Montreal Tech Watch

I am not about to write a retrospective of 2007, but what I think is necessary is to thank everyone who contributed to making Montréal a vibrant tech community.

Thanks to Mehdi Akiki, Claire Bu, Mat Balez, Frank Lamontage, Scott Lake, Victoria Revay from nowpublic, Samuel Bouchard who all contributed to Montreal Tech Watch.

Thanks to Carl Mercier and Mat Balez from Karabunga for starting montrealonrails.com and create a strong Ruby on Rails community in Montréal.

Thanks to Ben Yoskovitz who organized the monthly tech breakfasts and where many bright minds met. This is probably where Montreal Tech Watch was initiated, back in February this year. Austin Hill and Patrick Lauzon brought the idea to the next level with the Founders&Funders dinner, which gathered more entrepreneurs and investors.

Thanks to everyone who went to the Montréal Tech Developers book club, especially JF Couture, Mehdi Akiki, and Fred Brunel who came on many occasions.

Thanks also to the bloggers who get the word out there, Roberto Rocha at TechnoCité, Denis Canuel at QuebecValley, the TechnoMontreal team, Tris Hussey at MapleLeaf2.0, Jonas Brandon and Jevon McDonald at startupnorth.ca, the Intruders TV, Scott Lake and Scott Annan at StartupOttawa,

Big thanks for the Blitzweekend “crew”, Denis Canuel, Raymond Luk, David Massé, Mehdi Akiki — and there is also Etienne Lagacé from iNovia Capital.

Of course, one of the big successes in Montréal were “open source” events, be it democamps, rocococamp, barcamps or facebookcamps. These wouldn’t have been possible without Fred Ngo, who first championned the idea of starting one barcamp in Montréal. They wouldn’t have been possible either without Simon Law, Evan Prodromou and Sylvain Carle.

Looking ahead, 2008 promises to be a great year. On the startup scene, we have new startups coming in early 2008 akoha, praized, standoutjobs. Embrase is starting the first ever startupcamp. Hopefully, we will also have more Founders&Funders dinners, and monthly entrepreneurs breakfasts.

On the developer scene, I hope Montreal Python will create a strong python community in Montréal. I will also be re-launching the monthly Montreal Web Developers meetups, as soon as we find a sexier name.

Montréal’s coworking space, Station C, is also opening in early 2008, thanks to the joint efforts of Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mirault. I see Station C as a place which will support local and bright designers, developers and entrepreneurs, and hopefully will be a place of continuous innovation and collaboration.

Blitzweekend is planned for late February, and will be definetely a place where we will see a lot of innovation and get lots of projects started.

I wish many things for Montréal: that more students and universities be involved in technology and innovation, that we will have more designers, and we will have more deals and more projects starting. For everyone, I wish you success and luck.

Roberto Rocha is doing a fun poll and asking who is Montréal’s “sexiest geek”

You can vote for Jade Raymond, Casey Mckinnon, Fred Ngo, Katheline Jean-Pierre, Skull Mogensen, Nadia G.

I voted for Jade Raymond for objective reasons (or not…), which is there should be more women in technology, and because she did a great job with Assassin’s Creed, though Casey McKinnon is a great nominee too because of her support for the Copyright Act.

For the other nominees, I haven’t had the pleasure to meet Skull Mogensen, who is said to be CEO of OZ communications, or Nadia G. who suppossedly does a “cooking show“

A codeFest is a weekend sprint where programmers gather to add features to web applications. Last year’s codeFest theme was openID, and was reported to be very successful. The upcoming codeFest is planned Jan 5th and 6th, and the topic is to add microformats to your favourite applications. It is hosted at La Bande Passante, 8655 St-Denis.

A microformat is a web-based data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata, using only XHTML and HTML classes and attributes. This approach is intended to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.

While microformats have generated a lot of interest amongst the open source community and developers, it hasn’t yet gained any public traction. However, it’s easy to imagine tools, applications and software that would make microformats (re)usable and make it as popular and useful as the RSS/atom format. I am myself working on a microformat project with other montréalers, and will come at the event.

Furthermore, the event is focused on php and on Free / Open Source applications. For more info, there is an event page on facebook.

Meet Blitzmaker, which is a new website aiming to gather developers, designers, entrepreneurs and more, who wish to build an online profile and build teams for their upcoming projects. (example of a profile)

The website in itself came up from the upcoming Blitzweekend, where we had open-ended discussions, and where we agreed that participants needed a place to find other talents, and that neither a facebook group, a facebook application, or even a wiki could be a solution. Blitzmaker was then built from scratch.

If you want the whole story behind it, I cheated because I took 3 days to do it, even though the whole concept was to do a Rails app in 48 hours. But at the last minute, I added the french/english requirement, and the fine-tuning fonts and alignements took too much time I guess.

If you are interested in Blitzweekend, you should definetely register. We will use it to make the list of attending teams, and it will also be used for voting the “winner” at the end of the event.

If you are not interested in Blitzweekend, well … you should register too. The good thing about Blitzmaker is that it’s generic enough that you can view it as a dating website for entrepreneurs/developers/designers. Which means you can use for your upcoming projects/startups/open source projects, even if they are completely unrelated to Blitzweekend, and even if it’s outside Montreal or Québec.

InPowr, the web2.0 startup that wants to help their users progress in their life, has signed a deal with sympatico / msn which will feature their service to sympatico users. The portal is Bell Sympatico’s, and has over 650.000 unique visitors monthly. 

