Montreal Tech Watch

Last friday, a small group gathered at Station C to talk about developing services and applications for mobile phones.

The meetup was somehow improvised after rapid exchanges on twitter, around me, Martin Dufort, who started previously Kakiloc, a mobile “location-based twitter”, and Fred Brunel, who was already poking the iPhone SDK.

And so was born the idea for a meetup. Which is completely crazy for me to announce, given the fact that I am weeks late on my own current work schedule, and had about 0 hours to start a new project on mobile apps, let alone organize a new meetup, à la barcamp. But what do you know, it occured to me that the iPhone SDK completely changes the game and introduces a new paradigm on how we will access and use information. I have to thank though Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mireault for the support they gave for this meetup, and who are doing an awesome work on putting things together at Station C.

For the meetup in itself, about 10 people or so came up, with a good mix of developers/hackers/entrepreneurs/geeks/early adopters. Fred Brunel told us that he worked for a french company for 5 years, which was developing and distributing games for cell phones, and one of their biggest technical challenges was the diversity of platforms. For instance, they had a proprietary technology that would compile on the fly a binary for use for a given customer. Apple’s distribution system, on the other hand, completely overrides those challenges, and for the first time in mobile history, you can imagine a single developer capable of creating one application that would fully run on millions of devices. The beauty of the system is also the fact that it bypasses the user’s telecom carrier, whose standard business practices is to tax any service that its subscribers wants to use.

We also talked about Google Android, whose set of features matches Apple’s platform. But here again, the fact that cell phone manufacturer will have their own implementation of Google Android will be a huge burden to developers: for instance, you can’t be sure that your end-user will have access to 3D features, or you don’t know if the user has a touchscreen, a full keyboard, or a standard cell phone keyboard, amongst other things.

We continued afterwards the discussion at Chilenitas, a small family-run restaurant nearby with great food and drinks. While, Station C is a great place, you feel sometimes like being in a modern art museum, and Chilenitas was just the right place to take a beer, chill out, and get real on what we exactly wanted to do.