Montreal Tech Watch

Benjamin Yoskovitz, one of Montreal’s most famous blogger, has started last week the ultimate productivity project. He reports that 28 bloggers have already partipated into the guide. I liked reading the 14 tips to get things done in less time for instance.

Kudos then to Benjamin Yoskovitz for:

• launching a project that will be actually useful, in a world where we have so many things to get done.
• and for successfully getting his readers to participate. I know too well how hard it is to get casual readers to get involved.

God knows how many bloggers have less integrity out there to get quick traffic and get ‘dirty’ links. (I won’t link to them, make a google search about ‘john chow’ for an infamous example). Ben’s project is actually useful and filled with great info.

So, if you think you have the ultimate productivity tip, tell Benjamin Yoksovitz about it and he will link you back.

Edward Ocampo-Gooding, a Computer Science student graduate from Bishop’s, was at Concordia University yesterday to distribute the books he received from O’Reilly. The books ranged from Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Interface Design, Graphic design etc…

I want to thank him officially for this kind contribution to the community. Now, I want to do something too, so I would like to take this opportunity to start something.

The idea is to get together monthly in a coffee shop in Montreal or any other cool place. Each person would then talk, in english or en francais, about a book he read recently, concepts he liked in the book, and things he didn’t. The audience then asks a couple of questions and the guy/girl then gives his opinion. Books can range from Ruby, Python, XHTML/CSS, information architecture, interface and graphic design, or other topics related to web development. At the end of the session, people can swap books. Or you can just keep yours if you didn’t see anything worthwile. It’s up to you.

The goal is to share and get to know what are the current best practices. (for instance, Django guys could explain why they chose the framework). I have myself a list of books that I would like to trade with other developers/designers.

If you are interested/would like to co-organize, please leave a comment. If there are at least 4 or 5 people, we can start something in 3 weeks.

Note: Another post will follow this soon

Yesterday was a rainy day, one of those saturdays you would rather be home, reading a book in a comfy sofa. Or you could also attend BarcampMontreal, whose second edition was planned april 28th. I missed its first edition, and thought of it as an extended DemoCamp. I had the intuition it was “kind of” different, seeing the strong recommandation that you share and participate but didn’t really know what to expect. But reading the wiki didn’t help. Did you know there were MiniCamp, HealthCamp, BlogCamp, InteractionCamp, ArbCamp and every variation you can think of?

I was there at Société des Arts Technologiques at 9.45am. Daniel Drouet, from montrealstartup.com, was welcome the participants. The stage was setup at the back of the room, making it look like I was entering an industrial hangar or a gloomy cave. I knew afterwards that the bar and first room would be used for the lunch, but still, the SAT could have used more lights - especially white lights to allow us take good pictures.

I would say I knew a third of the people who came up there. It’s a big difference from the first MTEB, where I was “new” in Montreal and had just an interrogation mark to everyone I met. Fred and Simon were already presenting Akoha, standoutjobs, SAT and Garage Canada, the event’s sponsors.

Damien Di Fede was first, he made a demonstration of MUJAX, a web-based text game, made with AJAX and php. It reminded me of the early video games in the mid-90s, such as Betrayl at Krondor, the difference being that it is multiplayer. Enter room. See. Look at inventory. Chat with another mujaxer. Open door. Go south. etc… I was impressed by the admin interface, where you can edit rooms, “maps”, and items. If I were him, I would make the admin area open to everybody, wiki-style, and see what comes from it. I would be interested in the idea of an ever-evolving gaming world.

Damien Di Fede

Evan Prodroumou had a presentation afterwards entitled commercialization of wikis. Evan P. cofounded Wikitravel, a world guide where every traveller could write about the countries he visited, which is now owned by Internet Brands. So the question was: is it possible to make a business out of the wiki model? Evan started by making a state of the art. I liked his graphic where he compared blogs, social networks and wikis. Blogs exist because of individual egos, social networks are there for relationships, and wikis have a purpose. To run a wiki, you need a noble purpose where everyone can get his share. This is very interesting (altough I missed the link between commericalization of wikis) and I am putting wikis (ie RococoCamp) on my agenda.

