Montreal Tech Watch

CEIM stands for Centre d’Entreprises et d’Innovation de Montréal. Their mission is to support companies who innovate in Montreal and who want to produce and commercialize a new product, in the sense that there must be some R&D involved and that they will coach you in marketing and sales. See the list of companies who worked with CEIM. They are backed by the Quebec and federal governement.

They now have a brand-new website, which now cleaner and much more accessible, with a dynamic (.NET) backend. Previously, the website was made in flash, which was sort of nice, but as you all know, flash websites are nearly impossible to update.

Note: for montreal tech watch readers, they also provide services to startups

If you haven’t had enough of advertising, Pixman has introduced Pixprojector, which seems to be a projector wrapped in a box, with a portable battery in a backpack.

They are introducing it as the killer mobile/guerilla marketing tool. I am viewing it as the 21st century equivalent of the sandwich man.

The difference though is that PixProject has “a powerful sound system” “to interact with the customer”. ok. Idiocracy, anyone?

Immervision is a Montreal company that makes software and hardware for 360 imaging. Their products are used for conferences, for panoramic interactive photography and in security.

Their Panomorph technology won this year the Frost & Sullivan Award for North American Technology Innovation of the Year.

Yesterday, they added a new product in their offering, which is the IMV1-1/3 Panomorph lens. It allows any analog or digital camera to see panoramically, which should a more affordable solution than getting a specific 360 deg camera.

As you can see, the IMV1′s main usage should be video surveillance, in retail for instance.

I got this from a email: Hue has made a ranking of the most influent Quebec blogs. (PDF ranking here)

Interestingly, I only have one blog from the list in my feed reader, which is nayezpaspeur

About the usefulness of this list, I find that it is a complete waste of time. You can make rankings for radio shows, audience analysis for TV shows, evaluate gross readership with newspapers, but blogs are definetly not mass media. Involvement (like user commenting in your posts) are much more revealing than inbound links.

Benjamin Yoksovitz, blogger, entrepreneur, and active member of the “web2.0″ entrepreneurs in Montreal, has written a series of posts on entrepreneurships on his blog. He wishes universities develop more entrepreneurs.

If we sum up what’s going on in Montreal recently:

• TechnoMontreal launched
• Barcamps and democamps were a success
• Montreal is established as a wiki city
• new startups are launching, such as akoha, standoutjobs, fonome, while a dozen has already launched, such as tungle, ilovetoplay, inpowr
• and web studios like growwwing or code genome are embracing agile development and innovative frameworks, to support new web applications
• the coworking space is opening soon, and I am sure it will spurr a new wave of innovation. And I think it will also support would-be entrepreneurs to make the jump.
• montrealstartup has opened, which opens great opportunities for entrepreneurs

As you can see, there is no lack of initiatives or “infastructure” to support entrepreneurs. You may notice though that Montreal’s university network is left out from all the initiatives I mentionned in the list. So is Ben right about the lack of focus in entrepreneurship in universities?

I don’t think so. I know that the main universities in Montreal have many programs supporting entrepreneurship. Université de Montreal has Centre d’entrepreneurship. McGill has the Dobson Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. UQAM has the Centre d’entrepreneuriat ESG/UQAM. And in all of those institutions, you can attend freely an entrepreneurship course where you will learn how to write a business plan or make a marketing study, among other things. The Centre d’entrepreneurship for HEC Montréal and Polytechnique has (free) offices for entrepreneur students, counselling, funding, and mini-conferences which focus on topics like sales, marketing or execution. The team supporting the center is very professional with a good track of successful companies.

I think now all the core elements are right there. But to make Montreal a great innovative city, where great companies get built and thrive, we might need more communication between all those core elements. We need coordination so that an entrepreneur or a company knows exactly where to find the right ressource. We need a better flow of information so that entrepreneur know what’s possible and what door to knock at. We need to directly invite students from the entrepreneurship centers to attend the next barcamp.

And I am now inviting the people behind yulstart, Montreal Tech League and TechnoMontreal to tell what they think about entrepreneurship and montreal.

First, this post is not a report about the sessions at RoCoCo Camp, I don’t think I can write one; and you will find why later.

First, let’s *try* to define RoCoCoCamp: it is a (un)conference about collaboration, wikis and usage of technology in society. It gathers entrepreneurs, geeks, designers and even philosophers. But if you go to the official website, there is not even an official definition. The event is defined by the people who attend, contribute and learn. A good metaphor would be considering RococoCamp as a wiki page, that is edited live by the visitors.

