Montreal Tech Watch

StartupDrinks was awesome yesterday. It was easily the best event I’ve been to in Montreal lately.

Thousand thanks to QuebecValley, MontrealStartup, RedNod, NorthGeek, MontrealPython, Alexis Smirnov, VC-TV, Austin Hill who wrote and buzzed about the event.

The evening was great, with people coming up with great new exciting projects and startups.

We had the pleasure of having people from Montreal Girl Geeks, JLA VenturesBlackBerry fund, iNovia Capital, BDO, MontrealStartup, php Quebec, fellow pythonistas, javascripters, c++/assembler programmers, railers, 3D software engineers, Maxster from Proje(c)t Hackerspace, Morgan Tocker from MySQL/Sun, Praized, Flow Consulting, CoRadiant, CakeMail, future BarCampers, linkbaiters :-), hackers and “security experts” who came up for RECON ’08, and a reporter from the Lien Multimedia. It was also great to see people coming up from Boston, Calgary and Toronto. I certainly miss people here (sorry couldn’t meet everyone)

Alok C. even planned for the event a modeling fashion show *cough* and fireworks **cough, cough**

Pictures at flickr

Again, thanks to everyone who came for StartupDrinks. See you all at the next one!

Update: A team also broadcasted live the event on Justin.tv

This is short-notice, but we’ve got 2 excellent meetups this week:

• We are holding a Montreal StartupDrinks wednesday 30th July from 6pm, at Café des Éclusiers again. The place is located at 400 rue de la Commune Ouest. It’s at the end of the old port near the St-Laurent.

  We had the last StartupsDrinks there last month, and it was a great event. About 25 people showed up, with a great mix of entrepreneurs, developers, business & technology consultants, CEOs and CTOs of software companies, also the team from montrealstartup.

  There have been comments last time by a few wondering if the place was really appropriate, but I found iit great, and so did most of the people who came. There is ample space; it’s easy to talk and meet people, and it’s also a great setting.

  Come have a drink with us, meet innovators & great people working in technology, come talk about your projects, share about your current startups!

• There is a meetup today for the Project Montreal HackersSpace, at Café Chaos, at 6.30pm.The instigator of the project explains:
  

  Hacker Spaces are popping up all over the map and Montreal will be no exception.

  Proje(c)t Hacker Space Montreal is the first phase of having a hacker space in Montreal. At the moment our main necessity is to find anyone who is interested in shaping and building this project.

  After attending The Last HOPE, which was a huge primer on hacker spaces, a few members of Geek Montreal found out that their excuses were invalid. So if you frequent Montreal and are interested in shaping, building and enjoying this hacker space, send an email to phsmtl (at) gmail (dot) com

Great events where you get to meet hackers & entrepreneurs don’t come often in Montreal. If you read MontrealTechWatch, you need to be there!

I’ve just read a post by Mark MacLeod who tells how business models for web-based companies have evolved during the past few years.

Once upon a time, technology companies built products and sold them…

How times have changed. First, vendors started getting SaaSy…

Then we stopped making users pay. At least not everyone. Freemium has emerged as a powerful way for startups to acquire bucket loads of users…

Now, we’ve gone off the deep end – where everything is free, all the time

You’ve got to relate this to Chris Anderson‘s theories who came up in late 2004 with the long tail theory, and then topped it with another provocative thought, the $0.00 business.

Mark’s post is very interesting, since he addresses a current issue that every entrepreneur faces, which is pricing of its product and service, amidst an ever-changing market and relentless competition. I invite you to read it. I had then a personal reaction to the article but the comment took more than a few paragraphs so I am writing it here:

There’s a simple rule: if someone can do it for free, then it will be inevitably free. For instance, that’s why content-based businesses (say newspapers) are doomed because there’s always people like Mark, me or even the average guy willing to spend one hour in their day writing articles and take pictures of what’s up.

The rule outlined above is always true, even if you have superior marketing, even if you are backed by government laws (demise of music albums for instance), even if have millions of VC money…

People serious about business should then move to areas where people can’t replicated it easily, for instance by having unique technology, or by having unique knowledge, or by having access to networks, or just by the good old fact that the product / service needs a serious amount of human (not computer) effort to produce and be offered to the client.

