Montreal Tech Watch

Company: xMedia Targeted Communications

Position: Busy e-biz entrepreneur seeking superstar apprentice!

Responsibilites and Tasks:
Ok, so you’re in school, and you don’t want to work in some stiff and boring corporate office with bad coffee when you graduate, do you? Have you read “The 4-Hour Workweek\ and want to learn how it’s done? I’ve been working remotely as a private Internet consultant to a Fortune 500 company for 5+ years and need some help.

As my apprentice, you’ll gain valuable hands-on experience in:
- creating project schedules and gantt charts
- extracting and organizing data
- QA (quality assurance) and QA management
- overseeing front-end and back-end tasks
- techniques for remote and offshore project management

Required Knoweledge:
Does this sound like you?
- fast learner
- proactive
- efficient
- task and deadline-oriented
- detail-minded
- friendly and upbeat, with a “can do” attitude

Your skills:
- excellent verbal and written English communication skills
- good to advanced knowledge of MS Word and Excel (MS Project a bonus)
- business, computer science or communications background preferred

Compensation:
This position is unpaid, but there are some cool perks:
- Coffee, lunches and transportation to meetings
- Flexible hours (A 10 hour a week minimum is required with at least a 3 month commitment)
- Ability to create your own schedule
- A cool, collaborative environment in the Mile End that you will like having occasional in-person meetings at (check out http://www.station-c.com )
- Knowledge and skills to succeed in IT management, e-business and/or entrepreneurship
- Possibility for a paid position at the end of your internship
- Recommendations and contacts for jobs upon graduation

How to apply:
Think this is the gig for you? Email your CV/resume attached in a Word document to: aleece@xmedia.tv.

Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you!

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IOU Central has launched today, and it’s a website allowing canadians to get loans from other inviduals on the website, also known as person-to-person lending or social finance.

The promise of the service for borrowers is that they will get to tell their story, why they precisely need the money, and any other personal details that would allow them to connect with other members of the website, in contrast to going to a “classical” finance company which would only focus on your credit history, your current revenues, and assets.

For lenders, it’s an opportunity for those who emphasize direct relationships when investing, and know personally which business/individual you are investing in. Lenders also get a high rate of return, up to an advertised 10.65% on their investment. Lenders can also choose to invest the amount of their choice for a request, to get risks distributed amongst other members.

Person-to-person lending is seen by most people as a revolutionary idea, a way to get easy funds for your upcoming projects and cut out banks. The first wave of p2p lending came two years ago, with zopa in the UK, which has now expanded in the US and Australia, lending club, and prosper, with each company making the promise that they will change the credit industry.

In practice though, the idea is not perfect. For instance, you can’t finance a house or any other sizable project. Most of requests are in the $3.000 - $10.000 range. Most of the members on these websites also realized that most of the requests had a high default rate. These websites then encouraged lenders to diversify their “portfolio”. This was a tactic used by lending club, which brought down the minimum loan to $25.

One thing I know though is that there is always a psychological barrier to micro and p2p finance. When someone invests his own money, there is always a minimum period of thinking and opportunity assessement, even if the transaction in question is just 50 cents. Websites like lending club encourages frequent and small transactions, which might not psychologically feasible for lenders.

This doesn’t mean though that p2p is a bad idea; to the contrary. Services like IOU Central fills a void in the credit landscape for people who don’t have access to classical financing options. I have also looked at the team behind IOU, and it seems that it started as a joint venture behind Palos Capital, a investment management firm, and FairRates, which was a p2p danish-based company.

 Read more about IOU Central on startupnorth

Company: Coradiant

Position: Technical Customer Support

Responsibilites and Tasks:
Reporting to our VP Client Services, as a member of our Customer Support team, you will provide technical support primarily to our enterprise customers who are working to implement Coradiant solutions. You will be the primary interface between Coradiant and our customers. The ideal candidate will have the ability to consult with, present technical information in easily understood terms, and develop relationships that meet and exceed customers needs.

You will work closely with Coradiant’s QA department to ensure all problems are resolved with the highest levels of customer satisfaction through quick and thorough turnaround on customer issues. If you enjoy taking things apart, breaking them, and then figuring out how to put the pieces together this position may be of interest to you. This is a great opportunity to make a significant contribution and gain valuable experience. In addition, this is one position where the job itself is better than the job description.