In practice, this means there is no distinction between organizers and attenders. You are expected to help and share your knowledge. If you are bored by a session, you follow the law of two feet – which is go somewhere else, right away.

Now, I wanted this weekend to go to RoCoCo Camp/RecentChangesCamp. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be there for all sessions and decided to go there on afternoons, after forcing my todos batch on mornings.

I went to SAT friday at midday, and I was invited to pick some stickers so that people could guess where I came from. There were stickers from all sorts of wiki initiatives, free software, open source, creative commons and any other variations you could think of. That was fun. Next, a guy from aboutus showed me around – I could pick a t-shirt, how the scheduling board and how the law of two foot worked. That was even more fun. I also saw Hugh McGuire and Matthew Forsythe. Matthew draws and travels. Cool. And then it was time for free lunch. Even more fun. Reminds me of ad-hoc events we organized back in college.

I went before to a couple of biology and maths conference but have never been to an official tech conference. And I think now I am not interested to. Altough things look anarchic, I love the spontaneity of RecentChanges camp and how problems are not problems anymore. I mean, if you go to an traditional conference, you expect top-notch service, you expect speakers to begin and finish on time, you expect powerpoints with bulletpoints, you expect *straight* people to talk about performance and business models. Here, you know that you can’t have expectations and it’s up to you to make it great. So problems cannot be problems anymore.

It’s time I talk about the sessions, and I think the best if for you to go to the frontpage which gathers reports about the sessions. I won’t pretend that I can report and sum up the sessions. A blog post is linear and the result of one man’s view, which is the complete opposite of Rococo’s philosophy.

After understanding that I couldn’t make a report about RoCoCoCamp, I tried to do a video from all sorts of videoclips I took and let me tell you it was even harder. Like a blog post, a video is very linear and cannot really capture the philosophy and the synergy happenning between attendees. RoCoCoCamp sessions are plural, live, with its highs and downs, and I am not sure what will Mélanie will come up with her capsulettes.

What I can say though is that I met a lot of great people at RoCoCoCamp. People who came from France, Germany, Ontario, East and West Coast of US, and of course people from Montreal. They were a tad idealists, a bit dreamers, somehow bohemians and free-minded, but they were mostly builders. They were ready to spend their time and energy to build a better society. I thought a bit about the first greeks and romans who thought about building a democracy through an open and participative model.

I might be going too far with the comparison but i like it.

To finish with this “report”, here is a short video snapshot, with two bright guys saying what they thought about RecentChangesCamp

A set of RoCoCoCamp photos

One Wiki per Child

Wikis for sustainable development

Emerging concepts

One Laptop per Child

More pictures from RococoCamp

Please help me tag the pictures – for instance, to know everyone who are in the pictures and what is the session. Thanks!

RAW footage (videos) at dailymotion

More pictures from Flickr

RococoCamp has started yesterday. I invite everyone who reads this blog to go to SAT, 1195 bvd St-Laurent, to experience the open conference format, to talk about collaboration and usage of technology in our daily lives.

More pictures here

Note: again, I didn’t have a chance to write about this week because of some rails work.

Two undergrads from mcgill university have started a new company called ClixConnect.It provides live online customer support for any website, through a widget. A window with a few suggestions appears to the user, which might be product suggestions, or just chatting. The service is targeted for online retailers, web hosting companies, and web design agencies.

There are already many live chat solutions but their solution seems much more simpler and it can be a very straigtforward way to bug help future customers. If the website owner is not available, ClixConnect will have a team member to interact and talk with the user. To get an example, go to their website , a pop-up window will appear, inviting you to talk.

The company is entirely bootstrapped, with development done in Romania and Pakistan. Their marketing seems to be focused on blogs and forums, and pretty much other ‘viral marketing’ strategies.

Now, I have some concerns about direct marketing on the web. Is this scalable? will Montreal become the world’s customer support center? What will happen in September, when school opens again? And more importantly, can we just transpose the “store clerks” concept to an online store?

Note: I had lots to do this week and could not update. Sorry for that. I read about Eidos last week but haven’t had time to write about it.

Patrick Melchior, director of Eidos, said on MusiquePlus that Eidos Montreal’s first project will be a new Deus Ex.

Deus Ex was an innovative science-fiction game that mixed genres. It received universal acclaim and won many “Game of the Year” awards, and ranked as a best-seller among role playing games.

I have been very critical of Eidos Montreal but this may be the golden opportunity for the brand new Montreal studio. By the way, Eidos Montreal received about 700 job candidates for the 350 positions that were avalaible, which means there is not going to be a lack of talent in Montreal soon.