Evan Prodroumou

Phil Chrun made next his first public demo to the tech crowd. I have already talked about his project: Mycarpoolstation.com is a car sharing website where coworkers and students can share rides. He presented the signup process and then how to setup a ride. The map and directions feature is neat. Finally, he showed a few user profiles. It all seemed to me as nearly finished product, and I think that many thought the service was already running. One participant even asked how many customers he had. Phil said that he wants to add more features. I think he should streamline the product, scale back on features and get a shipping date as soon as possible. Getting more investors is risky and it wouldn’t make sense to wait another year to launch the service.

Phil Chrun

Sylvain Carle made a bilingual presentation about his experiences in San Francisco. He was there during the .com days, worked for startups, and caught the entpreneurial virus there. His presentation was very lively, original and personal. I thank him for sharing this with the community. The words were true and inspiring. I invite you to take a look at the slides.

Sylvain Carle BarcampMontreal2
envoyé par montrealtechwatch

Francois Lane and Duncan Moore presented next CakeMail, a white label email marketing solution. Unlike campaignmonitor, they target resellers like ad agencies, web publishers, PR and media consultants. They talked about the product’s creation and also about the design, which was nice, because people would usually hide their mistakes and creation process.
Hugh McGuire was next, and made a presentation about his experience. He launched Librivox, an “open source” audio book library, which became very successful, contrary to Collectik, another website which had had mixed results. He went through the basics, up to his vision of startups - you need the idea guy, the designer and the back end developer, but also clarity and get your core feature right before adding new features. The presentation was lively, much alike Sylvain Carle, and we knew he was summing years of experience in a 10 minutes slide. Talk about impact. slides here.Nelson Ko made a 5min presentation next. He comes from Ottawa and is a consultant. For instance, he advises companies on how to create online communities. web2.0 for the entreprise. I wish he talked about practical examples and recipes and less on principles.I made a pause here, and looked at the crowd. Geeks, macbooks, more laptops, a guy who talks to himself. I think there is a geek culture growing in montreal.

Coworking Special Session - Patrick Tanguay
Coworking Special Session - Patrick Tanguay

Alok Mohindra, one of the guys who had his laptop open, presented a proof-of-concept for fonome. The idea, crowdsourced at cambrianhouse, is to allow laptops to receive phone calls with Google Talk, via open source frameworks such as asterisk. Simon Law phoned the test phone number and after some fiddling, they could talk to each other. This would be really handy for business travellers who want to keep in touch with their clients. However, GTalk has a very limited subscriber base, compared to MSN Messenger for instance. But still, I am very interested in the “hack”. By the way, with a account, he can receive 2 phone calls at the same time.

Daniel, from Code Genome, inserted himself in the presentation schedule. His company wanted a project management software for their customers. They are using basecamp, which is english only (and will always stay that way). So they made their custom web app, in french. It’s done with Ruby on Rails of course, and they plan to open it up to their french-speaking customers.

Angel Anduaga, from podtatto.com, was next. It was the first time I saw a presentation done with a screen-less laptop. Of course, it’s possible, but you have to wonder how it’s used daily. The crowd cheered when hearing about Lasers. Angel wants to inserts permantently rasterized and vector graphics into gadgets and laptops. He showed a video showing the process. I thought he could just pass along samples. Angel is looking for investors and wants to start as soon as possible.

Simon Law, the guy who takes pictures with a Canon EOS 30D, planned a presentation about cheap drugstore cameras next - or how to start in digital photography. This was a good presentation, which reminded me a lot of Philip Greenspun’s articles. He focuses on light - bad light, sunlight, flash, indoor lights, etc… He says don’t take videos with digital cameras. I will still continue to do so. We are in the youtube era anyway.

