Montreal Tech Watch

Cozimo, whic was featured both at DEMO 08 and StartupCamp, and which offers a real-time collaboration service to work on digital media, has an interesting new plugin that also allows collaboration on wordpress blogs, or any website for that matter.

I thought that a simple demonstration would be more efficient than trying to explain what it does.

You can draw on those images, annotate, pan & zoom, chat with other connected users etc

[cozimo filename="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2387/2377801840_1a4f94d007.jpg" type="image" mimetype="image/jpg"/]

[cozimo filename="http://blip.tv/file/get/Blitzweekend-BlitzweekendIntro388.flv" /]

(might not be used if you read this through RSS)

I find this very promising and thought it opened new usage opportunities. Cozimo is targeted at creatives types, but this could be used by everyone, Youtube-style, although the UI would need to be streamlined for this kind of usage.

Continued from the previous post showing pictures of Praized, Mobivox, Watchmojo, and also Hugh McGuire’s setup

This is Fred Ngo’s work desk. Fred Ngo is CTO at Standoutjobs. Interestingly, almost all of them use macbook pros, and you can also notice that they heavily rely on basecamp/campfire for tech development.

Karabunga’s founder is Carl Mercier. Their main product is Defensio, an (excellent) anti-spam system that can be integrated into blogs and social media websites, and also in web applications via an API. While they are not technically speaking in Montréal, they are very active here and organizes for instance every month montrealonrails. It goes without saying, but karabunga is also a mac web dev shop.

Great picture by the way. You can see the full-size version on flickr (click and follow the link)

RollAName is a social networking website started by David Nadezhdin, Vasily Klimko, who wanted to make a website that would get you a better presence online. It plays well with search engines.

Featured on the picture is David Nadezhdin.

If you are working in a local startup, send similar pictures at news@montrealtechwatch.com

I went last wednesday to GameCamp — mostly because it was the first edition.

This post is not much a report about the presentations, I’ll leave this to the more informed Michel, but more a comparison of the “Web/Entrepreneur” vs “video games” community.

What I’ve seen is the Web people we see in Barcamps and Blitzweekend are much more diverse. You can see for instance in a Barcamp solo entrepreneurs, hardcore programmers, investors, creative people with dreams and big projects, guys who are designer/programmer/marketers at the same time, some who might be in the industry for as long as 1995 or those who just came with a new web idea the day before the meetup.

This is a striking difference compared to video games, which is now an industry in Montréal, with all its consequences. Jason Della Rocca, who was the host for the evening, asked casually what job positions people in the room had, and apparently everyone in the room knew exactly what their speciality were. It occured to me that these kind of questions couldn’t be asked in a BarCamp, as most of us are working on bleeding edge “stuff” that has yet to find a name. Also one revealing difference was that there were many video games sudents in the room, coming from various video games school. Yes, it’s now an industry, and it’s socially acceptable to have a “video games” career, while it’s harder to present yourself as a “web entrepreneur”.

Apart from this, I would say though that both communities are more similar than they are different. Both are obsessed on innovation, both are obsessed on the quality of the people they get to work with, and ultimately both know that it’s ultimately the market that decides wether if you are doing a great product/service or not… and of course, they also know they have to work their *ss off in order to ship a great product.

All in all, this was very insightful. If you are working in video games, I am also inviting you to BarCamps and other related events. I think it will much more fun and insightful — so that both communities benefit from each other’s errors and successes.

Standoutobs, which aims to help companies find key talent, announced they have now a new partner, CUhire, a company dedicated on helping credit unions on their recruiting efforts.

I thought that this was a smart business move, in the sense that CUhire is certainly more knowledgeable and more resourceful when it comes to their industry — decupling then Standoutjobs’s sales effort. If they are capable of offering customized portals and features, this opens up new opportunities for Standoutjobs. The company’s main product, RECEPTION, is now free, but there is certainly business to be done here when they will decide to introduce a paying plan.

Ben Yoskovitz has also been busy putting together a podcast show focused on recruiting. OK, I admit I stopped listening when there was a 20 seconds pause at the beginning, but the show and the partnerships makes me think they are on the good track. Hope they will come up with similar creative initiatives next.

Canoe reports that Nomad is giving up on its project to install a city-wide wimax network because of the high costs.

Nomad announced with Radioactif last year that they would market a mobile high-speed internet plan to 90% of Montréalers, along with a voip and digital TV plan. Nomad was then presented as the technical consultant in charge of installing routers and antenas, but it seems they understimated costs, which are said to be on average $700 to cover a square-kilometer-wide area.

Nomad’s CEO also mentionned that it costs $75million to buy a wimax license in Canada, which they are unable to cope up with, and is crying lamenting at the end of the story that small technology companies can’t do anything against the likes of Bell or Rogers. It’s noteworthy that both telecom companies already maintain a (pre)-wimax technology in Canada, named Inukshuk, and therefore are in no hurry to update their network.

Wimax was announced to be the new technology that would take over UMTS and 3G networks, wifi, and even regular broadband Internet. It seems though that wimax is too costly and has too many shortcomings. A week ago, an australian telecom company, buzz broadband, complained loudly on their wimax venture, which revealed to be a disaster after spending dozens of millions of dollars in the technology; while Comcast, Time Warner, Google and Intel announced two days ago a new partnership of $4 billion in order to save all investments already made.

