Montreal Tech Watch

Radioactif, a local internet service provider, announced earlier this summer that they will deploy a Wimax network in Montreal, with Nomade Telecom as the mobile wireless expert partner for this project. The announced date was then September 2007, but they have now a page about the details of the service, which is now due Dec. 2007.

Interestingly, the page also mentions mobile IP telephony, which means customers who are subscribed to the $30 monthly service will also be able to leave Bell Canada in the process. For me this is a very smart move from Radioactif. It doesn’t require a mobile license to deploy a wimax network, which is considered by the CRTC as a wifi technology. Videotron wishes on the other hand to be the 4th mobile carrier in Canada, but are stumbling instead in political games and bullyinglobbying by the 3 other telcos. I know other entrepreneurs here in Quebec who wanted to launch a mobile phone network, and this might be the answer.

Wimax is a wireless alternative to cable and ADSL, providing users a practical service like wifi but with speeds up to 5Mbps. Previously, it required to have a rather big device, the size of a router to get the signal, but manufacturers like Intel are now launching cards that can fit into PCMCIA slots.

MOBIVOX announced today that they have now a new COO, Nitzan Shaer, who was previously an “Entrepreneur-In-Residence” at IDG Ventures Boston, which I guess is a fancy way to call a business developer. IDG Ventures Boston led earlier this month series A funding for the voip startup, raising a total of $11million. Nitzan Shaer worked previously for Skype, where he headed the mobile division, a highly relevant experience to get MOBIVOX growing. As a direct consequence, MOBIVOX announced they will open a new office in Boston, which should push their growth on the international market; although it also sounds as a total takeover by IDG Ventures.

Recently, MOBIVOX also overhauled their website, offering a simpler and smarter message, à la Skype, making it easy for everyone to use the service. You just write your details and the phone number you want to call, and MOBIVOX will set up the phone connexion between the two lines. I liked it compared to the previous interface, where they focused on the voice agent and other things that somehow felt clusmy.

Tris Hussey from blognation who has been testing the service also finds it easy-to-use. It seems that MOBIVOX is gaining real traction these days, and seems to be Montreal’s current star startup.

There is a Web Dev Book Club next monday, October 29th. If you are involved in web design, web development, and/or web marketing, this is the ideal opportunity to share, discuss and learn about current and new tools, software and developments in the web landscape.

The event is open to all and works around books attendees just read. It is not compulsory to have read a book but you will be somehow expected to contribute on discussed topics. In fact, you need to remind that the goal of these open meetings is to foster and raise the level of talent in Montreal, and brainstorm on cutting-edge technologies.

Read about past Web Development Book Clubs.

The meeting is planned at Laika, 4040 bvd St-Laurent, at 6pm and should last 1 to 2 hours.

MSBi Capital is now iNovia Capital, and their new office address is 1155, bvd René-Levesque West, Suite 2701. They have announced it’s because they will be expanding their team, deals, their VC network and will also be growing to other geographic regions.

MSBi Capital was a VC fund known for their involvement with academic institutions, seeding commercially viable research projects in software, semiconductors, biotech and cleantech. It was launched in 2002 and had partnerships with main universities in Montreal and with Université Laval. I wish good luck then to the iNovia Capital team.

Last tuesday, weblo, a controversial Montreal startup, has launched a new section called digital assets. Internet users can list videos, accounts from social networks, email addresses, or blogs. The main destinations supported are currently youtube, google video, metacafe, myspace, facebook, gmail, yahoo, hotmail, blogger etc. For instance, a user can claim a youtube video; and then other weblo users can make offers to publish ads on the page. For an email addresses, the user is invited to insert ads in their signature. For a social network like facebook, it will be somehow “slipped” in your interests.

Weblo claims for instance that the most viewed video on youtube is worth $1,211,942.72. One of my regular hotmail address is worth $9.44, another montreal barcamp video is worth $29.93, and a blog like the scheme way is worth $981.25. Meanwhile, 400 friends on facebook will get your profile valued at $62,807. How they calculate those figures is beyond me, but they are high enough I guess to attract feeble-mindedplayful internet users.

Like weblo’s other features, there is a “pyramidal marketing” aspect to the new section. If you list the content, even though you don’t own it, you will get a share of the revenues when the real content owner comes to claim it. The new section is already full of users racing to find the most popular pages/videos/blog on the web.

Needless to say that you should think twice before trying this service. Most of the websites above forbid third-party advertisements and monetization in their terms of service. For me, this is also the real-life equivalent of going out with stickers and banners placed all over your clothes, or maybe read third-party ads when you talk with someone else. Ok, I might be going too far, but you see the picture. Rocky Mirza, CEO of Weblo defends the new section by saying “If the content is the new currency, then you should be getting paid for it”. He also said they are going “stealthy” with the new ads, slipping ads into often overlooked text fields, but also easily clicked-on by accident.

