’s a good explanation of the unlimited potential of Internet sales. One of the best example is precisely the Amazon’s on-line store.

PS: I would like to mention that Infopresse has done an extraordinary job of organization and were very friendly with us.