Montreal Tech Watch

As a follow-up to the recent discussions about job boards and other features for startups, there is now a jobs section in Montreal Tech Watch. However, this is not a job board as you know it, it’s a simple, hand-filtered solution that publishes the job ad as a blog post. I believe this will do the job (no pun intended), as regular and RSS readers will be alerted of new jobs, and the Jobs Category will then list all previous listings.

Denis Canuel, Sylvain Carle and Tris Hussey both plan services and databases for Quebec and Canadian startups, but that’s for the future, and there is not yet a job board relevant to Montreal. Entrepreneurs, startups, and Montréal companies are invited to fill the form and the listing will be published in the blog. It will be free of charge, but to prevent abuse, you can only submit one job ad per month. If you wish to advertise more positions though, it’s possible but it will be charged accordingly (contact news@montrealtechwatch.com for more information about that)

Tungle, a Montreal startup that allows easy setup of meetings and appointements via a outlook pluging, went this week to San Diego, California, to present their service at DEMO. It’s a high-profile event that gets the attention of the media and investors, and can be seen as an opportunity for a startup to “take off”.

Marc Gingras, Tungle’s CEO, gave an impressing demo and received the DEMOgod award. Here is the video of the event:

But this wasn’t the only field where they innovated. Apparently, the Tungle team also co-signed a statement saying tools for businesses should be affordable, easy-to-use and affordable, with 7 other companies.

Needless to say this would boost Tungle’s image and adoption. Marc Gingras did an excellent job here as a CEO.

After a week of beta-testing, Marc-André Cournouyer has launched Refactor My Code, a website to share Ruby, C# and Javascript code. It invites web developers to share publicly snippets of code in order to get feedback and improvements from other members. One year ago, there was rails.techno-weenie.net which did the same thing with a points system but Rick Olson moved it to a Beast forum and then killed off the service.

The beauty of Refactor my Code is that it’s simple in design but serves right a purpose in practice. It’s those kind of websites you think you could have came up with it yourself, but Marc-André finally nailed it. I am expecting it to become a reference for RoR developers, beyond Montreal. I have to say I am quite impressed and tempted to focus 100% on development (instead of mtw for instance).

If you are providing services to businesses, Multiple Media, a local software company, has released MMCM-blog, advertised as the perfect tool for business blogs. It is said to integrate in form and function with the company’s website, and also offer additionnal security and stats that “consumer” blogging solutions don’t have.

The product has left me unimpressed however. It is in fact a component to use with MCMM, their Content Management System solution, so it might be interesting for the companies who already use the CMS, or for those who want a local tech support for their website. I don’t see however a compelling reason why an IT manager would prefer this to Wordpress or Movable Type, which are much more powerful, flexible, extensible, and more importantly proven solutions for millions of blogs.

Philippe Gauvin of Magnet Media pointed me to Brandfame, which aims to connect brands and companies to video producers.

Product placement is a common practice in the cinema industry, in subtle and less subtle forms; it associates a movie star to a product, with spectators then more likely to accept the message. With Internet’s case, “product placement” exists already for bloggers with payperpost, although the service has been criticized by many high-profile bloggers as immoral. For online videos, this is however the first company I’ve heard of that offers this service.

In Brandfame’s case, producers makes a list of videos they want to produce, with its theme, target demographics etc. Advertisers and product managers can then search those planned videos and make an offer to get their product placed somewhere in the video. Brandfame also tracks number of views for each video for advertisers, giving them a way to grasp their campaign’s success.

Online video is the fastest growing market on the web, with Youtube, dailymotion, metacafe, revver, proving long ago that there is an ever-growing audience for home videos. Rewarding content producers is still though an unsolved problem: metacafe’s members get a cut of the advertising, while Youtube plans to insert 30-sec bumper ads directly into the videos. I doubt however that home and professionnal video makers recoup their costs with this kind of advertising, and Brandfame can provide them a way to get additionnal revenues.

