Near Montreal, what I found interesting is Marc Gingras’ post, where he decodes for us Skype’s explanations, what went wrong, and why Skype’s self-healing algorithm didn’t work. And he continues by cheering the virtues of P2P. Of course, he wrote the post because he is the CEO and founder of Tungle.com, a Montreal startup that received earlier this year $1.5m in funding, and whose technology relies on P2P to organize executives’s appointements and calendars.
Late in his post, Marc Gingras says:
Tungle built its own proprietary peer-to-peer network. Similar to Skype, each time a Tungle client starts, it communicates with a supernode to find out the location of its peers. One of the key differences with the Skype network is that we have the ability to start supernodes using our own resources. So, if multiple clients go offline at once, Tungle could, in a matter of minutes start multiple supernodes to accommodate for the massive amounts of reconnects.
For me, this means that Tungle has leased/bought an array of servers throughout the world, with the Tungle client built-in, ready to start as supernodes whenever they receive a signal from Tungle, which is very smart. (Of course I might be wrong, I am decoding his post, the same manner that he decoded skype’s)
Denis Canuel, from Quebec Valley, is ranting about videotron’s new 100Gb limit for its Extreme internet subscribers (post in french). First, he says that limited plans are a thing of the past. But what I found more interesting was the second part, where he shows that there is actually a need for more bandwdith. If you haven’t noticed, 2007 is the year of web video, with startups like Joost or Babelgum bringing new TV/video services, iTMS pushing movies on its online store, the Apple TV, videoconference on upcoming Leopard, and of course youtube becoming as ubiquitous as Google. Video games now also expect an Internet connection (World of Warcraft, XBox Live!…) . As you can see, this is not the time to limit the bandwidth. Ironically, Videotron still calls the plan unlimited, as fagstein points out, and if you go past the 100Gb limit, there is no warning — until you get the month’s receipt.
I am sure some of you are already thinking about Bell, but you should check out first Hugh McGuire recent’s problems. And I also know Bell is using heavily traffic shappers, at least in my neighborhood, which prevents subscribers from using P2P services à la BitTorrent. It seems that Bell and Videotron have ruled out power users and now targets only their services to the average Joe, who uses Hotmail, spend some time on MSN Messenger, and the rest of the time on text-based message boards.
…
which sounds like we are going back to the early 2000’s. I think now is the time for a new telecom company to step up and offer a decent and unlimited plan.
Update: I couldn’t find the link yesterday but there is a very interesting article on the subject: bandwidth crisis. It says that cable companies are reaching saturation point because of video, and that they will get killed soon by HD programming. Maybe that’s why Videotron is introducing the limit, they might have already reached saturation
GolfGo, owned by Montreal parent company ActiveMedia, launched today tee times reservations. The service is avalaible for almost all golf courses in Québec, and allow golfers to see in real-time avalaibility and book a slot. Of course, there were already services to do that, but you had to go to each golf course’s internet website, which was a painful operation if you were trying to book at a peak hour. Now, it’s all centralized within one website.
Now, if you visit it, this isn’t at all a technological or a design revolution, but I am writing about GolfGo because it’s just a simple innovation, the kind of service that consumers would want and actually pay for, instead of your typical “web2.0″ website (say facebook) where the business model is built upon hype. Golf courses pay a small monthly fee to be indexed in the service, and GolfGo also have key partnerships with hotels and travel agencies.
WatchMojo has relaunched with new features this week, and they are beginning to take the spot of number one video startup from Montreal for me. (Well there is also yulbuzz who is very innovative, but it seems those guys are on holidays.). If this is the first time you read about watchmojo, they produce videos, and then distribute them to as many portals and web destinations as possible.
The most noticeable improvement is the new customized video player. It’s much more slicker, and has a widescreen format of 480 pixels by 270 pixels, which practically doubles the size of the video shown. The player also has user sharing, program guides, and can now be toggled to full-screen. Check the following video, featuring watchmojo.com’s CEO, where he profiles myspace.com:
I find the video player to be on par with watchmojo’s production quality.
For the back end, watchmojo now uses Typo3 as the CMS, and bliptv for the video platform. According to Ashkan, Typo3 allows them to categorize and tag their content, which should make the user experience more friendly. Tools for social bookmarking have also been added to each video page. All of this is very impressive for a company that is just 18 months old. (did I mention they have produced more than 4000 videos?)