Of course, as Mark MacLeod said, this is becoming more difficult for entrepreneurs, as access to technology is becoming easier.

So if you are building a business, if at one point you discover that your service could be replicated by a 14-year old kid during his spare weekend by using “shortcuts”, then you should either consider it as a pet project — or move along to something more ambitious, more original, and that requires more effort.

Image: free beer

I am at the new Apple store on Ste-Catherine street and I can see 30 vendors in blue and orange T-Shirts, all cheering madly, and high-fiving people entering the store, giving T-Shirts away and making customers and Montrealers who waited for the store’s opening feel like they’ve just won the gold medal or finished a marathon.

I have even in front of me 4 Apple specialists singing on karaoke, following the music in the store.

The store in itself is all in glass, alumunium, with touches of wood. Apple computers and iPod touch are on the ground floor, while accessories, software and support (the Genius Bar) is on the second floor.

Unfortunately, they don’t sell iPhones, even if you can still try a couple of them; nor do they have any special discounts for the store’s opening. Still, it’s now without doubt the #1 destination for Apple fans and consumers in Montreal now.

Photos (sorry about the poor quality, it’s a camera phone):

The line ran around 2 blocks

The store is located on St-Catherines Street, surrounded by top retail shops.

Cheering and high-fiving

First floor

Going to the 2nd floor, it’s all glass and aluminium

The Genius Bar

Pictures on flickr

I remember asking my brother a while ago what programming language people would still use in 10 years. I was suggesting Ruby, and since he’s into .NET, I thought he’d say C# or asp. To my surprise, Javascript was his immediate answer.

That was before words like AJAX or javascript libraries were mainstream. Javascript is now used in all sorts of flavour on the web, from dynamizing user interfaces, up to powering whole websites like gmail or 280Slides. In 2008 alone, we’ve seen the apparition of stand-alone javascript web frameworks like SproutCore or Objective-J.

A new service called the Reasonable Smart Platform aims to push further boundaries, by offering a platform for web developers that will host their application and store the data for them.

In practice, you open an account by using OpenId. You can then start a new host, or clone existing ones, with files hosted on RSP through git. Other programmers can also clone your host, and then push changes.

There is currently a minimal set of features. HTTP requests are taken care by bootstrap.js; you can also access the filesystem, store, retrieve and search data, and manage sessions. All of this is done with javascript; which is executed on the RSP server upon user requests.

If you go through the website, it seems raw; but the service is already functional. The website in itself uses RSP. Here is for instance a sample application done today, a demo made just for this post. It’s a board where visitors can leave a message, like what they are doing currently. If you have a RSP account, the code is hosted at http://mtw-demo.reasonablysmart.com:81/ if you want to play with it.

I’d like to believe that this is a strong contender to other cloud computing companies. They are actually looking for investors to fund and develop the project; it’s for instance a direct competitor to 10gen. Of course, there are many shortcomings (such as lack of documentation and examples); but I know how talented they are, seeing them working at blitzweekend so this shouldn’t be a problem.

Mini … minimalism

Marc-André Cournoyer has just published Invisible (link to the GitHub repository), a ruby web framework that aims to be as minimalist and compact as possible, with the core code taking 2k lines.

Yes, you’ve read it well, it’s a web framework and it’s under 2000 lines of code. In comparison, in other web frameworks like Ruby On Rails, there are base files that are well beyond 2000 lines (here or here for instance)

Thanks to its simplicity, I imagine the web framework could be used to get a simple website in a minimal amount of time, such as a website that has only a dozen or so (static) pages. It might not be production ready though for web developers, since it has minimal no support for stylesheets, javascripts, or any other fancy web2.0 effects.

In related news, the prolific Marc-André Cournoyer also released a while ago Thin Turbo, aiming to speed up Thin.

There are no clues if the author aims to release one day a web server or a framework coded in one line, or in assembly

For those who are into Apple products, a brand-new Apple flagship store will open its doors this Friday, at 5pm, 1321 Rue Ste-Catherine Ouest.

