Montreal Tech Watch

Internet permet une plus grande participation de tous à plusieurs égards. Samedi prochain, une vingtaine de personnes se réuniront en après-midi à la Station C à Montréal pour des démonstrations, discussions et enfin une session de codage pour un projet de l’association canadienne Visible Goverment.

Les démontrations se feront sous la forme d’un “Speed geeking [en]“. Quatre ou cinq personnes feront la démonstration de leur projet pendant cinq minutes à un groupe de trois ou quatre personnes. Les démonstrations se déroulent simultanément et après cinq minutes, chaque groupe passe à la prochaine démonstration, juste à côté.

Pour en savoir plus sur le project de Visible Government, consultez la présentation en ligne de Jennifer Bell expliquant ce projet de web scraping.

Michael Lenczner nous parlera aussi des différents projets de web scraping au Canada et au Royaume-Uni.

Comme l’espace est limité, svp confirmez votre présence par email à robin@millette.info ou bien via Facebook ou Upcoming.

Si vous avez un projet à présenter, svp m’envoyer un email ou bien faites le savoir sur Facebook ou Upcoming. Notez que vous n’avez pas besoin d’un compte Facebook ou Upcoming pour participer.

Date :
Samedi 29 novembre 2008
de 13h à 17h

Lieu :
Station C
5369 Saint-Laurent #430
(faites le 703 en bas pour entrer)
http://station-c.com/

Inspiré par :

• http://civicaccess.ca/
• http://ibelieveinopen.ca/
• http://datalibre.ca/
• http://notreparlement.ca/
• http://quivotequoi.ca/
• http://www.makethechange.ca/
• http://cancan.waglo.com/dataface/

The holiday seasons are quickly approaching.   With the growing concern over the economy and how it affects startups and the technology industry I’ve recently spoken with a number of startup founders who are looking for cost effective ideas for holiday parties.

Despite the doom & gloom over the economy, our community has a number of exciting things to celebrate.   We saw a record number of startups launching in Montreal this year.   We have had a growing list of community events including Barcamp, StartupCamp, DemoCamp, StartupDrinks, Founders & Founders, Entrepreneur’s Breakfasts, MontrealNewTech, GameCamp (plus others I’m sure I’ve forgotten) take hold this year.

With the size of many of our startups still under the threshold to throw a large party, the cautionary good sense about budgets and spending levels - there has been a discussion among the startup community about hosting a shared holiday party in December that would be open to all startups, contractors and members of the technology community.

With a great DJ, drinks and lot’s of friends we think it would be a better chance to enjoy & celebrate the seasons delights as a community with a large fun party then many of us doing smaller parties.

The organizing group is right now working on finalizing a date (Dec. 11th (Thurs), 12th (Fri), 13th (Sat) or Dec. 18th (Thurs)) and the location (Somewhere on the Main, St. Laurent Blvd area).

We are going to have door tickets (which include some drinks) and individual drink tickets to cover the costs of the event with any proceeds going to one of the many worthy Montreal charities (Old Mission Brewery or Montreal Childrens Hospital).  Prices for the drink tickets & door tickets are going to be startup pricing and designed to be very affordable for anyone looking to attend.  We may also have some sponsors donating a few prizes for a door prize draw.

This would be an open event with significant others, friends and employees all invited to attend.  If you, or your startup team are interested in participating in this we are trying to guage the numbers to finalize the location.

Please comment on this blog post with an indication of the number of people from your company who might be interested in attending the event.

We will confirm the location & details on pre-purchasing tickets shortly.

Reposted:

There’s a StartupDrinks planned today wednesday 26th Nov., from 5.30pm, at Reservoir, 9 Duluth East. 

StartupDrinks gathers everyone interested by tech entrepreneurship in Montreal. It’s an informal event which gathers every month the community, and where you can share your projects, talk about challenges, new technologies, and meet other entrepreneurs starting new compagnies. 

Subscribe here http://techentreprise.com/Montreal/events/46-Montreal-StartupDrinks before 2pm today if you want to come by. 

Montreal StartupDrinks gathered up to 40/50 entrepreneurs, investors, developers, experts and bloggers in previous months. See you there!

Google map of location

As promised, there’s a new map of Montreal.

These were removed:

• capazoo
• bluestreak tech (it’s a 5-year old company)
• jestai
• simon law
• tarantella (service provider doing pretty much everything)
• radiorfid (unavailable website)
• s2i (same as tarantella)
• jeffery thomas, blue chip services (nothing on website)
• navilon (no website avalaible)
• mp3.net, was announced as “launching imminently” a year ago, nothing new since then
• yulnews (acquired)
• videopresse (ended)
• atria rh (also doing services in industrial, sales, everything)
• double v3 (no website)

These were added:

• trap door inc
• identi.ca which is also the same placeholder for criti.ca, ur1.ca, certifi.ca, domesti.ca
• dailydollardeal
• google montreal
• reasonably smart
• seeyourhotel
• Les Laboratoires foulab
• seeyourhotel
• Brouillette & Partners
• BlueSlice Networks
• Fixion Media
• yourteledoctor
• kotsego
• xtranormal

These were changed:

• brigtspark ventures are now brigthspark
• flow consulting is now FlowVentures

View the new map here.