I am not sure now where they are going market-wise, and still feel overwhelmed by the quantity of links avalaible in each page. I think the next logical step for them is to hire a good Information Architect and designer, someone like Guillaume Thoreau, so that people would actually feel welcomed to the site.
In a province where up to 37.5% of video games developers’ wages are subsidized by the governement, this seems as a normal measure. It also sounds logical, seeing the number of video games already produced locally, in Montréal and Québec city. Now, I also expect Québecers to get much less video games titles in their hands, in upcoming years, except of course from blockbuster releases. Video game companies are not public organizations anyway, they follow market laws.
Defensio, the new startup launching an antispam system, has been in private beta test for bloggers for a month. They also have an API, which allow companies to use Defensio to filter requests and user interaction with their own applications and software. This is the case of Active Reload, which used it for Lighthouse, their new issue and bug tracking for web app development. Rick Olson (aka Techno Weenie) has just reported about their experience and for him, Defensio is on par with Akismet:
you can see that the performance of the two engines is similar, except Defensio is more eager to mark items as spam. I was expecting more missed spam from Akismet actually, because there hasn’t been a single spam that I’ve seen since we added Defensio support.
Here is my experience with Montreal Tech Watch:
I get to the same conclusions as Rick Olson, although I found Defensio too aggressive for my own taste. For instance, it marked one trackback inside Montreal Tech Watch blog posts as spam, or comments from local bloggers as spam, even though they didn’t post any link. Patrick Tanguay, who wanted to correct a recent post, was seen as a spammer, even though he is using Defensio too for his blog.
The problem here is that Defensio doesn’t put suspect comments in the “awaiting for moderation” section, so I have no way of knowing that someone left such comment, except than going through the spam folder every 6 hours or so. In this area, Akismet is more usable, as it will send you an email if it can’t decide if a comment or trackback is legitimate or not.
Now, I don’t know if Defensio just needs a little fine-tuning or this is inherent to the way their algorithm works. The good news is Defensio is learning, and there are less and less false positives each day. But I was wondering how users would manage if they had 10 times more traffic and comments than this blog. Don’t misunderstand me, I think Defensio is doing an incredible job against 2-year-old Akismet. I really would like them to succeed. But at the end, you need to get into a “standard” user’s shoes and tailor the product to them.
I came across a study from XitiMonitor, a company providing Internet traffic monitoring services, which shows how consumers use the web for each month. It is noteworthy that XitiMonitor is a french company, and have no activities whatsoever in Montreal, but they do however track Internet traffic globally, and I am sure this will interest anyone having a worldwide Internet audience or planning to launch a web startup soon.
The data is compiled from their 2002 to 2006 database, and show that Internet usage is at its lowest in the summer, especially august. In the other hand, if you plan to launch a website, it’s best to do it in January, or in March.
I wouldn’t be suprised that data for Québec and Canada would show even more differences between the summer and the winter (I am sure you know why) .
Chris Hand Zeke, owner of Montreal art gallery Zeke’s Gallery and the blog of the same name, was featured on CBC yesterday. The reporter used his current case to highlight the gray area bloggers operate in currently in Canada.
If you missed the story, Chris blogged about another Montreal art gallery owner and linked to the National Post, Le Devoir and Radio-Canada articles which covered the owner’s troubled past, who subsquently sued Chris for libel, demanding 60.000$ in compensation, and more.
In this case, a man took a website down because the blogger linked to a newspaper article. If you are blogging, if you operate a website where users can publish at (”user-generated-content”), if you plan to have “social networking” features in a new website, then it’s a critical problem for you. I am always surprised at how so many Canadian bloggers get on the internet neutrality bandwagon, whereas it is a pure U.S. problem, a fight between American Congress, American Telecom companies, and Internet giants the like of Google and Yahoo, whereas this issue is more critical and more relevant.
Think about it. What do you have the right to blog about? Do you think you are protected by provincial and federal law if you publish your opinion about someone else? Aren’t you liable in Canada if one of your user is making a bad reputation of another person in your website?
DemoCamp fourth edition was at SAT Friday, 17th of August.
