Montreal Tech Watch

For an additional 10$ per month, Bell Mobility customers can now get unlimited calls to AND from Bell mobility cell phones, residential and business phones. Of course, we are talking about local calls here.

We will have to watch what Rogers Wireless (and Fido), Telus, and even Videotron will have to offer. The offer is ground-breaking, at least here in Québec and Canada. I know that European and US mobile carriers have been offering similar plans at the beginning of the decade. Bouygues Télécom in France offered for example unlimited calls to ANY french phone in 2001, for as low as 45 Euros. Here, you would be happy to get 300 local minutes with that. And of course, you will be charged extra fees, and get other arbritrary phone setups from your operator, such as Telus disabling wifi on HTC 6700 phones so that you wouldn’t use skype in a hotspot.

Hopefully, the CRTC and other governement agencies are opening up the market. If one carrier plays his cards right, he could offer highly competitive plans that will shake up the current market. And I am quite sure that’s what videotron is currently doing. Because when you think about it, a phone call has virtually 0 marginal cost for a telecom operator. They will charge you with customer acquisition costs, customer support, and network maintenance.

Hightlights from DemoCampMontreal1:

• Evan Prodromou, the founder of wiki travel, demonstrated how to use Open ID. He had some DNS problems. I have yet to see a convincing presentation of OpenID. I understand its benefits, but I think someones needs to find a better pitch
• growwwing is an upcoming web service for freelancers and small businesses. Thierry Poitras, from ibop, said he wanted to make it so easy that your aunt could use it to create their own website. There is a lot of AJAX, Ruby on Rails with REST, APIs … The team works with Guillaume Thoreau, an user interface specialist. They want to finish soon, although the marketing tools are yet to be developed
• Alden Woodward and Kingsley Woodward demonstrated Darwin, a tool that adapts to the changing needs and processes of businesses, while Raj Vadavia presented Evolution. Evolution is a database technology which lets DBAs add dynamically objects and requests. Both technologies were very interesting although I wish they thought about a presentation made for DemoCamp.
• Marc Chriqui presented ilovetoplay, a social networking website for sports guys and girls who wants to organize a team or just play a casual game. ilovetoplay.com was launched one month ago, it has an extensive search function and has an elaborate profile manager.

I talked to Tom Sweeney, a partner from Garage Canada, and he thought that the presentations should be more interactive and engage the audience. We both agreed though that the Montreal tech scene is getting more dynamic and that it would be very interesting in the next few months.

Montreal Gazette has a new blog called Montreal Tech Scene, written by technology news reporter Roberto Rocha.

The initiative is great, and you should definetely bookmark the blog.

iWeb Technologies, a Montreal web hosting provider, has received a 4.5M$ funding from BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada) to build a second data center in St-Léonard, with additional power supply and a total of 4000 servers. Marin Leclair, co-founder and CO of iWeb said he hoped to raise up to 12.000 servers their capacity.

iWeb offers Dedicated servers, co-location and - of course - shared web hosting. You can see in their blog that they receive regularly top worldwide position in terms of reliability, results and growth. I am quite sure their exceptional 2006 results convinced BDC to lend them 4.5M$.

Groupe CIS offers sales, transport planning, and distribution software. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Saputo Group, Parmalat, Nestlé, AgroPur use for example their products to track trucks and their delivery systems.

Omniciel was a direct competitor of Group CIS, and also offered management software and general computer services.

The two companies are merging today into Groupe CIS, and will control 90% of the Quebec market and about 40% of the Canadian market, a total of 2B$ market. Expect the merged company to focus on distribution and sales software.

Radio-Canada has setup an online website for the TV series Rumeurs

They must have discovered and subscribed to the Internets last week.

I am not qualified to talk about the content, but what I have to say is that the website is:

• a e-magazine, which means it is not updated regularly but published monthly
• in flash. Therefore, there is no way to bookmark or email to a friend a specific page. I don’t even want to think about search engines
• there is no feedback or conversation possible
• features an user interface that breaks all rules of usability and accessibility

The user interface is so bad that they had to write side instructions on how to access pages. Everything feels so wrong. What where they afraid about? “pirates” copying their content? or the team didn’t get the budget to publish this on print?

DemoCampMontreal1 is tomorrow’s meetup where a handful of Montreal tech guys and girls will get to demo a new technology or application.

The first DemoCamp was started in Toronto, as an alternative to FooCamp, the O’Reilly event where entrepreneurs and key Silicon Valley innovators get to hang out together and talk about their technologies. And you had to be the founder or the technologist from Google, Yahoo, digg, flickr … to be invited there. In contrast, DemoCamps are more local, free, casual, and lasts 1 day instead of being a multi-day event.

You can get the schedule here. About 40 people are expected. DemoCampMontreal1 will be starting at 6.30 pm and is located at Société des Arts Technologiques, 1195 bvd St-Laurent.

Tomorrow, from 5.30pm, a YULBiz meetup is planned for professional bloggers, i.e. people who blog for business. Expect many consultants and freelancers to be there but also marketers, public relations specialists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and also some biz types who want to see what is all this about. Michelle Leblanc has written a report of January’s YULBiz

Location: Café Mélies, 3540 Boul St-Laurent

Loren Segal has released an alpha version of YARD, a ruby documentation tool. YARD’s goal is to be simpler, more convenient and more consistent than RDoc

YARD enables the user to generate consistent, usable documentation that can be exported to a number of formats very easily, and also supports extending for custom Ruby constructs such as custom class level definitions.

Get the release at svn co http://soen.ca/svn/projects/ruby/yard/tags/0.1a, test it and send feedback to the YARD’s website

Alain Bealieu, from DirectionInformatique, writes a very interesting report - in french - about the Canadian and Quebec IT industry. The key figure is that Canada ranks now in 27th place for innovation. They raised issues like lack of investment, lack of government support and lack of talent.

It always surprises me how big monolithic companies like CGI are allowed to talk about innovation. It surprises me how SGF, a financing agency that specializes in heavy industries, forestry, huge industrial projects and long-term partnerships are allowed to talk about entrepreneurship. These are the kind of organizations that will invest when there is a 0% proven risk or when you target Fortune 500 companies. These organizations advised Quebec companies to rationalize everything, processes, technologies, management and are then suprised how there isn’t much innovation around. Yeah, you made sure you killed it.

I liked however Yves Pelletier, from DRM Conseil, who said: “Il manque un leadership et une vision d’ensemble.”

People in Québec should realize that innovation = ideas and ideas = people