Simon Law
envoyé par montrealtechwatch

Avery Pennarun is an original guy who likes to experiment. He went throught the bubble, and now wants to share why he is working for a bank. The explanation was long and entertaining with quotes like: “Angel investors want to be seen as cool” “VCs expect 1 out of 10 companies in their portfolio to succeed”. Now he wants to get geeks and hackers to work for bank and make cool software. OK THIS WAS CONFUSING. just watch the video below to understand what he was talking about.

avery pennarun
envoyé par montrealtechwatch

Michelle Ann Jenkins presented next Wikitravel Extra. She compared social networks, blogs and wikis. She said that Wikitravel wasn’t meant to be a blogging platform with pictures and personal journals. Wikitravel Extra is a layer on top of wikitravel which is meant to complement wikitravel. Users can have their profiles, and import their feeds and content. I was confused at first because I didn’t know about wikitravel extra and thought she was talking about wikitravel. Oh well…
Fred ngo throwing t-shirtsMadameWoo - who I expected to be a Thai lady who came from the Thai sex industry - was next. She was in fact a regularnot-so-regular montrealer girl, and did a session about travelling alone. She said cleanliness, appeareance were important. and it was expensive too. and that there were security issues. And some other personal issues.Ok. I wish she brought pictures.

Chris Car was next, he wanted to talk about meshcubes. They are wifi transmitters, running on debian linux, with small enery footprints, which would interconnect and provide internet access to all nearby wifi users (OLPC anyone?). They had an investor, tested it in 4 german cities, and well… that was it. Chris Car said he wished he focused less on getting new technology and rather reuse existing hardware. It is still a very interesting project, and many linked it to the Ile-Sans-fil project.
Chris car

Robin aka Moonlyn talked next about lucid dreaming. She is a mathematician, an australian who came here for a science conference, but thought she could educate montrealers about lucid dreaming, at barcamp. I wonder if she takes substances - like Carlos Castenada who likes mexican mushrooms.

Moonlyn

Martine Pagé, a montreal TV writer, was next, and this a more serious presentation about “présence féminine/where are the girls?”. She made a “state” of the blogosphere, and told about her own experience. So where are the girls? Who is responsible? what should be made? This started a long debate, and it seemed all the ladies in the audience had something to tell about it. My opinion is that if there is an opportunity for a woman to speak in a conference, she should be encouraged to do so. The reality though is it may just be a symptom of the reality.

martine pagé?
envoyé par montrealtechwatch

Pictures

More pictures here

BarcampMontreal is scheduled tomorrow, at Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT), 1195 bvd. St-Laurent, at 9.30am.

Barcamps are “unconferences” where everyone participates. You can either present, discuss, interact or help organize the event. The aim is to learn and also to share you current projects and your knowledge.

There is already a great list of participants. It may lack some feminine presence and would benefit from more art/social/cultural people but I wouldn’t miss it, and neither should you. It’s possibly the best tech event that has come to Montreal.

Jerome Plantevin, tech blogger from lesaffaires.com, writes (in french) about the upcoming law in France that would require website publishers to save visitors data for 1 year. He says that bloggers, ISPs, webmasters will now want to transfer their businesses to Quebec, because the law would demand heavy technology investments, far too cumbersome for many businesses. This is interesting, although there are already plans to censor ISPs in Canada.

This, with Google’s recent program to track and save every click and action you make on the Internet, leads me to call this week Big Brother Week.

Happy Internet surfing then.

You better enjoy it because next year every move you make on the Internet will be likely tracked and used. With or without your will.

Énergie has just relaunched its website, radioenergie.com. They wanted “web2.0″ features, so they added blogs, user profiles, conversations between radio DJs and the audience. They are obviously inspired by myspace and skyblog, Radio Skyrock’s blogging platform that dominates the social networking landscape in France.

But it seems they were just too ambitious. The only thing they got right was displaying advertisments. The website is unbelievably slow, throws Drupal/mySQL errors, and it looks like it has just been tested with internet explorer 5. I had a look at how they built the webpages, and it is a nightmare, even worse than myspace. It reminds me of my early days where I just inserted in a website “features” ie javascripts, CSS, snippets of code I found on the Internet, without knowing it would take a toll on the database and the overall user experience.

I know they announced it is just a BETA version, but I think that with a website like this, they will just turn off visitors.

This must be seen as a proof that even if facebook, flickr or skyblog has many cool features, it doesn’t mean that you could do the same too. It is just not a matter of getting the idea and installing the “ready-to-use” open source CMS you just found on sourceforge. You need to architect your website. You need the tech infrastructure to back it up. You need quality assurance. You need engineering to optimize your database queries. You need user interface specialists. This means you need to invest on key people and time. And in this case, you also need developers who talk with product designers and are not afraid to say that it is just not possible.

In RadioEnergie’s website, the only way they can pull it off is start over and build a custom solution.

Montreal.TV has quietly relaunched, and the result is quite impressive. Montreal.TV covers nightclubs, bars and Montreal restaurants, and wants to show Montreal as a wordlwide hub of fashion, entertainment and fun.

It looks like a video equivalent of Montreal Tech Watch, the difference being that they have a production team covering events out there - as they happen, and that the website is full of advertisements - which are very relevant by the way.

Montreal.TV has embeddable videos, has tags, comments, voting and allow users to browse the website by most favorite, most popular, most commented on etc.

This is a great example of a Montreal-based website. Kudos to lesite.ca then. Although if I was the architect of the project, I would allow Montrealers to upload their own videos, which would skyrocket the website’s popularity.

LightSpeed is a Point-Of-Sale system from XSilva that allows shops, consultants and small offices to manage their sales, from products management, quoting, invoicing, purchasing to reports.

Version 2 introduces an iTunes-like product browser, an improved user interface and new management and inventory tool. If you look at the screenshot, you know now that LightSpeed is mac os x only. XSilva, the maker of the software, apparently likes polished and beautiful interfaces.

The software uses an OpenBase database, a central computer can act as a server and other apple computer can then connect to the system through the local network. You can also setup 1 computer to do the whole job, but you would want the latest Mac Pro to run it.

If I had a retail store, I would seriously consider LightSpeed2. It is currently the most advanced POS system for the mac. Although I also think that they need to streamline their product. The most popular mac os x software are the ones that are good - excellent - at one thing, and do nothing else, contrary to the Windows world where you get bloated products.

OZ, a Montréal mobile solution company, has just acquired Thumbspeed, another leading mobile solution provider who have customers within the Cingular, Rogers Wireless and TeliaSonera networks.

OZ makes IM, email and social networking software and gateways for mobile phones. Their clients have been installed to 85 millions handsets in North America and Europe. They allow users to interact with main social networks like youtube, flickr, blogger, MSN or AIM.

I didn’t know about OZ and am still amazed how they could pull of products like this. They even engineered their own instant messanging solution, which allows telecommunication companies to create their own social network.

Note to self: OZ needs serious coverage.

Neks Technologies is a biotech company that makes detection tools for dentists. They have just received FDA’s approval for a new innovative product, D-Carie.

I wouldn’t report about what’s happenning in the biotech industry usually, but this is an innovative product that uses LED and fiber optics technology. With the traditional tools like X-Rays and manual dental tools, dentists can usually detect up to 50% of caries. D-Carie can detect about 90% occlusal and interproximal caries, requires no calibration, can be used by hygienists, and is cordless.

I was however struck by the product’s price, which is a bit less than 3.000$. I know what’s involved in the tool’s manufacturing and R&D and nothing justifies D-Carie’s price tag.

Oh well. They would have had immediate success if they sell an “affordable” product for families. How cool would that be to check your dental condition at home?