Montreal Tech Watch

WatchMojo, a video content producer that syndicates its content to major distribution networks, is experiencing exponential growth rates and becoming one of the top video producers on the web.

Its monthly streams went from 250,000 in June 2007 to 4,500,000 in March this year, which is an increase of +17,000% in just 9 months. Today, Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, who runs the company, also writes that they are now the biggest professional content producer on Youtube Canada, while they are on the Top 25 on the main YouTube website.

WatchMojo’s style is to produce many videos on an unbelievable number of topics, ranging from business, daily life, culture, fashion etc. The videos are produced in Montréal, but shot for an international audience, and with a timelessness style. Another specificity they have compared to other producers is that each video is short and independent from each other, with no series, or building the profile of a special host — making them perfect for Youtube and the ADD-striken new generation.

These numbers are an undeniable validation of their strategy, which consists of striking partnerships with networks like youtube & co., social networking platforms like MyspaceTV and new media destinations like Hulu. As viewers shift to the web, and with many other opportunities emerging, like videos on cell phones, I expect WatchMojo to experience the same growth rates in the upcoming months.

The coolest thing is that it seems to be a dream job. Between signing new deals and blogging about the industry, they still find the time to make fun of themselves.

Company: tungle.com

Position: Software Integrator

Responsibilites and Tasks:
Come help us build a web 2.0 service that is reliable, secure and scalable. Reporting to the Director of R&D and working closely with our Operations team, you will need to be versed in all new technologies, (Java, Web/Ajax, Python) and be a self learner. You should be quick to understand complex architectures and can quickly identify problems in the code of others.

You will be responsible to build, improve and maintain an integratin testing framework that spans all components of the Tungle service. This framework will be used to automate quality assurance and scalability requirements. You will be required to perform daily white box or black box testing and must be able to quickly assess problems and identify their source.

Required Knoweledge:
Skills
• Experience and familiarity of Python and other scripting languages (BASH, PHP, Perl)
• Experience in multiple programming languages: such as C++, Java, J2EE
• Experience with virtualization technologies (VMWare, XEN, MS Virtual PC)
• Strong understanding of operating systems (Windows, Linux, OS X, BSD)

• Familiar with Internet based protocols, such as TCP/IP, HTTP

• Familiar with non-functional testing, such load and performance testing, stress and disaster testing

• Direct testing experiences with Web or internet based applications are ass

• Ability to troubleshoot the code of others and identify problem areas
• Drive and ambition to build a great company with a team of Entrepreneurs
• Pervasive personality, a no-nonsense team player

Education
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.

Compensation:

How to apply:
Contact jobs@tungle.com

View the complete list of job listings
Submit a job ad

Eidos Montreal is currently looking to fill several new job openings as they prepare to form the second of three planned development teams. These openings range from Senior Network Programmer to Technical Librarian/Intraweb Support, with an emphasis on senior and artistic positions. If working in the game industry is something that appeals to you or someone you know then this is an excellent and rare opportunity. It’s not often that a studio creates a development team from scratch. The full list of job openings and descriptions have been posted on eidosmontreal.com, along with all the necessary information for applying.

It was announced last year that Deus Ex 3 would be the first game to be developed by this new Montreal studio. The original Deus Ex, released for PC in 2000, is a critically acclaimed classic with a strong following among gamers and developers. It was fairly obvious at the time that a large part of the reason the Deus Ex IP was chosen for this new studio was to attract talent that simply wasn’t available in Quebec or Montreal.

The second game, to be developed by the team they are in the process of hiring, has not been officially announced yet, but some hints previously appearing on the Eidos Montreal website have basically confirmed that it will be Thief 4. The Thief series began on the PC in 1998, and, like Deus Ex, is an extremely popular IP that can be used to attract developers from around the world (or competing neighbours like EA and Ubisoft).

There were a half-dozen keynote speeches yesterday, sandwiched between the day’s seminars, exhibits, and the sideshows of the unconference, and the evening’s libations and mixers around the offices of San Francisco notables.

Tim O’Reilly went on stage to repeat what Bob Metcalfe and others were saying over 12 years ago, that the network is really the computer. Tacked on were two side concepts. The first idea is an invitation to tackle large common-good projects so that even failing is contributive. The second is an interesting take on the market’s valuation of centralization (Facebook, Google, etc.) even as Web 2.0 is pulling the web towards decentralization (Open APIs, shared contexts, etc.). The end-result is that market-valued centralization will happen through interoperability. The unstated conclusions are interesting though; we can’t value or buy a share in inter-operating companies, unless through a mutual fund (assuming the companies are public) or a Yahoo-style consolidation (if not). Is centralization dressed in new clothes still the same old successful maid of yore ?