So we are now back at square one. Regular wifi still rules in Montréal, and the market is still waiting for a mobile high-speed data network.

iNovia Capital has announced officially the launch of a new fund, iNovia II, a $107 million seed and early stage venture capital fund. The new fund is targeted at information technology, life sciences and cleantech emerging companies, based in Canada, and also the US.

The fund was gathered from institutional investors, labor funds, government agencies: Consensus Business Group, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, FIER, BDC Capital, AVAC Ltd., Solidarity Fund QFL, Export Development Canada (EDC), Fondaction, McGill University’s Endowment fund, the University of Alberta, Université de Sherbrooke, Bishop’s University Foundation CSN, Gestion Univalor L.P. and Telesystem Ltd.

As you can see, iNovia Capital is also one of the rare VC fund in Canada to work closely with universities.

iNovia Capital also announced Shawn Abbott as a new partner to help them manage the fund. He has a technology entrepreneur background, having started previously two successful technology companies.

We had the pleasure of working with them for Blitzweekend; and found them open to work on new innovative events, even if it was very risky at the time. Blitzweekend was a large success, and I hope they will continue to work with new entrepreneurs.

Congratulations to iNovia! Looking forward to see what companies they will work with.

LavaBlast, which was started one year ago, markets a series of tools for franchise owners, letting them to centralize operations with franchisees, taking care of sales, accounting and stock management.

The “microISV”, as the founders like to call it, follows Joel Spolsky’s philosophy, which is 1 - build a profitable company from day 1, and 2 - eat your own dog food. They also chose from the company’s beginnings not to seek any VC or angel funding.

Jason Kealey and Etienne Tremblay, the two founders who come from the software engineering program from University of Ottawa, knew that they just had to start a company dedicated on making great software. One year after the launch, it seems their business is doing great, and they are now giving back advice to anyone wanting to start a software company (part 1 - part 2 - part 3)

If you have some time today, read those posts. Some interesting excerpts:

…[the long tail] if you build and promote something worth buying, they will buy it.

The most important part of the company is not the idea but the people. A small and closely knit team of people who’ve worked together in the past is a recipe for success, regardless of the idea.

If you’re not happy in your own company, doing what you want to do, you have a problem.

because we’re self-funded, I feel we have a competitive advantage over our VC-funded competition. Our competitors want to skip the flat part of the growth phase and jump directly into the areas of highest ROI. Generally, this means developing one-size fits all software with (if you’re lucky) tons of configuration option

technology doesn’t solve conflicts

Business Plan: Before launching our company, we worked on a short business case and participated in a Technology Venture Challenge. We didn’t win, but it was a very beneficial experience because sitting down and thinking about what the hell you’re trying to accomplish is a very rewarding process.

They also explain in detail what tools they use internally to get the job done (Skype, SupportBlast, Microsoft Groove, Twiki, Lotus Unyte, MS Sharedview). They also advise Station C for any future web entrepreneur :-)

I like to see once in a while a web company that does things differently. They didn’t take any outside funding, they didn’t spend any time on financial projections or market studies, they didn’t chose the fashionable technology of the day (LavaBlast use .NET instead of your typical Ruby on Rails or Python framework), they didn’t spend time coming to our hyped camps, breakfasts and conferences, and actually shipped a product (and got solid revenues) within a year…

Maybe there is a lesson to be taken here.

Alliance Numérique has inaugurated today their blog section, with 3 authors coming from Alliance Numérique, and a fourth contributor coming from Strataction, a strategy consulting firm.

Alliance Numérique holds an enviable position as the main business network for everyone in the multimedia and video games industry in Quebec. Their new blog section leaves a lot to be desired though, posts are limited to 1 paragraph, there is no RSS to which people can subscribe. I don’t know also if they get the “blog thing” as they don’t take any position or any insight in the posts I found.

Alliance Numérique’s website was relaunched last year, in a rebranding move that I criticized. The blog section was then announced to be opened in early January. Nearly 4 months later, they’ve done it but the new blog section seems only to be a half-hearted project. It occurs me that they did a better job with their portal-like website last year.

Until then, you can follow Michel McBride who blogs about video games here in MTW.

Guillaume Germain from the Montreal Scheme / Lisp User Group is writing:

The MSLUG is having a meeting this week. Marc Feeley, professor at Université de Montréal, will give a tutorial on Scheme and an introduction to more advanced features anduses of Scheme and the Gambit-C implementation.

What: Montreal Scheme/Lisp User Group Meeting — Scheme for the Novice and Beyond
Where: Room 3195, André-Aisenstadt Building, Université de Montréal, 2920 chemin de la Tour
(a plan of the UdeM campus)
When: Thursday March 27th 2008 7pm

Dominique Boucher wrote previously a great article on MontrealTechWatch about Scheme/Lisp in Montreal.

If you are a mac fan, then this should rejoice you:

This is a recent picture of construction currently going on for Apple’s store in 1321 Ste-Catherines street.

Photo taken by MacEtMoi, which tracks construction of the store. It will take 2 floors, and most likely will have Apple’s signature (glass, transparent architecture, aluminium, etc.)

Via TechVibes, which says that Montréal will have the only Apple flagship store in Canada, with smaller stores in Laval, Etobicoke, Vancouver & Toronto.