Montreal Tech Watch

Here is a recap of what happenned in Montréal last month in technology:

• Montreal Mirror names DrunkenStepFather.com as the best Montreal blog (June 1st)
• Samuel Bouchard, blogger from Québec City, writes about entrepreneurship in Québec (June 3rd)
• Artifical Mind And Movement CEO is nominated for the FIQ awards (June 4th)
• Branchez-vous, a media company, buys youtube clone tonclip.com (June 5th)
• Yannich Manuri makes a ranking of web advertising companies operating in Québec (June 5th)
• Telus introduces extended local services in Québec (June 6th)
• Radio-Canada overhauls their video and radio web streaming section. It is optimized for Internet Explorer though (June 7th)
• Jean Charest tries web video, amidst budget negotiations. (June 9th)
• A dicussion about problems in the media, started by the fagstein blog. (June 9th)
• Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast, 5th edition was on June 10th
• ISIQ launches internet privacy campain, which aims at educating the publich about security issues on the Internet. (June 12th)
• Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal, says he wants to make interactive short animated movies, which reminds me of old video games from the previous decade. (June 14th)
• Radioactif, the little David amidst the big telcos, plans to offer wimax for montrealers, a Canadian first. Great news. By the way, one reader asked if they are just reseller and were using the nukshuk network: radioactif will install their own telecom equipment. They will not rely on Telus on Bell. (June 14th)
• Astral Media ditches Branchez-vous and open their own ad bureau. (June 15th)
• pictures: opening of a new startup (June 15th)
• Integration New Media launches Reach – a waste of R&D dollars for me (June 16th)
• Trellia, a local startup in wireless networks, gets $3.5 million funding from Fonds de Solidarité FTQ and SkyPoint Capital (June 16th)
• I write about Freedom of Speech in Canada, after Zeke’s case with Pierre Antoine Tremblay. The case is not ssolveed yet, there are many conflicting issues here. Expect some follow-up (and not just blog posts) from this case (June 18th)
• Open Space is started at montrealtechwatch.com/openspace , an experiment in blogging+wiki. So far, 2 posts were written at Open Space. I think this needs a community facilitator or more expose on MTW frontpage
• Flickr party in Montreal. (June 22th)
• Telus is considering buying BCE June 21st
• Mighty Bids is for sale at eBay on June 23rd. Update: current price is $97,601. The reserve price is not met yet.
• New weekly in Montreal Tech Watch, starting from June 24th. First poll gets 50 voters in a couple of days – apparently everyone loves video. Vero-b is considered as the most innovative video.
• HughMcGuire opens datalibre, a new blog supporting open acces to data in Canada.
• RW/W publishes a list of Top Canadian Web Apps on June 26th. Great way to talk about what’s up in Montreal
• First Web development book club in Montreal June 26th Next one is due July 30th
• Karabunga’s first web app, Defensio, is in beta. Cool name and cool header picture, although I have no idea of what it is.
• I spend a few hours in Illustrator after seeing the IA trend map. A cool map of the web in Montreal follows (June 28th). I am now faced with problems on how to represent and interconnect items which have more than 4 connections
• Fonds de solidarité FTQ, whose primary goal is to support Québec companies, invests foolishly in a New York startup. Total amount of the deal: $60 million.
• A list of open source projects in Montreal

In June, I also saw that there were much less posts, but the ones published were much longer. Compared that to April this year where there was 61 posts, which should be about 2 per day.

In July, I should be redesigning Montreal Tech Watch. make a new map of Montreal with the blogs and topics I have forgotten or couldn’t figure how to place them. also expect a look at how other cities are doing with their tech community.