Note: I tried to take a couple of videos for this edition, please excuse the jitteriness, I guess I will have to take a tripod next time
Simon Law was the host of democamp
The first presentation was by a team from Categorical Design Solutions who developed a “scenario editor” for the web called BrainCuts. The idea is to append concepts and relations to web objects so that they get understood by computers
The categorical design solutions team presenting BrainCuts
The semantic web, i.e getting machines to understand human-produced content, is an issue as old as the Internet. Currently, the “cool web geeks” are all about open content, microformats and the Atom format, but, frankly, nobody has yet the answer, and I am open to BrainCuts. Now, they tried to put Braincuts in the “web3.0″ movement, whatever that is, with other “trendy” words, and I am not sure that was the right way to present it. What I know though is that BrainCuts, the end-user interface they developed inhouse, can have huge opportunities if used for the mass market, for instance. It produces multimedia content (sound, movies, pictures…) with standard technologies like XHTML and javascript, and is an open and readable format unlike flash for instance.
The next presenter was David Xu, who is behind PodBean, a website for podcast producers and listeners. He went through the website’s features, and from what I get, his vision was to make it the Youtube for podcasts. This is impressive for someone who is studying at the same time at McGill university. Podcast producers can have a blog where each podcast is featured, they can monetize episodes with premium subscriptions and get a share of the ad revenues. Like in Youtube, podcast users can subscribe to channels and see what are the popular shows.
Now, from my experience, I know this represents a hell lot of work. It seems it was started august last year, and it has grown now to videos as well. One advice though: I would highly suggest David to put some real info in the website’s info. There is an address in Delaware, but it’s the same thing as a postal office box in the Bahamas.
Mitch Cohen was next, and he made a demonstration for the first time of ClixConnect. There was previously a post about the service in Montreal Tech Watch. ClixConnect allows online retailers to provide direct customer support to their website visitors.
Mitch Cohen said how clixconnect was born and what was its market. He showed how a javascript popup would get the customer to chat with a real human. Apparently, 80% of visitors would ask basic questions while the rest would ask for information that would need more research. Someone commented that this might be intrusive, and might be perceived as “stalking” visitors, and Mitch said the key is how you approach them - ie suggest help and recommend instead of pushing sales to the customer’s face. I was not entirely convinced previously about clixconnect, but I think now I am.
Democamp4 - ClixConnect
Josh Nursing presenting IronRuby, and alternative code editors for Ruby on Rails
Josh Nursing presented next what he did with Ruby. First, he went through IronRuby, an implementation of the programming language for the .NET framework. I first thought this was really useless; it’s like say teaching ballet to prison inmates, two conflicting philosophies for opposite usages. But I then thought of Silverlight, the new platform from Microsoft, and it struck me that it can be a big deal. You could use Ruby to make a silverlight application without (re)learning C# or another proprietary language from Microsoft.
In the presentation, Josh also presented alternative IDEs for Ruby, with E text editor for instance, a Textmate clone for the Windows platform which copied everything, from its pricing to the bundles system.(alternatively, if you are on windows, I also suggest Notepad++ which is lightweight and open source). At the end, Josh presented what Microsoft is doing for Open Source, but I have to say I don’t care at all. This all marketing, if they support or fight the movement is pretty much irrelevant to me.
The last presenter was Daniel Haran, who worked on url_pipe since he left Québec city, a few weeks ago. It’s a geek version of Yahoo Pipes, where you would use commands to chain RSS feeds. He presented for instance how url_pipe can transform a RSS to another feed with geographical data and then feed to Google Maps, which will show the relevant markers on a map. The audience for url_pipe is of course developers, and the next logical step is an API. I don’t know if he has the back-end servers to support all the requests people are going to throw at url_pipe, I guess we will wait till he makes the service public.
Montreal International, whose mission is to promote Montreal and its international status, has published this week Attractiveness Indicators 2007, a study which compares Montreal and other major cities in Canada and in the US. It highlighted quality of life, competitive costs, and also research:
Among major North American metropolitan areas, Greater Montréal ranks:
- 1st for the number of university students per capita
- 1st for the competitiveness of overall business operating costs
- 2nd for the quality of life
- 2nd for the quality of its healthcare system and level of sanitation
- 3rd for the rate of attraction of patented inventions
- 4th for the concentration of high-technology jobs
Among major Canadian metropolitan areas, Greater Montréal ranks:
- 1st for funds granted to university research
- 1st for the total number of university students and the number of
foreign university students
- 1st for the number of university diplomas awarded to all students and
to foreign students
- 1st for the number of research centres
- 1st for the number of researchers and the funds invested per researcher
- 1st for the number of patents held
- 1st for the number of scientific publications arising from university / private sector partnerships
- 1st for venture capital investments
Quite impressive, isn’it? Now, everything you just read comes straight from the press release, and I think this needs to be discussed a little. My reaction, although I might be wrong, is that I don’t have the feeling that Montréal is the number 1 university center in North America. Sure, the student population is huge, but I have been tracking technology news locally for 6 months now and the only innovation I have seen comes from Université de Montreal, namely uMind, a e-learning company, based upon Artifical Intelligence research*. I also got in touch with their respective entrepreneurship centers and all I have to say is that they don’t really look or network beyond their own faculty or local laboratory. As you might have noticed, the figures shown above highlight academic research and its results. It’s a prerequisite but not synonymous of innovation. Innovation is defined as such when it makes citizens’ lives better off, and when it grows the whole economy. I think Pierre Brunet, who heads Montreal International, nails it by claiming there is a “huge innovation potential” for Montreal. Which, in other words means we need actual research to be transformed into innovation, we need more entrepreneurs, and more importantly we need more support for entrepreneurs. Let me rephrase this again. inconditional support for entrepreneurs.
