Montreal's Needium generates business leads via social media

Last month Techvibes was invited by the Trade Commissioner Service to attend Venture NORTH 2011 in New York along with an impressive list of Canadian companies in life sciences, ICT and cleantech.

The goal of Venture NORTH is to accelerate growth through strategic exposure to opportunities for R&D financing and partnerships in the North East United States.

This is the second of a series of blog posts about the companies that presented in Venture NORTH's ICT stream.

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Montreal’s Needium makes sure an opportunity is never missed by their client businesses. By scanning and searching through Twitter accounts of local Twitter users, Needium finds out what potential clients are looking for, and if your business is a potential answer to their needs, they’ll send a message to that user with your business info and an offer set by you.

For example, let’s say someone posts on their Twitter account, “Where to have lunch today on St. Denis?” A Needium employee will spot that, and if a restaurant near Rue St. Denis is a client for Needium, a message promoting that restaurant will be sent to them.

Needium is the brainchild of Montreal entrepreneur Sylvain Carle. In his 15-plus years working with the Internet, Carle has founded companies, advised start-ups, served on boards and headed non-profit groups in la belle province. At Praized Media, the company that created Needium, Carle also serves as the CTO.

2010 was a busy year for Needium. In addition to their launch in June, Carle was invited to present Needium at the start-up competition at Le Web, a Paris conference of Internet companies, where he served as the lone North American competitor. The company completed a round of funding in the fall, and is currently working with local resellers to create city-specific Neediums elsewhere in Canada.