Montreal Startup Gets Sobersmart About Drunk Driving, Wins Grandma’s Award

Drunk driving is a serious problem. Over the past five years or so, various companies have been able to put breathalyzers in the hands of those drinking alcohol. People can even purchase retail breathalyzers as a fail-safe way to make sure they are “ok” to drive home and not impaired. In other cases the justice system hands out breathalyzers to those convicted of drunk driving. Often times those breathalyzers are tied into the cars ignition system to make sure the vehicle can not be driven if the driver is intoxicated.

A Montreal startup called Sobersmart has incorporated the use of a smartphone with a breathalyzer to make it even smarter. Sobersmart is part hardware in a fob-sized breathalyzer (pictured above) and part app readily available from the App Store. The app can function as a standalone without the breathalyzer component.

Together the system has three modes: parents/kid, driver, and taxi:

-PARENTS / KID: In a parent / kid setup, the kids use Sobersmart wherever they are before driving and the parent app gets a notification and a variety of options for their safe return. You can even get your car’s location if you have to pick it up later!

-DRIVER: The driver setup is the classic breathalyzer mode. It measures your blood alcohol level and provide you with alternatives to get back home safely if it’s elevated.

-TAXI: Under the TAXI configuration, a taxi driver is hailed automatically by the Sobersmart app. It accepts payments straight through the app, draws funds from the prepaid taxi account, or allows a parent or friend to sponsor a cab ride if someone is short on cash after a long night.

Sobersmart is currently crowdfunding $75,000 for their first production run. The team has already won several accolades including winning “The Grandmother Judges Panel” at the International Startup Festival. They also ranked top 3 overall at the ISF.

Check out their crowdfunding link here and for more information visit their website here.

Here are three ways to improve your startup pitch from a founder who’s raised $1 million dollars.

Montreal Startup Outpost Is Kayak For P2Pers

Kayak is one of the most awesome sites in the world for travelers. On one big screen you can compare flights, cars and lodging by price and provider. It’s great if you’re on a budget but if you’re bootstrapping and hitting the peer 2 peer sites there hasn’t been a place to offer similar comparative information.

That’s until now.

Montreal based developer Hamed Al-Khabaz, recently launched a new startup called Outpost or outpostp2p.com. It’s the Kayak for people looking to take advantage of p2p travel.

Right now the site give you access to Vayable, RideJoy and Airbnb, but according to Al-Khabaz via reddit and social media, they are looking to add just about every peer 2 peer travel service available.

Outpost is made up of three easy steps.

Lookup P2P services
Plan Your Spots
Packup and Travel

Using outpost you know where you can use each of the services individually or in tandem. If you’re using airbnb why not do some ride sharing too, it just makes sense.

Once you pick your destination using Outpostp2p.com you’re taken to a map that shows you all of the various p2p travel services available to you.

While Ridejoy obviously moves about a city, in cities like New York you can use Outpost to compare Vayable and Airbnb side by side. It also gives you a quick rundown in a list on the left side of the page with current accommodations by price for both services.

While this was admittedly a side project for Al-Khabaz, with the way it looks, operates and the need for a service like this, it could quickly become a huge new startup.

Check out Outpost here at outpostp2p.com

Startup Act 3.0 aims to open borders for entrepreneurs

Montreal Startup: Hypejar The Wikipedia Of New Products? INTERVIEW

Grant Yim and his team of co-founders at Montreal startup Hypejar are hoping that their startup becomes the “wikipedia of new products”. Hypejar aims to help manufacturers and startups with new products, generate buzz and excitement before a products official launch.

The web based platform promises to feature new and exciting products before they hit the market. Hyperjar users will be able to keep track of the upcoming products that they’re interested and get notified when those products officially hit the market. Users will also be able to vote products up and down in reddit style to indicate which products are more popular and which ones are more highly anticipated.

Hypejar is also targeting those smaller startups, and independent inventors. Inventors will be able to add their own products to Hyperjar and update their products “wiki”, to notify potential customers of new features, pricing and availability.

While Yim realizes there are plenty of sites out there that post reviews and product information after a product is released, there aren’t many sites that post information before a product is released. We know from our previous website that many manufacturers do vet out “review units” of products before a release, however Yim sees one of Hypejar’s main differentiators as the fact that users will have access to information on a large number of products before they get released.

Hypejar will become a vehicle for those early adopters who love to find out about the newest things first. It will also be a great vehicle for manufacturers, and inventors who need to gain traction for their products before they are released.

We got a chance to talk to Yim about Hypejar and the startup scene in Montreal. Check out the interview below:

Montreal Startup: GigTrip Social Meets Music Tourism INTERVIEW

Canadian serial entrepreneur and startup aficionado Jean-Pierre Levac is working on solving the pain points involved in musical festivals, tours and shows. To do this right, Levac found early on that all three stake holders would need to be involved. Musicians, fans and venues. Without all three pieces in the process one stakeholder would end up with an unfair advantage, while another may be left out in the cold.

Levac has spent much of his career in the IT Industry, with the last fifteen years spent in startups. He’s always been interested in the music business, but not necessarily the way everyone else is. Levac wants to take his skill sets and those of his co-founder Artem Mindrov, and fix the back end of the music industry.

Levac and Mindrov are attacking the fan angle first. To that end they are looking for beta testers, especially people who attend music festivals and make travel excursions out of them. To us it seems that there are so many people out there attacking the event discovery problem from the aggregation side, Levac and Mindrov seem to be on the right track to integrate all three stakeholders before the events pour into search engines and aggregation apps.

We got a chance to talk with Levac about what they’re working on at GigTrip. Check out the interview below:

Montreal Startup: MatchFWD Socially Connecting For The Job Market

MatchFWD is a startup based in Montreal that is hoping to change the paradigm in the job hunting game. They want to cut out the middleman by leveraging social media and sharing. MatchFWD provides a platform that allows hiring managers to share new job opportunities with people and then down the social landscape, in a word-of-mouth style that will hopefully connect good candidates with great jobs.

MatchFWD works both ways though, job seekers can leverage the same social media networks to promote themselves to potential hiring managers and jobs. The pinnacle of MatchFWD is when, through social networks, a person that’s seen and shared a job can connect a person that’s looking for a similar job.

While recruiters are sure to frown on the concept behind MatchFWD the power is granted back to the people and the hiring becomes a smoother process. Also, hiring managers benefit by seeing the real time recommendations that are coming through shares.

MatchFWD is using the sharing economy to disrupt the job changing experience and make it a more level playing field. Job seekers will love this platform because they won’t waste their time applying to blind box ads where recruiters are just fattening their talent pool.

The startup launched this sharing platform back in March even before Washington DC based startup “Barrel of Jobs” launched. Barrel of Jobs is also using the social economy to help place candidates but in a different way.

We got a chance to interview MatchFWD co-founder Phil Gauvin about their new approach to the job hunt. Check out the interview below: