Montreal Tech Watch

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

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