If you’re in Montreal/Quebec and you’re looking for funding to start a business, you should check out the grant opportunities available in Quebec. On Thursday I went to an information session for La Fondation du Maire de Montreal. Their deadlines are in February, May and September, so check out their website for more information and [...]

I listed below some (most) of the travel sites available today.
If you look at this list and you think this is a crowded market, you clearly have no idea about most of the sites below nor about the size of the travel industry.
So, time permitting, I’m going to try to educate you in the next [...]

Toronto is one of my favorite cities in North America, so when I heard about StartupEmpire, I was very tempted to go over there… I was one of the winners of the StartupEmpire contest by Flow Consulting, so that made it for me.
I left on Wednesday morning, so I’d have some time to walk around. [...]

I’ve been busy lately and I had a couple of news I wanted to share… First of all, I’d like to congratulate PlanetEye for their official launch (and all the press coverage). I’ve been following them since last year, when I heard about it through Luca Filigheddu, whom I met in Palo Alto when demoing [...]

Tripit is a travel organizer site that creates one’s itinerary by just forwarding their confirmation emails to them. I’ve met somepeople from Tripit during networking events in the Bay Area. When I would demo YowTRIP, Tripit was fresh on people’s mind, so I’d get feedback about its way of creating trips (simply by forwarding emails), and [...]

June is practically over and I decided to share some of YowTRIP’s web analytics here. Be able to track who visits your website, how they get to it and what they’re looking for is very important for improving its user experience and marketing effort. That’s why I started I-stats back in 2004 (actually, I started [...]

As I spent a lot of time this week reviewing YowTRIP’s business plan and its goals, and I started thinking more about our competitors (or at least the big online travel social networks) and how we compare with them. I’m not sure yet who I’d say are our direct competitors, as I’m still compiling that [...]

I’ve blogged about Kiva before on my old website, but since I deleted all of the old posts, I’m going to write about it again. And I’m also linking to my public profile from the “About” block on the left, so you can see the entrepreneurs I’m supporting…
So, Kiva is a SF-based non-profit organization that [...]

A trend in a lot of startups now is to provide a quick demo video about their services. The “demo/features” pages are becoming more and more obsolete. I still have them at both YowTRIP and I-stats, and I think it’s a great way to quickly see if that’s the service you’re looking for… By just looking at [...]

For a few months now, I’ve been thinking about ways to encourage YowTRIP’s members to create videos about their hometown or any place they like and share it on YowTRIP… A quick travel guide about something interesting there. Similar to these videos from GeoBeats (this is a set of videos about Rio de Janeiro):

I was thinking about launching a new [...]