Companies and places are now listed at the bottom, which is much more practical than the previous map. This was done in collaboration with John Beales, who was tremendously helpful to make this happen. Thanks then to John!

If you want to show the map on your website, you can use the code below, thanks to Jean-François Noel

<iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://jfno.net/mymap/mtwmap.html"></iframe>

In two weeks from now, I’m going to be at LeWeb08 to present Silentale during the Startup Challenge. Since I’m a Montrealer at heart, I would like to take this opportunity to reach out to all MontrealTechWatch readers that are going to be in Paris for the conference and try to organize a little get together.

So, if you are planning to attend, let’s first connect through this group down at TechEntreprise.com/Paris or find me during the event using @lfp.

In the meantime, listen to Loic Le Meur (the organizer) say, “Why Love Is This Year’s Theme at LeWeb: Love and Entrepreneurship are very Similar Obsessions!”

Why LOVE is @leweb theme this yearnrelated blog post http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2008/11/why-love-is-thi.html

Facebook won yesterday a case against Adam Guerbuez, and his “company”, Atlantis Blue Capital. Facebook sued under the CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act, and was awared $873 million US in damages.

Adam Guerbuez stole user credentials on varous phishing websites he setup, and then used those login information to spam Facebook users & friends about various dating, porn, drug and “male-enhacement pills” websites. See also here a story on how he got rich by selling videos of people attacking homeless people. Adam Guerbuez, his company, and 26 other indivuduals identified in the case, were based & operating in Montreal.

The ruling also forbid M. Guerbuez to use again Facebook, although it’s probably the least of his worries.

This is by far the biggest amount awarded to a company for anti-spam. Myspace also received a favourable ruling earlier this year, but the damages were “just” $230 million.

Xtranormal (see beta review) which launched with much fanfare a little over a month ago has laid off today 36, which is half of its staff.

Xtranormal invested heavily in research & development efforts in the past year, understandable since they were tackling a new challenge, user-produced videos, but this mass layoff shows lack of planning, focus & guidance from its CEO & founder, Richard Szalwinski, who also did previously Discreet Logic. Many at xtranormal expected him to lead product development but he didn’t. As sources of money & funding disappear, Xtranormal is now forced to downsize its staff. I guess xtranormal’s investors are defaulting on committed payements due to markets crashing left & right, although you have to take that with a grain of salt.

Layoffs are hard times for a company, with remaining staff having lower morale. My thoughts goes to existing and ex-employees, hoping they’ll bounce back.

For all those who miss the famous StartupDrinks, and also for those who haven’t had the chance to come to one, we’re doing one next wednesday, at Reservoir, 26th of Nov.

The venue is Reservoir, 9 Duluth East, and we’ve got all the second flour to ourselves. Signup at TechEntreprise if you want to come up at the event. The event is done in association with the tremendous help from the team from Flow Ventures (thanks to Raymond Luk and Robin)

There were StartupDrinks during the summer, the last one in August had 40 to 50 people going from 5.30pm up until 9pm. I had personally a great time, we even managed to get fashion shows plus great music… I expect to get the same number of people. If you are an existing entrepreneur, or are looking into getting into tech startups, it’s the ideal venue to come. Do also bring your friends or colleagues who might be interested.

As always, it’s the same great formula: gather everyone from the startup community in Montreal for one evening, grab a drink (or several…), talk about ventures you’re working on, or talk about new technologies you’re looking into. The event is informal, with the objective of hooking up people together, see what members of the community need help on, and see what they can do for each other.

See below pictures from previous events:

FluidSurveys, a web application from Chide.it, has relaunched last week. Its major selling point is the application’s user interface, which has been designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. Aydin Mirzaee, who runs Chide.it, says that in other survey/polling software, creating a survey takes hours while it only requires a few minutes on FluidSurveys.

FluidSurveys is a SaaS software, with a free plan avalaible if you want to try it out.

This new version has been developed in Montreal for the past months, with Aydin working with McGill students on their avalaible free time (read: code sprints during weekends). Aydin said there might be rought spots, and they’re now looking for feedback and comments from the community.

I’m in awe on how they can pull off these crazy hours, especially Aydin who regularly launches a new web application every 6 months or so, even more so when seeing that FluidSurveys is a strong contender to other survey or polling software such as polldaddy, with features such as branching, skipping, invites etc.

Joshua Koopferstock has done a mashup listing all upcoming rock/indie/pop concerts in Montreal at MusiqueMusicMontreal. Joshua does the role of curator, adding a tune for every planned music band.

I don’t always have time to individually research and preview each and every band that is playing in Montreal (there are over 130 in the next 3 weeks…). With this site, I can passively listen to all the music from bands soon to come to Montreal while I’m doing something else, and if one band jumps out at me, I just write myself a little note to look into it more later. I imagine there are quite a few other live music fans out there who are in a similar “information overload/time limited” situation that I am,

There’s no new breakthrough technology here, and Joshua said he’s done it in his free time; but I do like the simplicity, practicality and usefulness of the service. It’s the sort of thing a rock fan would bookmark as his homepage, and one can easily imagine aggregating blog posts or other relevant news, and then work from there to sell tickets or just do plain old affiliate marketing with iTMS.