Montreal Tech Watch

Blitzweekend is due tomorrow Friday 29th, and needless to say we are very excited for this event.

If you have missed it, here are a quick list of the people who are going, a list of blogs/media outlets who mentionned Blitzweekend. We also had Computer World interviewing the “team”, and their article got published in Canada/US/South Africa/New Zealand. If you have missed it, there is also a major post entitled Top 10 reasons on why you should go to Blitzweekend.

If I have a final word for anyone reading this blog, just come, find an idea to implement, have fun, and be curious & open on what others are doing. This is how great ideas are born, this is how you find and connect with talented people.

Also, here are some important reminders

Attendees must come Friday, beginning from 5pm. This is where we will do the registration, give out T-Shirts, assign rooms, and give accounts to access the Internet. We will also do some last-minute match-making for those who registered late and are still looking for ideas or team members. This is also when we will kick-off the event, starting with 5 quick and useful presentations. Standoutjobs who also sponsored the 5 à 7 will have their CEO as our first speaker.

For the location, it’s 1111 rue St-Charles, 2 minutes from the Longueuil metro station. You have to take the “Place Charles Le Moyne” exit, and then head for the green-glass buildings to the right. We will be on the ground floor of that building.

One final note: everyone is welcome. In the Barcamp spirit though, you can’t just come and watch. You have to participate, or help co-organize, or be an expert/partner and help the teams.

Via Stéphane Guérin, je viens de lire un billet de Christian Pouliot, qui se présente comme entrepreneur web. Apparement, il a eu sa overdose de Twitter, blogs, del.icio.us, RSS, flickr, facebook, myspace, et qu’il en a assez de suivre les trackbacks, les abonnés à son blogue, et le traffic de son site…

Sauf si vous êtes en charge du marketing/communication dans une agence, je ne vois aucune raison de s’abonner et de consulter autant de services et de passer sa journée dessus. Je comprends que certains veuillent connaître les toutes dernières informations, mais il faut reconnaître que cela a un prix. Je restreins par exemple les RSS/blogs/twitter à 2 heures par jour, et c’est tant mieux ainsi, parce qu’entre nous, j’ai beaucoup mieux à faire. De plus, je ne vois aucune utilité comme Christian le fait, de rajouter des personnes qu’on n’a jamais rencontré à Twitter ou facebook.

Rassurez-vous, je n’ai pas une vision négative de tous ces services. Je pense par contre qu’il faut être lucide et les utiliser seulement s’ils sont directement utiles. On est loin à Montréal et au Québec de l’ultra-connectivité, comme c’est le cas dans certains pays européens ou asiatiques — je considère par contre que cela va venir dans les années à venir et c’est le moment d’avoir une position finale sur l’utilisation de ces services, sinon vous atteindrez très vite le “cas Pouliot”

Note: pour ceux qui en veulent plus, Sylvain Carle propose un TwitYul en Mars prochain pour les fans de Twitter.

WordAns just launched last month, and it’s a design-it-yourself T-Shirt shop. It’s started by 3 montréalers who organized a design competion last June, entitled “Rock your Wear”, in which they got the initial designs. They are betting though on unique designs submitted by any user, who can upload their own creations, choose a “base” T-Shirt/hoodie, and then set prices for each product. The greatest thing about WordAns is that there is no initial investment to create your own T-Shirt, and there is no minimal number of T-Shirts either, allowing emerging designers and artists to have a shop at no costs, with WordAns taking care of the logistics and the (international) shipping. See for instance design by Seventh Fury, The Funk, or FNo Design.

Antoine de Brabant, who is affiliate manager at WordAns, told me they are using digital printing, which allows them to reach this level of agility.

To illustrate this, here are some T-Shirts I created, featuring the Montreal Tech Watch Logo.

I am sure you all have a great sense of humor, so I did additional designs, reading:

• I m in ur city lovin’ some technology
• got me Twitter for my stalking needs
• reinventing the world every day with my startup

I find the idea behind WordAns neat, as it involves a top of the line web store, tight logistics, and a great marketing plan. Even if there is already cafepress, I think there is enough room for them to find a spot somewhere.

Company: McGill University

Position: Web Programmer

Responsibilites and Tasks:
Provide consulting expertise to the University community and high level information systems support and services that enhance and maintain the University’s existing central systems; and provide local area network management services for a wide variety of administrative and academic units, ensuring the security and confidentiality of data. Supervise support staff and the daily administrative operations of the unit. Set standards for level of unit services and provide administrative direction regarding the unit’s goals and objectives. Apply specialized skills and technical knowledge to prioritize, plan and monitor activities. Develop and implement procedures and/or controls to enhance the operation of the unit and provide administrative direction regarding the unit’s goals and objectives. Act as advisor to unit members regarding University policies and procedures. Troubleshoot, assess and resolve problems requiring specialized skills and technical knowledge. Provide advice to unit members on problem resolution. When appropriate, inform supervisor. Participate in the implementation of policies and new initiatives that support the strategic direction of a faculty/department/unit by keeping abreast of new developments and trends in the field information technology.

