Montreal Tech Watch

Marc-André Cournoyer has just released another ruby project. It’s called linkr, and is a place to share bookmarks with friends and coworkers. There are voting features; which makes it look a lot like reddit.com

What interested me in linkr is that it’s a follow-up to a series of other programming projects. Have a look at his code repository:

This led him to be recruited by standoujobs, and this got me into thinking about open source projects in Montreal and also people involved in Free Software.

• First, there is the Montreal Linux Users Group, which is one of the oldest tech community in Montreal. The group holds regular meetups, like for instance Ubunty party installs, and also participates in SQIL,
• Speaking of SQIL, this stands for Semaine Québecoise de l’Informatique Libre, or Quebec Week of Free Software. This year, it will be held from 15 to 23rd of September; the objective is to promote Free Software among the Québec population,
• There is also Koumbit, a community of web developers and designers who support Free Software, such as Drupal.
• FACIL - Appropriation Collective de l’Informatique Libre supports Free Software and Open data formats. They hold regular conferences, and publish also articles on the Free Software movement on their blog,
• The folks from bande passante are a strong believer of Free Software (see Robin Millette or Fred’s 1984 blog )
• I met also Marc Laporte, who is involved in the TikiWiki project,
• Open Source Cinema is a project started by Brett Gaylor. The goal is to invite readers to make the movie, together

Now, there is also wikitravel and librivox whose “business model” is centered around the Open Source movement. Actually, Hugh McGuire has also launched datalibre, a blog that is working on open data formats. It’s sure there are more Open Source initiatives in Montreal, but this new blog and other projects like open source cinema or SQIL are enough to make me think that Open Source is well and alive in Montreal.

As for my personal experience, I have never participated into an Open Source project (as a main contributor that is). But I use the tools daily and have launched for instance OpenSpace. Many people forget that without Open Source Sofware and tools, there would be much much less content on the web and much less companies.

And you? what do you think of the Open Source movement? Do you know of other Open Source projects in Montreal?

Update on 2nd of July:
Damien Seguy from nexen reminds me of phpquebec. And Dominique Boucher also writes in the comments that there is a vibrant lisp/scheme community in Montreal. Thanks

I am mad today at investors who are based in Québec or in Canada but are never seen in the local startup scene. And then once in a while, we get words from them from across the southern border. TC reported that Cellfish, a startup operating in mobile and socials networks, got $60million in funding from Humagade Group and from the Fonds de Solidarité FTQ. Why they are investing in a New York based startup is beyond me. The FTQ fund advertise on their website:

The Solidarity Fund QFL is a development capital fund that calls upon the solidarity and savings of Quebecers to help create and maintain jobs in Québec by investing in small and medium-sized businesses.

$60million is a lot of money, an amount that could be well served here. I know many startups here in Montreal such as fonome, mycarpoolstation who would are looking for investors and who would truely blossom (and get some real ROI) if they get proper funding.

There is also the case of montrealangels, a group of early investors in Montreal, but who are blatantly looking to invest in the US. I have never seen those guys in Montreal, I sent them an email a while ago and their answer proved that they knew nothing of what was going on in Montreal or in Canada. I would bet they spend their time travelling in the US.

Investors and entrepreneurs in Québec should realize that there are more potential here than wasting their efforts at scouting the US. Cellfish has a technology that I believe would never get in Québec, and no Québecer will never benefit from the service. The fact that it’s based in California or in New York City doesn’t mean anything. If everyone starts at watching with envy at the US and start hoping they could be there, we might as well raise the white flag. I don’t know about Montreal Tech Watch readers but I believe that all the ressources can be found in Montreal — or in Quebec/Canada — People must just stop doing their stuff alone, see what others are doing, and work together.

There is a new new updated version with the STM network

The inspiration comes of course from IA JP

The map is not complete, it is a visual representation of people and projects I know of or have seen in Montreal. There are also people who are on multiple projects and I couldn’t solve yet their “visual proximity”.

I decided to close the polls it when it gets 50 votes or after 5 days. The first poll about innovative use of video in blogging received 52 votes this morning, so here are the results:

• vero-b (19 votes)
• yulbuzz (17 votes)
• galacticast (8 votes)
• zecanada (7 votes)
• dailywom.tv (1 votes)

Congratulations then to vero-b. 3 people voted for her yesterday morning, until she made a post on her blog. She describes her video blog as: “Vidéoblogue montréalais, axé sur de simples tranches de vie, le quotidien, les amis. Je parle musique à l’occasion. (Depuis mars 2006)” which should be translated to “Montreal video blog, focused on simple moments of life, daily life, and friends. I talk about music sometimes. (since march 2006)”. For me, the innovation in her blog comes from its originality and appropriation of technology. Most people would usually shoot in a studio with classic interviews/screenshots. For me this is citizen reporting 2.0 - Forgive the buzzword, but I haven’t found a better name yet.

2 sample clips below from one of her post:

Thanks everyone for participating! and remember, this is just a poll.

