Montreal Tech Watch

DemocampMontreal2 was planned thursday evening. I’ll cut directly to the presentations:

• first Alec Saunders presented Iotum, a Blackberry notification service. A small app will alert you when your contacts are avalaible. Users get an invitation by email from their friends, setup rules with each connection, sync it with their calendar, and voilà, your symbiotic relationship with your Blackberry will be even closer. They are based in Ottawa, which is a good idea as government officials are known to be heavy users of Blackberrys. Now, if you ask me, I don’t like it. I like to use technology, but when it suits me and I feel like doing so. I don’t like technology when I am in the obligation to enter data whenever I do or have done something. Picture this: 9.30.am. writing a Word document. must update Iotum. 10.10am still haven’t finished writing. must update Iotum. 11.00am writing urgent emails. must update Iotum. 11.30am. colleague enters office. was supposed to be free on calendar. must update Iotum. 2pm. forgot to update Iotum. Boss frustrated. and so on… Twitter was fine, but this feels more like voluntary Big Brother. But then again, I am in no position to give an opinion. never owned a blackberry. Feel free to test Iotum if you have one.
• Hugh McGuire was next, and he talked first about LibriVox, the open source audiobook project. Collectik, the service he was presenting that evening, creates and manages your podcast playlist. You get afterwards a feed with the podcast episodes you want to listen to. The keyword here is remix. You can then get a radio-like experience, with continuous audio. They already have more than 1100 registered users. Great idea, and props to Hugh for the service. In fact, Collectik was, with Open Source Cinema, one the most immediately usable service. Hugh added he wanted a cleaner interface later for the next updates.
• Martin Dufort and Alain Lavoie were presenting next, in english. They are launching Kakiloc, a mobile social network for friends, allowing them to know the whereabouts of their contacts. If you get near of your friends, you will get a SMS notification. It was also the first public demo of the IM feature. Now, I want to try the service and how it works in Montreal. I just hoped they would focus more on marketing and product design. Getting it to work with a web interface, SMS, J2MI, Jabber, IM are all good, but in the end, you actually have to make a great useful product.
• Brett Gaylor presented the Open Source Cinema project. The goal is to invite users to shoot and produce themselves sections of the film, like wikipedia but for movies. This left me wondering of the endless opportunities of the idea. It’s a social and tech experiment, a great example of how we can use technology to foster creativity and collaboration. Have a look at the videos and “mashups” already avalaible
• Anand Agarawala, a Toronto entrepreneur presented next BumpTop. He wants to recreate our computer desktops: you can move, toss and pile up your documents as if you really had a real desktop in front of you. The audience was amazed by the new user interface, as if it was a Steve Jobs presentation. I am waiting to test this, to decide if it’s a toy or if it really brings better productivity and better organization of your files. I have open questions also about the business model. For now, I think it would be a great addition to iPhoto, just like CoverFlow was for iTunes.

If I sum up, it was a great democamp – where mobile services and mashups (remixes) where the stars. Folks, I just had a peek at the future here.

There was also lots to talk about after the demos – inspirations, connections, new heads in the community.

wow.

what a great evening. thanks to Austin Hill, Fred Ngo and all the volunteers.

You can find by the way another report on the kakiloc blog.