The most expected talk of the day was the announcement of Microsoft Live Mesh, a long-haul project built and hyped under the supervision of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Once you take all of the buzzwords about collaboration and data synchronization out, you essentially get, as far as I can tell, a RSS-enabled shared folder with a public changelog and a programmable API. The first application of Live Mesh is one in which multiple devices can share preference and settings files (bookmarks, contacts, personal Windows settings, the kind of thing you get for a decreasing premium on certain USB keys) so that they are all using the same basic data (as long as they run Windows, although Microsoft promised wider support to a snickering audience). They claim over a hundred developers were assigned to work on this for two years. Taking into account the complexity of building shared-storage systems (instead of, say, collaborating with Amazon or acquiring the likes of Nirvanix), I wonder what the other 90 were doing.

By far the most interesting talk of the evening was a live stage interview with Max Levchin (PayPal, Slide). If you are running low on smart, well-articulated, incisive content, you can always count on Levchin to deliver. Max covered his early attempts at start-ups (4 of them until he found success with PayPal), but focused especially on the social entertainment software that is the core of Slide’s applet business. He went at length exploring the relationship between social actions and advertisers as a non-abrasive promotional vehicle; witness, for example, the addition of a wildly popular pregnancy test to be thrown at others in SuperPoke to coincide with the release of the movie Juno. He covered new ways to segment the market based on behavioral commonalities rather than demographics, an idea that the market analysts at an earlier Consumer 2.0 panel hinted at. Levchin then offered an interesting distinction between applets and traditional software: that applets draw on users’ wish to participate through one destination, made valuable through its character and popularity, unlike traditional applications which are meant to be chosen not for their intrinsic identity but rather for the predominance of certain features and qualities differentiating them from the feature lists of others; that this is what makes widget companies so valuable. Interspersed in the talk was a fourth idea on the lifecycle-prolonging value of widgets as the novelty of social networks erode. Good stuff.

AdCentricity, which is a Toronto digital advertising sales network, has raised $3 million in a series A round led by Propulsion Ventures, one of telesystem’s VC firm.

AdCentricity in itself allows ad agencies and brands to manage their outdoor digital signage advertising, by facilitating them the task of planning, buying, and distribute multimedia ads on plasma screens, HD TVs or projectors, by demographics, geography or venue type.

The company publishes bold projections for its market, predicting exponential growth for digital signage advertising, more than the adoption rate of the Internet or broadcast TV.

Beyond the marketing copy, I understand this is mainly due to the technology, which allows rapid distribution of ads, customization of ads per venue type, and the appeal of multimedia advertising compared to traditional (paper) advertising.

Another company in digital signage that readers of MTW might remember is iGotcha, another startup which focuses on having interactive presentations in shops, although they are focusing on technology while AdCentricity’s strength is its network and distribution.

Last month Ubisoft revealed that their upcoming Montreal-developed Nintendo DS title My Health Coach: Weight Management would ship with a pedometer peripheral that tracks a user’s steps and distance travelled. This pedometer can be carried around during the day, and uploads stats and progress to the application when attached to the DS. What differentiates this title from the multitude of other non-games for the DS, and even WiiFit, is the mobility of the peripheral and potential applications for use outside of weight management.

On the very same day Ubisoft announced My Health Coach, noted Alternate Reality Game designer Jane McGonigal gave a talk at SXSW on and happiness and why and how we should be making real life more like video games. Her full keynote can be read here. With Ubisoft’s DS pedometer fresh on my mind, I couldn’t help but feel her ideal future where society uses games in their daily lives to kill boredom was closer than she thought. Near the end she talks about expensive GPS utilities tracking positions and mobile devices that communicate with Twitter and other web services, but here comes Ubisoft with an affordable peripheral for the most popular mobile device on the planet. I’m sure a designer like Jane McGonigal could come up with dozens of bredom-killing game ideas that take advantage of this pedometer. And how long can it be until the DS officially supports GPS tracking too? It’s refreshing to see that Ubisoft Montreal isn’t a studio just limited to creating big budget blockbusters, and is actually at the forefront of challenging our concept of what constitutes games and where they can be played.

In this article posted on the IGDA Montreal blog, Pierre Boudreau provides us with brief summaries of each of GameCamp’s 20 mini-presentations. It’s no substitute for attending the actual six minute talks, but is nonetheless a nice overview that shows those of us who were unable to attend what kind of event GameCamp is and what can be expected from the next one.

Interfaces Montreal has generously uploaded videos of the five speakers who presented at the demo-conference that took place two weeks ago. Each presentation lasts around 15-20 minutes, so you might want to first read Bart Simon’s write-up of the event before deciding which videos are worth committing the time to watching.

Simon’s own talk was fascinating, and probably the only one I would recommend watching in its entirety. He summarizes the ideas behind his research on the “physicality of Wii play,” or the Wii’s ability to shift the nature of video game boundaries in the living room. For such a potentially esoteric topic he was incredibly concise and clear. His side-by-side comparisons of advertisements for the PlayStation 3 and Wii were particularly effective at conveying the essence of his research — that the Wii has brought play into the physical space of the living room, and the players and space they occupy are beginning to become as much a part of the game experience as what occurs inside the television screen.