Specific duties and Responsibilities:
• Coordinate with the Client Services team, and the staff in quality assurance to resolve complex customer problems
• Respond to customer inquiries, primarily via email and telephone as necessary to maintain client SLA’s
• Properly document all customer interactions and troubleshooting actions into the ticket tracking system
• Manage, troubleshoot, and respond to open issues to ensure appropriate resolution time
• First line of contact for support

Additional Responsibilities Include:
• Participate in weekly Sales engineering, and Support meetings providing input on customer related issues
• Proactively identify, record and revise current procedures to improve customer satisfaction
• Provide product feedback to Product Management and Engineering teams by disseminating input (enhancements and bugs) from customers, prospects, partners, and Sales people.
• Conduct online and in person product training courses for customers
• Act as an escalation point for sales engineers with product demonstrations, prospective clients, and product hardware/software support
• 10% business travel

Required Knoweledge:
The successful candidate for this role will have:
• 2-5 years of technical support or customer facing work experience
• At least 2 years of related software and hardware experience
• Strong verbal agility and fluent written communication skills (English)
• Hands-on technical skills with the inquisitiveness to learn new products and ideas
• Tack-sharp analytical and problem solving abilities
• Ability to work in a dynamic and growing environment
• A work style that emphasizes a disciplined and organized approach to supporting customers
• Professional telephone etiquette

The successful candidate for this role will also posses at least a few of the following assets:
• Experience in enterprise and public data centers working with firewalls, load-balancers, switches, routers, reverse proxy caches, and traffic shapers
• Strong familiarity of the web networking stack, from Ethernet and IP datagrams to TCP sessions and HTTP transactions and using network tools like tcpdump and ethereal
• Familiarity with the installation and configuration of Linux or Unix operating systems
• Setup and operation of TCP/IP networking on Linux or Unix systems
• Ability to diagram and explain complex, highly available multi-tiered network topologies
• Experience working with database solutions (Oracle a plus)
• Familiarity with mission-critical, multi-tiered web applications such as those that run on WebSphere, WebLogic, Microsoft IIS, ATG Dynamo, or Oracle 8i
• Familiarity with load-testing and traffic generation including hosted synthetic testing (Keynote, Gomez, AcitveWatch) and load generation (Mercury LoadRunner, Rational Robot, Empirix, SilkTest)
• Familiarity operating Business Intelligence and/or Reporting solutions
• Familiarity with network monitoring via SNMP and enterprise management platforms such as HP Openview, IBM Tivoli, BMC Patrol, Concord e-Health, Mercury Topaz, and CA Unicenter
• Experience with high-traffic web services, including capacity analysis, monitoring, and change management.

Compensation:
Compensation is based on market standards and experience.

Additional info:
Coradiant innovated the Web-Performance Monitoring industry by introducing TrueSight, a systems appliance that monitors real user web traffic in real-time. Coradiant’s solutions enable companies that rely heavily on web based applications to measure the health, performance, availability, and functional integrity of web applications. This is an opportunity to enter into a new field poised for explosive growth.

Network Computing awarded Coradiant “Well Connected” at Interop-Las Vegas in 2006, following “Best of Interop” awards in 2005 and 2004, among other raves and awards TrueSight has earned in the past 3 years.

For more information about Coradiant, please visit www.coradiant.com.

How to apply:
To apply, please send your resume to careers@coradiant.com.

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When Ben Yoskovitz launched the first ever Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast in February last year, I decided a few hours after the breakfast to launch a blog about what’s happenning in technology in Montréal.

Today being the first-year anniversary of the tech breakfasts, which is held monthly (even if it’s -20C outside), it’s also MontrealTechWatch’s first-year anniversary.

Now, the first post was exactly the 18th of february, but that was mostly due to me playing around with different blogging platforms, and finally going for the easy way, which was blogger.

To celebrate this, I will begin a series for next few days, until the 18th, summing up what have been done here. This first post is going to cover all the maps, graphs, visualisation proejcts published here during the past 12 months.

The first of those was the Technology map of Montréal, which linked in a seemingly random way all web people and startups in Montreal. All of a sudden, people could see what were the similar bloggers, events and projects in the city.

The second was published a few weeks after the first map, but this time mapped to the STM network, using the metro and train stations. The map was much simpler, but I believe most readers prefer the chaotic feeling from the first map.

The third vizualisation project was with tag clouds, which showed how often Montréal bloggers mentionned certain keywords in their posts.

This didn’t get as much feedback as the first two maps, but nevertheless, I still find it interesting.

One of the last graphic for MontrealTechWatch was the different stages for startups.

Hopefully, we will get more graphics in the next year (xtranormal, I am looking at you). To wrap it all, here was a short video, done a while ago, which was made to keep people waiting around while the design was updated on the website.