Update: SpringWise has also today a post about Brandfame

So Denis Canuel who started blogging in French and in English a few months ago at QuebecValley has been working hard on startups and growing his website. Now, he has just opened a new section in the website. It makes a list of startups in Montreal and throughout Quebec. He lists some other planned features:

• A “PR center” where startups can post their own PR, hopefully gaining some local interest
• A listing of resources bringing value to a startup. For example:
  • Government entities willing to help entrepreneurs
  • Coaches, business veterans, volunteers
  • Angel “groups” and Venture capital
  • etc.
• Ability for startups to setup polls to tests new ideas
• A jobboard
• Help wanted / Looking to help section

I have been thinking of getting similar services on MontrealTechWatch, but between this and Yulstart, it doesn’t make sense anymore. Maybe later, but right now it’s just too crowded.

Deloitte, a top consulting company, has published this year’s list of the fastest growing Canadian companies, or Fast50. For instance, Reasearch In Motion, the makers of the Backberry, rank at 41. Montreal companies that make up the list are:

1. Airborne Entertainment, a company specialized in mobile industry,
2. Radial Point, which provides services to ISPs,
3. Genetec, specialized in IP security
4. Nstein Technologies, which makes software for print and internet publishers,
5. DTI software, which makes games for airliners,
6. Distech Controls, in electronics
7. Artificial Mind and Movement, a video games company
8. OceanWide, which makes software for international trade

Companies from Ontario, especially Toronto, dominate the list.

Congratulations to each of those companies!

The Code Kitchen, which is currently working on CakeMail, has a blog post on their new web-based localization tool.

The application is targeted to web developers who use gettext to provide multiple languages for their users, which is somehow a compulsory step in Québec. As CakeMail is being launched in Québec, the Code Kitchen had to provide a perfect interface in both languages, english and french, and were unsatisfied from existing tools.

Duncan Moore points out though that there are already solutions avalaible, like launchpad’s translator tool, and launching a new service wouldn’t make sense if you don’t have enough key differences and advantages from your competitors. If you want my personal opinion, we rolled out either english-only or french-only websites, or hand-coded the translations. Providing a user interface in both languages added a layer of complexity in content delivery and also programmatically; so projects were “downsized” automatically to one language. But I guess this isn’t the norm but the exception. If you are developing multilingual websites, head over to their blog and leave a feedback.

Telefim Canada has just announced that Mindhabits has won the ‘Great Canadian Video Game Competition’. Mindhabits wins a $500 000 prize from Telefilm Canada and an equal amount from private investors, to help them develop and launch their game.

The competition was started to support and highlight independent video games companies from Canada. It was started by Telefilm, along with the support of various governmental agencies and established industry players like Ubisoft or Electronic Arts. Competitors had to display original content, with each of them tested during the competition’s previous 10 months.

MindHabits is based in Montreal and was spun off from original McGill medical and science research. They plan to build a ’serious’ video game to help minds manage social stress, much alike the Brain Age series, which reminds me a lot of the Coué method. Overall, this is a very curious video game, although the prospect of getting social happinness from a video game doesn’t seem ‘right’ to me.

Ubisoft Montreal has relaunched its recruiting campaign tropdimagination. Prospective candidates are invited to test their skills in interactive games and quizzes in memory, creativity and logic. Ubisoft hopes to find 150 designers and developers for its workforce thanks to this initiative.

Although I really disagree with their overuse of flash, I liked the way they diversified their message. There is a facebook group, a myspace page, and videos to expose the company’s culture to the candidates. Here is a sample video about 3D and creativity in Ubisoft, which reminds me a lot of the standoutjobs videos:

Ubisoft Montreal is the heavyweight video games company in Québec, and even country-wide. They have managed to lure and charm all new talents, and are planning to recruit 1000 more in the next 6 years. Thinking about it, if I was right now in high school, I would say my number one goal would be to work for Ubisoft, and I bet it’s the same for many young Québecers. A direct consequence of having so many video games companies hunting top designers and developers is that there would be nothing left for software companies, web design agencies, startups, consulting firms and for the IT industry in general. Of course, it’s quite easy to give a bigger salary package than Ubisoft, but nothing lures the young’uns than the prospect of making their own AAA video game. And if they can’t go to Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Eidos, Artificial Mind and Movement are broadcasting the same message.