I have a couple of other general comments to add to Simon’s:

- The Army of Two co-op presentation was, as I had feared, not much more than an extended preview of the game (with no less than 6 gameplay trailers!).

- Phil Fish continues his impassioned crusade against the mainstream game industry and I have to ask: Why? I agree that there is incredible innovation and artistic style and opportunity for those choosing to follow the indie game aesthetic, but it’s also an aesthetic that easily promotes formulaic gameplay and ugly art. Both mainstream and indie games have their unique advantages and disadvantages and that seems like something Fish should have acknowledged. It’s unfair to judge AAA studios like Ubisoft so harshly when there has never been an indie action game with a world as vibrant or open as the one in Assassin’s Creed, for example.

CITIZENShift, an open platform by the National Film Board where all citizens are invited to contribute to a social topic, from blog posts, videos to podcasts, was distinguished as an official honoree in the activism category.

The Webby Awards are annual awards, where members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences choose the best of the web. They proclaim themselves as the equivalent of the Oscars for multimedia works.

CITIZENShift went through an overhaul at the end of last year, transforming itself from a group blog into a full-fledge open social platform. This selection is in a way a direct acknowledgement of the work done. Congratulations!

Greetings from very chilly San Francisco where the 2nd edition of the SF Web 2.0 Expo, organized by O’Reilly and Techweb, is going strong. Yesterday was the kick-off to the geeky celebration of all things surrounding social computing, with a full-day of seminars and demos for those willing to shell out a few extra bucks. Attendees could choose from a whopping 14 3-hour workshops during the day. The most promising of the morning track was a presentation by Vanessa Fox (the lady who organized and promoted Google Webmaster Central) and Nathan Buggia (Program Manager for Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center) on “SEO-friendly web application design”: tons of tips and techniques to help search engines crawl, understand and index web applications and applets, as well as a list of dangerous pitfalls to avoid. There are pages and pages of great ideas taken out of this workshop, and you can get it all for free off of the private website janeandrobot.com (an already very valuable resource to be further enriched in the near future based on workshop participant questions).

The afternoon seminar was a promising one on making innovation happen on time. The fact that it was presented by an ex-Microsoftie is somewhat ironic (as it would be if the topic had covered bug-free code or open-source), but Scott Berkun has clearly learned from the depths of the trenches and came up with a toolbox of ideas and concepts useful for firing up innovative thought processes in teams larger than an entrepreneur and a few dedicated buddies (if you lead Facebook or a corporate MIS dev team, this one was for you; for startups the material beyond idea generation was academic). The “on time” part was a trifle thin on details (it was delivered in the last 20 minutes) and basically summed up to three ideas: account for weekends and natural downtimes when planning schedules, cut features before you get late on delivery instead of after, and build in a scheduling/design/experimentation dry-run stage before the start of any project to see how your expectations about tasks and times gel together.

The evening entertainment was an eye-opener. Held in Jamie Zawinski’s technodive-ish DNA Lounge, Ignite SF was a fast-paced Demo-like presentation platform where selected speakers could come and entertain the audience for 5 minutes on a topic of their choice; they were awarded 20 slides of presentation and usually not enough time to cover them all. Topics ranged from startups’ relationships to user commentary (metblogs.com), one lady’s particular love for giant Cloverdale-like monsters, Salim Ismail’s experiment with explaining startup growth through Pirsig-like metaphysics, Christian Crumlish’s hilarious take on social anti-patterns (the bit on how to send automated friend-plea rejection notices from social networks was priceless), an exploration of the open SMS-accessible digital signage around DNA lounge, and a few oddball speeches on successful interviews, the leveraging of your user base, and search engine optimization. The event was a bit like StartUpCamp but with more presenters and no experts, a lot less presentation time than at BarCamp, and a whole lot of hecklers droned out by the chatty crowd whose discussions were lighted up by the variety of topics at hand. This is great way to get to know local techies and entrepreneurs through a wide variety of quirky angles. It is also very fun — we should have this back home.

As posted earlier, we are planning a startupdrinks next week, wednesday late afternoon, at Café Santos, 191 St-Paul Street, in the old port. The nearest metro station is Square Victoria.

Here is a description of the startupdrinks concept:

A simple concept: startup culture in cities around the world gathers around a bar to have a pint and discuss what they are working on, what they need help with and what they can do for each other.

Basically, the idea is that if you are involved in a startup or looking to get into a tech startup, come have a drink, meet new people and discuss startups. no rules, no keynotes, no schedules, nothing fancy, just some plain good old drinks, great people, hopefully good weather, hopefully awesome startups to talk about :-)

The event is shaped up together by Alok Chowdhury (fluide media group / custom content ) as a continuation of our last meetup at laika, but this is no way related to MTW, although if you talk to me, chances are that I’ll only talk about that.

If you are interested, please leave a comment now so that we can have an idea who is coming, to organize with the café.

When: Wednesday Apr 30th from 5pm to … late in the evening
Where: Café Santos, 191 St. Paul St.
What: drink and discuss openly about startups and your projects.