Apple flagship stores are known for their superior customer service & experience, within a distinctive lush store, much alike the attention to detail found in their computer and electronic products. Another distinctive trademark of Apple stores is that you can take orders and check out anywhere, with Apple staff having their own payment systems, making it a great shopping experience compared to the one you can find at Best Buy or Future Shop.

In the U.S., these stores have on average $4,300 sales per square feet, per year, one of the highest ratio you can find in retail, and has helped Apple regain market shares since these were pushed by Steve Jobs.

Since other Apple resellers like CompuSmart closed shop lately, this is a more than welcomed new store.

WirelessNorth, which tracked the national wireless auctions for the past months, sums up the result of the auctions, which were setup by Industry Canada to provide additionnal bandwidths to new and existing wireless companies.

The 3 existing telecommunication companies, namely Bell Canada, Rogers and Telus won additional frequencies in most provinces. Rogers Wireless alone brought to the table $999 million, in an auction that was planned previously to gather in total just $1.5 billion. If you had any doubts about the profitability of this industry, the auctions just confirmed that it’s a cash cow for the existing carriers.

For consumers, the most important fact to remember from these auctions is the arrival of 2 new companies, Globalive and Quebecor. Globalive managed to get frequencies in all Canadian provinces, except Quebec, while the media group Quebecor is now covering all Quebec, plus South-Eastern Ontario. Since previous reports from these companies confirmed that they will both use the GSM standard, they could (at least in theory) offer a nation-wide wireless access to their customers through a partnership. Of course, this will also mean lower prices for consumers, due to increased competition. Quebecor especially is known for this business strategy when they acquired Videotron and then slashed prices, reviving the cable in Quebec. I expect (well I hope) the same thing to happen; with much lower plans offered to consumers, which will then boost mobile usage, with new user behaviours & mobile applications.

So what’s next? Each bidder has 30 days to pay the auctionned spectrums; and the federal government will also see through each bidder’s structrure, which has to be at least 47% Canadian-owned. Each new carrier will then have to compete (or partner) to get key locations to install their antennas; followed by the roll out. This is estimated to cost $500 million, taking at least 1 year. (which means if you were waiting for a 2nd carrier to get an iPhone, you will have to wait for at least the 2nd half of 2009)

Austin Hill has a few poeticpassionnate words to woo a potential community manager at upcoming social gaming startup akoha.org

When you walk past, crying babies begin to burble. You call people and they hear a smile over the phone. Your emails cause people to forget their troubles. When friends ask for help, you’re always willing to lighten their load and brighten their day. You make the sun shine and the grass green and the birds sing …

… We’re looking for a Community Gardener who will help us grow and nurture a community of players, fans, and supporters of our game

Funny.

For those who were not aware, MontrealTechWatch was down from yesterday early morning till 8.00pm today 17th of July.

It might seem normal and in the-order-of-things that the server comes back; for most sys admins, it’s just a matter of opening a ticket and the tech support would restart somehow the whole thing. But this time, it was radically different. Just a few hours ago, it was considered to be un-recoverable *sweats* , and with it databases **shivers** plus all generated files for the past 2 years ***faints***. We tried one last hack, which miraculously worked.

For those curious about technical details, this server hosts many websites and services. It hosts for instance a RoR site, graciously hosted since it’s a friend’s, plus another experiment, using Phusion Passenger. I’ve discovered that mod_rails has a big memory problems and leaves around dead processes; which I intended to solve by writing a god-like ruby script that would kill & clean processes, and even if the parent process was defunct and couldn’t be killed. Fast-forward, yesterday morning, this script launched the system command kill -9 1 … with the script owned by root user… which is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the head … while jumping from a plane 30000 feet high. XenServer can’t even restart, reinstall snapshot backups, relaunch, nor be re-setup, and all files & databases were deemed lost and inaccessible.

MTW is taken very seriously and I know of its importance; and this should never happen again. There’s one thing to blame here, which is trying to use experimental scripts on a production server. If this was a company, I would have fired the Linux idiot who wrote the script. Oh wait… Anyway, thanks for everyone who were there, it’s much appreciated. I’ll look into getting an additional resource as a sandbox and get a bulletproof environment for MTW