Required Knoweledge:
Extensive experience with all of the following: PHP, Javascript, \”AJAX\”, XHTML, XML, CVS/Subversion, PostgreSQL; good working knowledge of Linux and Apache; experience with RPM Packaging, Python, Perl, C/C++, XSLT, MySQL or Oracle a definite asset. In-depth knowledge of WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative), W3C (World-wide web Consortium) and other industry-approved development standards. Knowledge of major operating systems (Linux, Windows and Macintosh). Ability to work on a variety of projects and meet specific deadlines. English (spoken and written). French (spoken).

Compensation:
$54,768 - $73,024

Additional info:
Full job posting: http://www.mcgill.ca/files/hr/08-0222FRE-1-MR3437.pdf

How to apply:
Mail:
McGill University
Department of Human Resources (Staffing)
688 Sherbrooke Street West (Suite 1520)
Montreal, QC H3A 3R1

Fax:
514-398-5315

Email:
Please send resumes in PDF format to prospects.wsg@mcgill.ca.

View the complete list of job listings
Submit a job ad

Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developer’s Association and Montreal resident, was recently honoured with the Ambassador Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards.

The award was given to Jason in recognition of his efforts towards “connecting developers with their peers, promoting professional development and advocating on issues such as quality of life, creative freedoms, workforce diversity and credit standards…”

The script Jason prepared for his acceptance speech can be found on his blog. In it, he tells game developers that they are already ambassadors for games and game culture, and they have a responsibility to make the most of their influence over the medium and millions of people who are touched by it.

It’s interesting to note that Jason Della Rocca was on the Montreal Mirror’s list of Noisemakers for 2007, and this year it was indie developer Phil Fish who was named a 2008 Noisemaker. Both received awards in recognition of their work last Wednesday in San Francisco. I think we should all start paying more attention to what The Mirror has to say about the state of the video game industry.

Austin Hill writes that there is a Anges Financiers Gala planned this upcoming thursday at Mount-Royal Center, 220 Mansfield Street, starting from 6.00pm

The event aims at gathering young entrepreneurs and angels for an evening. The main feature of the gala would be a presentation made by 5 teams, which are finalists coming from all over the province, with a prize of $25.000 for the winners. Also note that the event in itself is not technology-focused; we had for instance Liquid Nutrition, a health / food store, as a finalist in the past years.

You should view the gala as an opportunity for networking and also to get media attention. Young entrepreneurs get to know potential angels, and if they get to win a prize, they are sure to get mainstream media coverage for their project, which is essential to get their venture starting.

A new gameplay trailer for Fez, the 2D-no-wait-it’s-3D puzzle/exploration game primarily being developed in Montreal, was revealed earlier this week at the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco. The game involves navigating a 3D world from various 2D perspectives. Puzzles and obstacles are overcome by rotating the world and shifting your 2D character’s plane of existence. Just…watch the video below. It’s actually very intuitive and amazing to see in motion.

This past Wednesday, the IGF, a self-described “Sundance for independent game developers,” selected Fez as the recipient of its award for Excellence in Visual Art. The team behind the game received a $2500 cash prize and, presumably, enough exposure to help secure a distribution deal. It was also a finalist in the category of Design Innovation.

Originally attached to the Montreal-based experimental game collective Kokoromi, the virtual team behind the game is now calling itself Polytron Systems Corp. This international team consists of Kokoromi member Phil Fish (design and art), Renaud Bédard (programming), Graham Lackey (animation), and Jason “6955″ DeGroot (producer, music and sound effects).

Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization, aka SEO and SMO, are relatively new fields in marketing, and as such, are often overlooked by most people when launching a new service or a new product. I also know quite a handful of web people in Montreal who don’t understand SEO and see them as gimmicks designed to “fool” Google and other search engines, and as a consequence, are completely unnecessary if you have a good website.

Needless to say that these words come from engineers who believe in the motto “build it, and they will come”. For me, experience shows this motto is true but what’s also true is that this happens after a very long period of time. Marketing is then necessary to speed up adoption of your product or service, and also reach out more efficiently to potential users.

