Montreal Tech Watch

RoCoCoCamp will start tomorrow at SAT (Société des Arts Technologiques)

For me, RococoCamp is not really a tech conference like Barcamp, but more about the social usage of technologies, with 2 main themes which are the Open Source movement and wikis. Attendees will decide together, on the fly, about the day’s sessions, as if it were a live wiki. Sounds mysterious isn’it? I would say that some organizers are not even sure about what will come up tomorrow. But have a look at the participants. With people coming from out of town coming to the event, and most guys people from the montreal tech community, I trust the un-conference concept to come up with a great line-up

Stéphane Hamel is planning a web analytics meeting tomorrow, from 5.30pm, at Hyatt Regency Montreal.

However, this meeting is somewhat different because it will be focused on and sponsored by Omniture.

I have forgot to write about it, but mobivox launched into beta phase, 2 days ago. Mobivox is a voice over IP Montreal startup that aims to bridge landlines, mobiles and skype. The service is free for mobivox and for skype users, and *cheap* rates to other users.

A friend of mine said that there is no real reason why you would make an international call, to a skype account with your mobile phone, unless you phone a guy who is 24 hours a day in front of a computer.

For me, this is the same kind of argument that denied any future for the telephone. I think mobivox gives access to a new kind of service and we will somehow find a new use for it. And already, you can find a cool way to use it, which is making free international calls to a regular phone from your mobile phone. Yes, you read it right. Free international calls between cellphones/landlines users - and without a computer. If you call someone who also registered to mobivox, you can call them on their mobile or landline phone for free. How great is that?

By the way, I like their marketing. The service is really hi-tech but they managed to introduce VoxGirl as the magician who does all the black stuff behind. Other startups or companies would have talked about back-end servers, routers, and telecom operators to impress customers but VoxGirl is just one neat concept. Not as cool as IWantSandy, but still an intelligent marketing move.

And the only one by the way. There was no mention of mobivox in the local media - and no awareness or support from montrealers. Which is really a pity. Let me remind me that we are talking about a groundbreaking technology. In recent news, Jajah, their direct competitor, just raised 20M$ and got direct access to Intel technology. Sometimes, americans just know where the jackpot will come from.

Yesterday was Quebecor’s annual shareholder meeting. Pierre Karl-Péladeau, CEO and founder, talked about his plans of a new 3rd gen mobile network in Canada, a pledge he begun 1 month ago.

He also said that his company is being retooled into a multimedia company. His newspaper business is slowly transferred to other platforms, mainly the Internet. This means that the lock-out of Journal de Québec journalists is just the beginning. Pierre Karl Péladeau said that they are planning to eliminate redundancies and to ask reporters to adapt their content.

CBC News has a more detailed report about the meeting. Official Press Release here.

The Financial Post reports that the CRTC has created a new division for emerging and new technologies and find ways to police it.

Quote from the article:

Meanwhile, the CRTC is consulting other international regulatory bodies on how they might police broadcasting systems that have the potential to send signals to anyone on the planet.

They plan to have recommandations in 2008. I am not expecting much from the CRTC. They didn’t do anything for Skype, even if long-distance telephony is in their mandate; and even if they do actually come up with “recommandations”, they will be much likely outdated and technically unfeasable.

IT heavyweight service provider CGI has been ranked 12th in the Global Outsourcing list, published on the Fortune 500 magazine. The list is done by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals and takes into account “size and growth, customer references, organizational competencies, and management capabilities”

CGI specializes in information Technology and business process services, with a total of 25.000 professionals. The group is headquartered in Montreal but operates in 100 countries, mainly in Canada, United States and Europe.

Webcom 2007, a conference about blogging, open source tools, viral marketing, wikis, pretty much about web2.0 in fact, has started this morning.

As I write this, Sylvain Carle, Eric Baillargeon, Marc Snyder and Bruno Boutot are updating the blog, with notes, photos, and videos.

The experience is interesting, from a social and marketing perspective. Bloggers talking and blogging about blogging. I am torn between considering this as innovation or if the bloggers are in a bubble (litteraly, not in reference to the .com crash). But what do you know, I am not attending the conference and can’t really give my opinion about it.

Yahoo QA is a website where you can ask any question and then other users are invited to answer it. It has an excellent design (read: the user interface is transparent and doesn’t get in the way) and is backed by a small but solid engineering Yahoo team. The Yahoo Q&A was so popular they integrated it into their homepage, with 23M visitors daily.

Now, Yahoo have made a french version of QA (Yahoo Questions Réponses)

via i.never.nu

I have tried the service in the past. It is addictive with its points system, although it quickly turns out into a place filled with homework questions, people who like controversy, and very basic questions and answers. But when you feel you’ve had enough of the service, there are occassional genuine, puzzling and intelligent questions, with original and authentic answers.

Now, I am prediciting a huge success for this québec version. Much alike South Korea, Québec internet users do not have many choices when looking for content on the internet, and go often to French websites, which do not match their cultural specificity. Yahoo Questions Réponses leverages the Quebec internet users to help each other and create their own content.

I just wish they create specific categories for questions related to regions (like questions about Montreal, Québec, Trois-Rivières…). Of course, I also wished this was created by a quebec or a canadian company, but I just thought they would have been crushed by Yahoo.

I went yesterday to the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast, where 20 other guys showed up. Had some people to meet and some plans to show. Here is a quick report:

• The usual suspects were there, namely Patrick Tanguay, Phil Chrun, Guillaume Thoreau, Mat Balez, Daniel Drouet and Carl Mercier.
• I met Laurent Maisonnave who is doing lots of projects in video, at zecanada or yulbuzz. Video is sure a growing trend, and those are mild words to describe what’s coming in the next few months or years.
• Alok Mohindra was there too. Lots of discussions with montrealstartup.com
• I talked with Eric Kucharsky, who manages TechnoMontreal’s website. We talked about ways to make the website a reference for IT and innovation in Montreal. There are lots of opportunities here for them - they are a brand-new organization and should embrace new technologies and innovation.
• Volansa Technologies was looking for investors for their RFID geo-localization service. This involves R&D research and might be a ground-breaking service for agencies and organizations who need to track their customers (think of ski stations, parks, prisons…)
• Adrien O’Leary works for ines, who is pushing their web-based CRM solution. He wants to experiment with marketing and sales in Montreal.

However, the quote of the day was from Marie-Claude who said we all looked like a bunch of high-school girls talking about the latest trends and gossip. Oh well…

More pictures here.

Congratulations to Alok Mohindra, who won the April MIAW. Alok Mohindra is behind Fonome, an application that lets landlines and mobile phones call a gtalk account. He made a presentation at barcamp last week.

Note: I talked to Marc yesterday about this poll. I want to clarify that this is virtual, and that unlike some (so-called) awards, there are absolutely no scientific criterias behind it. Consider it as an informal poll that lets you know what’s new and innovative in Montreal.