Montreal Tech Watch

Can you present yourself? What is your background?

Alwin Tong (nick: alwinian) UI & Multimedia Design
Alwin is a freelance designer and a classically trained musician. His passions include art, music, design, and financial futures trading, in addition to web development. He has been exposed to technology since youth, growing up with a family-owned computer business. Over the past 10 years his career has enabled him to work in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Toronto and now Montreal where he plans to make his home and contribute his creative skills.

Gerry Briggs (nick: gbriggs12) Hardware Hacker & Quant
Gerry is an electrical engineer, mathematician and long-time electronics enthusiast. His first notable hack was a 10 watt FM broadcast station he designed and built at the age of 15 and subsequently used to operate an unlicensed radio-station for nearly a year until receiving a surprise visit from the CRTC. This inevitably led to a career with the federal government where Gerry has used his analytical expertise in spectrum regulation and geo-mapping and recognition for his work on Canada’s rural broadband strategy. Gerry has several hardware inventions at full prototype or in market test, developed using his expertise in integrated circuits, assembly and C.

Alok Mohindra (nick:alok) Entrepreneur & Innovator
Alok is an engineer and entrepreneur. Over the past decade he has held technical and management roles in industries ranging from aerospace and industrial automation to enterprise software and web-based technologies. Alok is a mechanical engineering graduate from the University of New Brunswick and holds an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business. He moved to Montreal in July 2006 and has been active in the local technology and cultural communities since. Alok lives to develop and commercialize solutions that employ emerging technologies for the betterment of mankind.

Joshua Layton (nick: josh) Tech Ops Ninja
Like SneakSend(TM) Josh is rather sneaky and chooses to use his skills in stealth mode.

Can you describe what is SneakSend? How did you get the idea? What problem does it aim to solve? a paragraph

SneakSend(TM) is a communication solution that offers users a truly private and secure channel for online correspondence pioneering a new take on a well known encryption technique called Steganography where encoded data is hidden inside of images. What makes SneakSend(TM) unique is the combination of both encryption and obfuscation solutions designed for the way people communicate online.

While multiple competing encryption solutions currently exist on the market, none offer the level of discretion and anonymity of SneakSend(TM). Our proprietary Crypto-Secure(TM) algorithm offers strong encryption combined with a high level of obfuscation along with reasonable cryptographic overhead. Crypto-Secure(TM) encodes text or binary files using standard digital images (png, bmp, jpg?) as public/private key pairs. The sender and recipient can transmit data securely over public channels by transmitting innocuous-looking images via email, instant messaging, photo-sharing, or social-networking websites. Detection is highly unlikely and decryption impossible without possession of the private key image. Public key images appear otherwise ‘normal’ with only minor distortion barely noticeable to the naked eye.

What were your objectives regarding Blitzweekend? What did you expect from the event?

Our original goal was to make something useful while we learned a new programming language (python) and to have some fun in the process. We succeeded.

Can you talk us about your experience of Blitzweekend? any challenges? How did you overcome problems?

We initially planned to develop web application to demonstrate SneakSend(TM) but that plan proved a bit ambitious in the time available. We decided instead to limit our scope and develop a working prototype of the Crypto-Secure(TM) algorithm.

What is now your objective for the project? Any plans to continue the work?

We are excited about the market potential for our technology. We are currently discussing a variety of compelling use cases and supporting business models while we continue to refine the technology. We are currently working on adding support for JPEG image keys and hope to have a web-based demo to announce soon. We’re also actively looking for a final co-founder with skills in Objective-C and an interest in iPhone application development. If that sounds like you please drop us a line.