In Montreal, there seems to be now a very active community of people working in Internet marketing and “pushing the boundaries”. This is a topic I am interested in, however, this is not a topic I am looking into covering in MontrealTechWatch, due mainly to lack of time. If you want to keep track of this though, Nicolas Cossette runs a very good blog named Montreal Social Media. He covers this week the Third Tuesdays meetup, a gathering of social media practitionners. I also find interesting his monthly tracking of companies doing Internet Marketing in Montreal.

I find those reports excellent, and hopes he continues — I am looking for instance into more reports about blog and social media adoption in Quebec and in Canada.

I caught the reports that the Sécurité du Québec and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided 12 locations early wednesday, and arrested 16 “hackers” who allegedly were running through a botnet more than one million PCs tlocated in Manitoba, US, Brazil and Poland.

If you go through the news reports, this is all very spectacular. “Hackers” were aged from 17 to 26, and allegedly made up to $45 million through ID theft and phishing. Police is said to have begun investigation since the summer of 2006.

Bot networks are created through trojans, worms, or “malware”, propagated from PC to PC through backdoors. Worms creators for instance craft messages for the Valentine’s day or any other special event that might deceive innocent users. Upon opening the message, the worm is installed and begins to replicate by going through the user’s address book for instance.

Bot networks are rented to send spams. They can also be used for denial of service attacks, like the famously known attack on Estonian government websites in May last year. A few of them are also used for phising and Identity theft, although the latter use is stupid, because it’s always possible to retrace the creators of the scheme through DNS and investigations, which is what the SQ and RCMP did.

I find though that the official figures in this case were overblown. I’ve done some research and couldn’t find the name of the group, which is surprising for a botnet running 1M+ bots. It just seems a random group of teenagers who downloaded a couple of trojans and worms generators. It’s also funny to hear a SQ rep saying that they were guilty of “hacking”, a word I am sure he doesn’t really understand.

OK. Here’s the catch. We view Blitzweekend as a grassroots events. However, people were requesting everyday information, so I am publishing now what we have for Blitzweekend, due next week.

This is not a final schedule for the event; and you can view it as a BarCamp wiki page, which just gives an idea of what to expect. Feel free to comment or to add your suggestions.

Location
1111 rue St-Charles, Longueuil, in front of the Longueuil metro station.
Blitzweekend will take all the ground floor of Université de Sherbrooke’s Longueuil campus.

Presentations (tbc)
- The story behind the startup standoutjobs : From idea to launch, by Ben Yoskovitz, Standoutjobs
- Utiliser Ruby on Rails pour créer une application facebook, David Fugere, Code Genome
- Comparaison des différents plateformes Python, Arach Tchoupani, MontrealPython
- Aides et subventions aux entrepreneurs au Québec et au Canada, Yann Rousselot, partenaire, Présent Profit
- Business plans and pitching to investors, Joško Bobanovi? , principal, iNovia Capital

Prizes and giveaways
- Surprise prize from Flow consulting to the winner of the make track
- One full day of consulting at Embrase, which helps startups and entrepreneurs perfect their business plan
- Blitzweekend T-Shirts for those who registered before 18th February

Experts (tbc)
- Guillaume Thoreau, user interface and UXP consultant
- Marc-André Cournoyer, Ruby guru at Standoutjobs
- Yann Rousselot, Présent Profit
- Embrase team for business plans
- Alistair Croll, marketing, founder of RedNod
- BDO, chartered accountant
- 10 more (tba)

Schedule
- Cocktail from 5.00pm Friday 29th February
- 5 presentations, starting from 6.00pm

- breakfast, starting from 8am, March 1st
- launch of the event
- start design and development 9.00 am
- dinner from 12 to 1pm
- Experts avalaible from 3.00 to 5.00pm, by email at hello@blitzweekend.com or twitter
- 10pm, end of the first day of Blitzweekend

- breakfast, 8am, March 2nd
- Experts avalaible from 1.00 to 2pm
- 4pm, end of the time given to teams
- each time present, each attendee vote by email at to hello@blitzweekend.com
- Feedback by panel

Team presentations
- must have a working demo
- tell about development, design of product, challenges during Blitzweekend and then tell what actions were taken to overcome these challenges
- if it’s a commercial project, present market and business plan

Panel for commercial projects
- Etienne Lagacé, iNovia Capital
- Vincent Guyaux, Embrase
- Hang Le Hong, Globalex

Partners
iNovia Capital, early seed VCs
BDO, chartered accountants
Globalex, insurance and financial services
Flow Consulting, business consultant
Embrase, business consultants for startups
Guru, energy drink
Université de Sherbrooke, Longueuil campus

Registration
Go to the wiki and add your name to the list of attendees. (password is c4mp)

Important: Register before Friday 22nd February, otherwise you won’t have a wifi connection.

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