I find it smart because it will be offered to the visitors in a time where many are making a summary of their year and are hoping to get a better life in the year to come. Sympatico users are invited to answer a series of questions about their life, and are then invited to open an acount to track their happinness / work / social life etc.  

InPowr in itself was chosen at the beginning of the year for the web2.0 Expo, the de facto conference about web2.0. I have to say I find the idea of tracking your life via a web application intriguing, although this is the kind of website that needs to be used everyday to be effective, and as such, won’t be really useful for me.

I have added 13 new companies/startups/service providers to the technology map of montréal. Some noteworthy additions: Embrase, Syntenic, La Fabrique des blogs, yulnews, markettiger

I have also updated the notes corresponding to each marker, with more info about the address, description, contact details etc.. However, most of the markers don’t have any now. If you are the founder or if you are working in one of the company in the amp, you can fill in the form to update the description. If you are not on the map, it’s also the place to go to.

Note by Heri: this is an original and innovative ad. See the puzzle at the end.

Company: Neo Henry Ware

Position: Wanted: Master Software Developers

Responsibilites and Tasks:
01/18/2008

1. You’re an artist, and software is how you express yourself.

2. You believe there’s always a better way of doing things.

3. You embrace positive change, even when it means relearning what you know.

4. You’re passionately committed to quality.

5. You’re always looking for ways to eliminate waste, at all levels of development.

6. You’re a team player, and you love (not just like) working with others.

7. You continuously strive for self-improvement.

8. You love to teach what you know, and learn what you don’t.

9. You like to have fun while writing software.

10. You’re extreme about your programming.

11. You can find out the significance of the date “01/18/2008″.

12. You can find out who we are and how to reach us (no, we won’t reply to the Contact link!).

Here’s your clue:

eyAnOicgPT4gJycsICcgJyA9PiAnLScsICdzXG4nID0+ICdzLmNvbVxuJyB9 (3548, 4648)

Good luck!

Compensation:
Depends on Experience

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The first release of tickets for StartupCampMontréal were sold out, so there is now a second release, as always avalaible on eventBrite. If you plan to attend the event, you should get your ticket now, as the first batch were all grabbed within 24 hours.

On related news, we will have Graham Hill as a speaker for the event. Graham Hill is now based in New York, but he was originally from the Montréal area (eastern townships). He is a serial entrepreneur and sold lately his very popular blog treehugger to the Discovery group. Graham Hill has surely an impressive resumé; as Philippe Telio from Embrase says, he will be an inspiration and valuable participant to the event.

Company: CakeMail

Position: Deliverability Manager

Responsibilites and Tasks:
We recently doubled the staff at our Montreal office with the addition of a sales and account management team, and welcomed an additional programmer to our development group in Eastern Europe. This brings us to a total of 11 people in the combined family of The Code Kitchen and CakeMail.

Now we’re seeking a Deliverability Manager to build on our in-house expertise as we expand.

What you’ll do

• Build on the ISP relationships established since 2002 during our founder’s previous venture.
• Maintain feedback loop programs and white listing.
• Resolve email filtering and blocking issues.
• Monitor black lists and sender reputation.
• Augment delivery-related data analytics.
• Work with account managers to prevent, communicate and resolve deliverability issues.
• Keep abreast of industry best practices, trends and legal changes and share this knowledge with team members and resellers.
• Participate actively in the email marketing and anti-spam communities.
• Contribute to industry discussions online, such as ReputationWiki.org and the Email Marketer’s Club.
• Collaborate with in-house and third-party developers to hook various deliverability services into the CakeMail API.
• Aid resellers in adopting best practices for content, creative, timing, data and trust-building.
• Propose inventive ways to improve deliverability.
• Have fun doing what you do!

Required Knoweledge:
Essential ingredients

• Experience in ISP relations (2 – 5 years preferred).
• Familiarity with delivery policies and procedures at major ISPs.
• Technical knowledge of email delivery, filtering and authentication.
• Familiarity with privacy and anti-spam policies and laws.
• Strong problem-solving skills.
• Attention to detail and organization.
• Effective interpersonal communication skills.

Icing on the cake:

• Excellent written English, and a strong interest in blogging.
• Knowledge of other languages.
• Experience with Linux and DNS administration.
• Enthusiasm for open source and the collaborative Web.

Compensation:

• Competitive salary.
• Generous options package.
• Possibility of working remotely from anywhere in the world.
• Cupcakes and cool T-shirts!

Additional info:
Get to know us

You can learn all about CakeMail on our website, peruse our blog and check out our Flickr space.

Why join CakeMail?

• Belong to a friendly, tight-knit team of talented, entrepreneurial people.
• Be part of a stimulating startup.
• Work with a truly innovative email marketing platform.
• Blaze new trails by forging relationships beyond the major ISPs worldwide.
• Telecommute from anywhere or come enjoy the great quality of life and culture that Montreal has to offer.

Referral Incentive

We’re offering a year’s worth of email delivery (150,000 sends/month) and CakeMail schwag for a successful referral!

How to apply:
Please send your CV and any other pertinent information or links to
jobs@cakemail.com and let us
know your salary expectations and (re)location preferences.

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Looking back at the archives here on Montreal Tech Watch, there were days where I wrote 4 or 5 articles per day. Things have changed, as right now, I find myself busy with other projects and other personal adventures :-)

This is not to say tough there isn’t anything happenning in Montréal as I am still heavily involved in Blitzweekend and other local Rails projects, it’s just that I am focusing on my own projects for now. This should change in the next few weeks though, so your best bet is to keep the RSS feed.

Until then, happy holidays for everyone!

:-)