Defensio, a new system to fight blog comments spam, is in beta today. It’s a wordpress plugin that has “personalized adaptation to your own spam habits, it makes few mistakes”. There are few details avalaible on the technical aspects; the team behind the product, Karabunga, says it’s much more efficient than the competition. Wether it’s better than Askimet is yet to be proven, I have registered to the beta and will update on this new plugin soon.

The First Web Dev Book Club was held at Laïka yesterday, at 7pm. Evan has a write-up, and I took some notes too from the meetup:

• Jean-François Couture who has a software engineering background, talked about In search Of Stupidity, by Merril C. Chapman. It has stories of “stupid” marketing moves done in the hi-tech industry in its early days. For instance, there was WordStar, which invented word processing, but was erased from the market after a series of management decisions. We talked afterwards about tech industry leaders in the 80’s who went through the same ordeal. Evan Prodromou started a discussion wether there is something specific with the software industry, and if we can learn from the past. I said that the industry is moving so fast, getting in new markets, with new social usage, that there is really not much we can get from the past. This is a topic that should be further discussed.
• Evan Prodromou read Everything is miscellaneous by Dave Weinberger, which is on the topic of information and how you can handle data. Evan was especially interested in free tagging and RDF, which he uses for wikitravel to present and organize data. The book also covers the decimal system, used in public libraries worldwide, which can be extended easily to handle additional books.
• I had the book Information Architecture. This was a hard book to digest, and I think my presentation was not as good as Evan’s or the one done by Jean-Francois. Still, I think IA is an important subject, and will be even more so in the upcoming years. I wanted to get this book first, because I have started using services like Twitter, RSS readers, IM and many other services in the internet and it made me think about information overload, and especially the best way to present information in a meaningful and complete way. The book is very scholar, and presents a framework to use IA in your web projects. It’s also complete, with detailed steps and tools. A recommended read for me, although I am more on the agile/get real methodologies.

The books were good, but what I found best was the discusssions, which were very insightful. We arranged the next Web Dev Book Club meetup to be held on the last monday of every month. That means the next one is due July 30th, at 7pm, at Laïka.

If you have a book to present, please add it to the wiki with the book’s title, or make a post with the tag WebDevMontreal. There should be at most 4 books in the next meetup, and it should last 1 hour and a half.

Read/WriteWeb has an article about top canadian web applications.

There are 4 web services from Montréal which made the list, namely librivox, wikitravel, standoutjobs and ilovetoplay

Note:

• Thanks to Mat Balez, Nick, François La Roche, Geo Perdis, Scott Lake, Stirling Westrup, Martin Dufort, Samuel and Trevor for participating.
• Special thanks to Ben Yoskovitz, who has been a great ressource and a “people connector”.
• The list covers web applications only. I know there are many other kind of bright startups in Canada, but the post needed to be focused.

Hugh McGuire, of Librivox fame, has launched a new blog called datalibre.ca. The blog is actually in english, and not in french as the name might suggest, and is “lobbying” for free and open access to all data held by the Canadian government. Hugh writes:

datalibre.ca is a group blog, inspired by civicaccess.ca, which believes all levels of Canadian governments should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. The data is collected using Canadian tax-payer funds, and we believe use of the data should not be restricted to those who can afford the exorbitant fees

There is a very interesting presentation done by Hugh about data in the blog, how our ability to manage and digest it is our main advantage in this world, as a human being. He continues by saying that by allowing free and open access to data, we will get more democracy and more solved problems. I really like the idea, but I have yet to see what datalibre is suggesting as an open data format.

Starting from this week, there will be a weekly poll in Montreal Tech Watch about current technology and news.

Now, unless you have been living under a rock for the past 6 months, you already know that video is now the biggest trend on the Internet. Joost, Babelgum, vpod.tv, VeohTV, and the Apple TV all promise to close the gap between video and television thanks to your broadband connection. Youtube now takes 10% of the total Internet traffic, which is more than P2P downloads, and the portal is now taken seriously by presidential candidates in the US. Justin.tv and ustream lets you stream video live, for your own Truman show. And it’s not just a user trend either. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, FOX are all flocking to the web, making deals with video portals and hardware manufacturers like Apple.

As you can see, this is a huge topic, and I am breaking it down to a series. This week’s poll is about innovative usage of video in blogs, while another poll will cover video usage for businesses, à la nuvu.tv or standoutjobs. Here is the list :

• dailywom.tv does daily interviews about viral marketing
• galacticast makes sci-fi and comedy shows
• Vero-b covers cultural events
• yulbuzz has shows and interviews, on a diverse set of topics
• Ze Canada takes video clips in yulblogs and yulbiz

Thanks for voting!

Mighty Bids, an ebay competitor, has dropped the towel, and you can now find the business for sale on ebay, which I see as a tribute to eBay’s business model. Sadly, I don’t think there is a way to go into direct competition with eBay, whose assets lie mainly in its rating system and user history. I guess you could go hyper-local, or focus only on niche products, but that is certainly not enough. If you think you have the skills to design a business model which will win against eBay, give me a ring and we will conquer the world next month. :-)

thanks to StartupNorth