The video shown above was used by Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal at his presentation, at D.I.C.E. 2008. It features cutscenes from the movie Bambi with a song from Evanescence. Yannis stated that even though the movie is 66-years old, it still triggers deep emotional reactions in his son, who cries everytime he watches it.

Yannis Mallat’s point was that pure technology doesn’t work when making video games. In order to have a successful title, you must design above all game mechanics, game flow, Artificial Intelligence, interactions, characters to create emotions.

This closed the panel where he was, which debated if it was better to build your own engine, or just buy a technology and skip R&D. Yannis Mallat said they missed the point because your focus shouldn’t be on getting the best, fastest, best-looking engine and technology, but on innovation and emotion.

Technology’ main role is to serve creative talent. Quite frankly, code does not translate into emotion.

This made quite a spash in the room, where all the big boys were speaking about the merits of the Unreal Engine 3. Yannnis’s philosophy is most certainly interesting and thought-provoking; and in the days where everyone talks about web frameworks, APIs, scalability, I can’t help into making a parallel when making web applications, say code alone does not translate into good user experience

Si vous avez l’occasion de lire La Presse aujourd’hui, n’hésitez pas à faire un tour dans la section Affaires. Outre un article amical sur Station-C, on y trouve la première partie d’une enquête sur Capazoo, surnommé le “Facebook du Québec” par le journaliste Francis Vailles (1 - 2 - 3 - 4)

On y apprend que Michel Verville a deposé une requête en cour le 29 janvier dernier, demandant de démettre son frère Luc Verville de la direction de la compagnie et de nommer une équipe de son choix à la tête de capazoo. Dans sa requête, Michel Verville, qui était l’instigateur et le fondateur du projet, affirme avoir été évincé de la compagnie suite à une longue série d’imbroglios et de pratique d’affaires douteuses.

Il y aussi toute une série d’articles dans la suite du journal à propos du manque de transparence dans la gestion de la compagnie, de comissions arbritraires, de réserves provenant des comptables chargés d’auditer la compagnie, de leurs liens avec le milieu du porno, de poursuites judiciaires lancées par des ex-employés qui ont été floués dans leur contrat, et de la longue histoire de faillites et d’affaires douteuses passée des frères Verville, etc.

Par exemple, les fondateurs se prenaient 10% directement dans leur poche des fonds levés des investisseurs, pratique qui en soi n’est pas illégale, mais devrait “faire dresser les cheveux sur la tête” de n’importe quel gestionnaire. Autre point révélateur, les “investisseurs” actuels dans la compagnie avouent ne pas savoir qui contrôle l’entreprise, ni même à quoi sert exactement capazoo. Allez savoir, ils sont sûrement plus occupés à suivre les résultats du hockey ou du football qu’à se demander comment devrait être conçu un service sur Internet.

Je considère que ceci clôt l’affaire capazoo. On en a parlé longuement ici il y a quelques mois de cela, on sait qu’ils ont un modèle d’affaires bancal (ils ont été nommés dans les applications web les plus stupides de 2007 par Mashable), et qu’au rhytme à laquelle ils brûlent leur actifs, ils devraient fermer dans 1 ou 2 mois. Le seul moyen pour continuer était de lever des fonds supplémentaires auprès d’autres investisseurs, mais après la couverture aujourd’hui, il faut être fou pour miser un seul sou dans capazoo. J’imagine que pour les frères Verville, la bataille judiciaire actuelle était leur porte de sortie de l’aventure capazoo et leur permettra dans le futur d’affirmer que capazoo était un échec à cause d’une histoire personnelle, et non à cause de leur pratiques d’affaires.

On pardonne beaucoup dans le milieu de l’entrepreneuriat, par exemple les échecs passés, et on peut même ne pas tenir compte du manque d’expérience en gestion, ou d’expérience, mais une des choses qu’on ne peut oublier est la malversation. Le pire dans l’histoire, c’est que capazoo donne une image d’escrocs de l’entrepreneuriat technologique, et de montréalais qui gagnent malhonnêtement leur vie, et ça c’est quelque chose que je ne peux pas pardonner.

Company: Culture Cafe, Inc.

Position: Webmaster

Responsibilites and Tasks:
Culture Café, Inc. (www.culturecafe.com) is a social media startup in Montreal. The company is currently looking for a part-time Webmaster, with plenty of room for advancement to full-time. Culture Café will allow internationals living in a place where they are not originally from, to find one another as well as resources for that culture in the city or town where they live.
Culture Café is beta launching on or about March, 2008 to select communities in a few key cities.

