Montreal Tech Watch

Reason Magazine has a great article about Hugh McGuire‘s LibriVox in its May edition (???). If you are interested in the future of open source, podcasts and crowdsourcing, go read it. Hugh was also the guest on ITConversations recently, with Jon Udell as the host. They talk about Librivox’s origin and its tech infrastructure. Jon [...]

Advantys has announced version 5.0 of Workflowgen. The software has been totally rewritten in .NET, with a new streamlined user interface. To keep up with trends, it is also buzzword compliant, with lots of “ajax” and “SOA” thrown into their product description. On a more serious note, WorkflowGen is a very impressive piece of software. [...]

Zeke is a blogger who also runs an ‘expertimental’ art gallery in Montreal. I find his blogging style and approach to art innovative – and welcomed in Montreal. Now, there is a new episode that everyone interested in blogging and new media should be aware of. Zeke received yesterday a cease and desist letter about [...]

WhotSpot is a Montréal company that specializes in wifi solutions for shops and businesses who want to provide internet to their customers. They will get a wifi router setup for them and nearby laptop users can then see a web page where they can pay for the internet service. WhotSpot also allow the business to [...]

Atrion specializes in software that handles regulations and hazardous materials Two Montréal companies, Atrion International and Actio, announced yesterday Chemical Management Solution, a web-based software that tracks the supply, the storage and use of chemical products in order to streamline them and reduce overall costs. Traditionally, suppliers take the chemical product lifecycle in charge. The [...]

One reader asked me if I am still writing about “upcoming” tech events. Since there is already a calendar of Montreal Tech Events, I won’t make a summary of them. For those who aren’t interested in the whole ‘netvibes’ idea, the direct link for the calendar is You can use Mozilla Calendars, Google Calendar, iCal, [...]

The partnership between the 2 Montréal companies covers distribution rights and new features for Web Creator 4: it will integrate language analysis feature, taken from Antidote RX, and Druide Infromatique will get the distribution rights for the software in Canada. Web Creator is a WYSIWYG web editor, which allows users create painlessly websites, without having [...]

WebElixir is a quality assurance tool for web publishers made by Druide Informatique, a Montréal company that specializes in language analysis. WebElixir checks grammar, orthograph and punctuation problems, tracks internal links and changes. Today, they have upgraded the analysis feature, it now ‘understand’ expressions and sentences, both in French and English. It also allows reports [...]

Everybody is talking about online advertising right now, but small ads were and still are newspapers’ key source of revenue, and we are currently going through a media shift, much alike advertising. In Quebec, the main destination is lespac, along with canoe subsidiaries, occasion.ca and livedeal. Occasion is a small ads online board, but differentiates [...]

Mechtronix won yesterday the Mercuriades competition, a “presitigious” award given by the Quebec Federation of Chambers of Commerce. The company makes flight simulators targeted at small airlines, contrary to CAE, another Montreal company who makes full-flight simulators. Mechtronix wouldn’t normally be mentionned in MTW, but I found their business model, innovation focus, and entrepreneurship very [...]