* note: there was also Clixconnect, which was started by Mitch Cohen, straight from McGill University. But I believe McGill had nothing to do with the new company. It had a lot do with Mitch’s entrepreneurship.
As was the case throughout 2008, VC activity preferred Québec IT sectors
in the third quarter. A total of $56 million was invested in 18 IT companies,
or just over half of all disbursements, which is consistent with trends in the
two prior quarters. But in comparison with the $63 million invested one year
ago, IT-related activity fell 11% in Q3.
To the consternation of Twitter users, the site often falters amid the demands of processing millions of tweets a day. One possible solution to this problem is on display at Identi.ca, the site that looks most identical to Twitter. What's different is under the hood: Nearly 100 different sites are sharing the load. "Instead of a single service, we're part of a federated network of microblogging sites running open-source software," says Evan Prodromou, who launched Identi.ca this past summer. He expects the service to mushroom from its current base of 30,000 to 500,000 within a year, and thinks it will surpass Twitter in users by 2010.
Local investors are gearing up for Capital Innovation 2009, an event organized for March next year by Amiral Partenaires. The event will gather private investors such as VC funds, angel investors and fund managers; and is aimed at showcasing high-potential ventures needing from $100k to $1M.
For the event, BDR Capital, ID Capital, iNovia Capital, JLA, MSU and Propulsion Ventures will be selecting 12 ideas which will be presented to investors during the event. Deadline on Nov. 28th for applications:
Weblocal is different though from their previous projects since it allows users to sign up, review + recommend businesses, tag them, as well as upload pictures and photos. It also has a mobile version. Lots of user-generated content then, which puts weblocal in the same category as other websites such asmonavis.ca or praized.
They stay true to the original vision, which is to provide companies a full array of tools highlighting the company’s best traits, making thus the company more appealing to prospective candidate
he Main will become a wireless Internet playground by year's end, thanks to the merchants' association of the world-famous boulevard.
The Société de développement du boulevard Saint-Laurent will provide free Internet access from Sherbrooke St. to Mount Royal Ave. to attract and retain more visitors and to push promotions onto tourists.
Flow Ventures invests in and accelerates startups. Our unique model combines financing, strategy and hands-on operational services designed to grow new ventures quickly and efficiently. Flow can accelerate your startup by operating key areas of your startup including finance, software development, HR, business development and administration. This allows entrepreneurs to focus on their products and their customers rather than building infrastructure and capacity.
Standout Jobs, a leading provider of Web-based tools to power companies’ online recruiting efforts, today announced the general availability of version two of its web-based Recruitment Communication Platform. Previously dubbed “Reception” while in beta, Standout Jobs’ Recruitment Communication Platform boasts many new features and updated functionality proven successful with more than 200 beta customers since the company’s launch at DEMO in January 2008.
La rive-sud de Montréal c’est bien évidemment PRATT & WHITNEY, HÉROUX-DEVTEK, 3M , BOMBARDIER, ou encore DANONE . Mais il existe en Montérégie, bien d’autres PME de domaines aussi diversifiés que les télécommunications, la chimie, la pharmaceutique, l’informatique, l’environnement, l’agriculture, l’agro-alimentaire, l’électronique etc.
My research shows that more than a third of the region's workforce comes from the creative class - scientists, technology workers, entertainers, artists and designers, as well as managers and financial types - putting it in the top 10 per cent of all regions in North America, and a global leader as well. Nearly a fifth of the Montreal region's workforce forms a super-creative core made up of the techies plus cultural and entertainment types.