I guess weblo is going next to let users list stuff they don’t own and make money from it from pyramidal schemes. Oh wait, there have already done it.

CITIZENShift, a project by the National Film Board of Canada, is a platform where creatives and activists are invited to self-express on social issues, through pictures, text, videos and podcasts. The platform is quite successful with young creatives; and they have now a new theme every month debating social changes. Creatives would send their videos and material to a small team, which would approve and publish it on a relevant category.

Yesterday, CITIZENShift and its french version, Parole Citoyenne, relaunched, with a new graphic design, focusing on users, user contribution, and social networking features. Any citizen can register and contribute to a dossier, upload pictures and videos and comment on any content. Navigation between similar content is also easier with the introduction of tags.

I spoke to a member of CITIZENShift this week: previously, approving material, sorting pages, converting multimedia content, and then uploading them would take them a lot of time. This new platform is much more scalable, and hopefully, they would be able to reach more citizens. I was not using the previous platform and can’t tell then if this is better; but this current version in itself looks and works great. However, I also think that the “dossiers” and “social change” were the distinctive features of CITIZENShift, and with the current atomization of content, the new website sometimes feels as a generic social network.

The new version of CITIZENShift was undertaken by meidia, a web agency which also has its own web2.0 and blogging products, with development heavily based on drupal.

Rogers has launched yesterday the highly-publicized HSPDA service in 22 cities in Canada. The coverage is mainly done in BC, Ontario, and Québec with 5 cities, Montreal included. As reported earlier, HSPDA is the only “true” 3G service currently avalaible in Canada, allowing data bandwidth similar to cable or ADSL.

Rogers has also developed mobile video conferencing, allowing callers to see each other. To this day, Rogers is the only carrier offering this feature in North America. It doesn’t come cheap though, because it costs an extra 25 cents per minute to have video calls, which is roughly more expensive than an international call to Europe. Still, I find this welcome, in a world where the Canadian telecom landscape is often seen as late compared to the US, Europe or Asia.

HSPDA will also let the user surf the internet at high-speed, and connect the device to a laptop, allowing thus true mobilility. Like video calls, this is also something that should not reach mass market because of its price tag, and because of the compatible devices, the Samsung A706, LG TU500, Motorola Q9, PALM Treo 750, HTC 621 and the HTC TyTN, which won’t win any design award.

Benjamin Yoskovitz, co-founder and CEO of standoutjobs, has written a guide on how to get funding if you plan to enter the startup world.

He explains how bootstrapping works, love money, angel funding, and series A funding. He finishes with tips and additional ressources on the subject. Now, I try to comment every piece of news or blog post that comes across, but this time, I really can’t. I would need to be an angel or a VC I guess to add something noteworthy to the article. It is wikipedia-esque in nature, and all I have to say is bravo for the great work.

You may recall the first post mentionning an event called blitzweekend, where the goal was to make a product within a very limited timespan, i.e. 2 days. We are now going forward, and have a date for the first “official” blitzweekend for Montreal, Nov 24th and 25th. Teams of 3 to 5 are invited for the event, and participants will then get to vote on the most “promising” product after the 2 days.

There is already a wiki page at barcamp.org and we have also setup a website, although there seems to be DNS propagation problems (?).

Now, we are inviting those are interested in the event for a meeting tomorrow wednesday at 6pm, at Laika (4040 bvd St-Laurent). We will talk about the organization, and also about another blitzweekend test session this upcoming weekend. Yes, you read it right, we want to test the concept again this weekend, to see if it’s really possible and if there are any other shortcomings. If you want to participate this weekend, then you should come up tomorrow at the meeting. The first session proved to be intense and productive*.

* this is the understatement of the day.

If you are interested in videos and its usages for the web, I stumbled into 2 new shows, both bilingual, and done by local video bloggers.

The first one is done dy Marie-Claude Beaucage and Veronique Boisjoly and is titled “dans ton salon”. They come into a musician’s living room, have an interview, and get a private “show”. The production quality is very good, but this is not really what struck me. The host and the interviewee are comfortable with the camera and everything seems spontaneously deliciousss

The second video blog is the one setup for the Festival du Nouveau Cinema. Mélanie, Mathieu and Annie are doing daily video reports about movies and panels programmed for the day. They also have a daily live video feed, done via ustream.tv.

Like bloggers, these video bloggers show a great deal of authenticity, give out their opinions, and don’t try at all to be perfect. Exactly how blogs are vs the press.I find that both shows are a great use of technology, one that could only be possible thanks to the Internet. It makes me wonder if this isn’t the real future of blogging, the one that would make blogging popular here in Quebec and in Canada.