Montreal Tech Watch

SiXtron, a developer of films coating for solar cells, has raised $10m in series A financing, led by Ventures West. Also participating were iNovia Capital, Innovatech sud du Québec, and Fonds d’Investissement en développement durable. SiXtron is a joint spin-off of Bishop’s University and Université de Sherbrooke, and has developed a new technology that is [...]

Things have been speeding up here in Montréal lately; although I had plans to renew MontrealTechWatch in early 2008, I am advancing them for now: The biggest change you will see is that there will be from now on posts in french. The choice of the language will be depending on the topic. For instance, [...]

If you follow Montreal Tech Watch or if you met me around Montreal, then you’ve probably heard of Blitzweekend. Today, we are officially launching the website. We had previously a blog at blitzweekend.com, but this is now the definitive website. As Mark Evans just points out, there has been lately around democamps, barcamps, startupcamps and [...]

Defensio is the 2nd startup to leave private beta this month in Montreal. Carl Mercier announced publicly the news at Montreal On Rails #4, along with Mat Balez, and Camilo Lopez DEFENSIOenvoyé par montrealtechwatch Defensio is an anti-spam service that is advertised as more performant than Akismet. Bloggers using wordpress can install the provided plugin [...]

Industry Canada has published a study where it shows that canadians sharing and getting music on p2p networks will finally buy more music. Some of the key quotes: Industry Canada undertook a music file sharing study during 2006-07 to measure the extent to which music downloads over peer-to-peer file sharing networks, for which the sound [...]

Last week, an employee of Sympatico, one of Canada’s main ISPs, confirmed on their online support forums that Bell has been using “state-of-the-art” technology since September to limit P2P downloads to 30kbps, regardless of the plan you subscribed too. The employee mentions that this was introduced to maintain their QoS. BitTorrent, Gnutella, Limewire, Kazaa, eDonkey, [...]

So I was about to write a complete review of CakeMail when I saw that it was featured at WebWorkerDaily. WebWorkerDaily is part of Om Malik‘s blog network and should provide CakeMail with a lot of visibility. Alistair Croll, who is also VP of marketing at Montreal-based coradiant explains why web designers and web agencies [...]

Carl Charest just wrote to me that Branchez-vous is launching today BV!Max, an ad serving program for bloggers, webmasters, and web publishers in Québec. Unlike the previous initiative by Transcontinental Media, which chose an elite group of 20 A-List business bloggers, BV!Max can be used by any website, although there are a few conditions: you [...]

ADISQ’s initial announcement on Internet regulation was vastly picked up last week by bloggers and the media. A facebook group, Against CRTC regulating the Internet, was created by Pierre Coté, with now 192 members. Sylvain Carle wrote an open letter to ADISQ, where he shows that the business model has changed for the music industry [...]

Austin Hill made a talk at Barcamp about angel funds in Montréal. I ¨noticed that most of the attendees were intersted; so here are some notes about angels. First, what is an angel and what are they for? Angels invest into a new promising company that looks like it is going to disrupt the market [...]