The candidate should be located in Montreal or should be able to visit Montreal frequently if not located there. At least two years of experience participating in the management of medium- to large-scale sites is required. The candidate should express an interest in working in a dynamic, growth-oriented start-up environment with a small team. Since this website is for internationals, experience working or living abroad and/or the knowledge of other cultures and multiple languages (preferably Spanish in addition to English and French) is a big plus. The approximate start date is late February, 2008 when we begin Q&A of the site.

The Webmaster will be tasked with general content management and administration as well as managing and optimizing ads, conducting reporting and traffic analysis, and some customer service. The position is a project/process management position and the candidate will be managing technological assets as well as content assets; making sure that the right team members are getting the necessary information to correct any problems, create new material and make bug fixes and visual changes. Please note that although this position requires a high degree of understanding of the technologies involved in this web site, this is not a technical position that will require any creation or maintenance of code, as well as any graphics production.

Required Knoweledge:
Other required skills:
• Be self-disciplined and have self-motivated work ethic.
• Hands-on experience in web production, including basic HTML, image production/optimization, and content management systems.
• Understanding of DHTML, CSS, RSS, XML, Flash, and other web technologies.
• Understanding Ruby, Subversion, and by extension LAMP development (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), and CVS.
• Have solid writing skills.
• Be accountable, detail-driven, and able to successfully manage several things at once.
• Be savvy and willing to get under the hood of the tools we\’ll be working with, including our own system as well as affiliate marketing interfaces and ad serving software.
• Ready to be an active member of the site.

Compensation:
To be discussed.

How to apply:
If you are interested, please send an email with an attached Curriculum Vitae to Ms. Decker at decker@culturecafe.com. We would be pleased to tell you more about Culture Café at that time.

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Yesterday, over 30 people attended MontrealPython’s first meetup at standoutjobs’s offices. Having all these Python developers gathered was a good surprise, as many thought previously that there weren’t that many people using the programming language in Montreal. Arach Tchoupani, and to a certain extent Akoha, launched the event nonetheless, and it was undeniably a success.

We had one presentation by David Goodger, who invited developers to come to Pycon 2008 in Chicago. He then followed to present his deep interests in polyforms puzzling, which is more or less fitting geometric pieces into a predefined geometric complex shape. He showed how he was able to find solution thanks to a paper by Donald Knuth.

This presentation was quite intriguing and esoteric for me. There is some irony on trying to find solutions on problems you have configured yourself, instead of say, solving mathematical problems that can be found in Nature.

At the end, I also presented Blitzweekend, and invited people to register for the event. I believed that went well. We should have more than our fair share of python wranglers at the weekend and the 5 à 7.

Arach Tchoupani said at the end that they should have a meetup every 6 weeks, and should have presentations on Django.

More pictures at flickr (ok forgot to use the flash - but still interesting pictures)

Vantrix, which specializes in video and content delivery for mobile phones, has announced a new product called Vantrix Store optimizer.

This so-called “store optimizer” allows a website to send personalized ringtones, wallpapers, and games to their visitor, without worrying about the specifics of the mobile phone or the format of the content. Sendmemobile.com, solow.com, and mbuzzy.com are one of Vantrix’s current customers for this new technology. In their case, they use Vantrix’s solution to send the latest tunes or the latest fashionable games to their members, or even’s a user’s own pictures and music, with the store optimizer converting and optimizing on-the-fly these files.

In case you are wondering what’s the big deal, this could in theory work with the hundreds of “web2.0″ websites on the Net, and allow the website’s owners to offer more personalized and unique services, up to the user’s cell phone. If there is a thing I learned recently, it’s that people are ready to pay a high price to customize what they have and show how unique they are.

This is also Vantrix’s first venture in the consumer market, as they offered previously their technology to mobile carriers or media powerhouses, like Orange, ABC, or T-Mobile. For me, this is a wise move for Vantrix. In this age, content gets olds very quickly and one way to make sure your services are always relevant is allowing your members to customize/design themselves their mobile phone.

We’ve received lots of attention around blitzweekend, and now is the time for a gathering.

If you are interested into participating, if you are also just curious, if you are looking into helping, if you want to meet the organizers and sponsors, we are inviting you to come join us and have a drink at the Blizzarts bar, 3956a bvd St-Laurent, starting from 5pm, next tuesday Feb. 12th

I have already contacted a lot of people for this and it looks we will have a great mix of people. Registration has just been opened on facebook

Standoutjobs is kindly sponsoring the 5 à 7 and will be giving away drink tickets.