Montreal Tech Watch

I wrote a post one year ago to sum up 2007; ending with the outlook for 2008.

2 years ago, there wasn’t any tech scene to speak of in Montréal, except from a few techies who’d connect at a place like Laïka and interact through blog posts.

How things have changed. There is now a strong technology community in Montréal, with a diversity of actors, community events, startups, places and new technologies coming up every month, up to the point where we hear about it in Radio-Canada now (shocking!)

Names like Felipe Coimbra, Austin Hill, Roberto Rocha, the Praized guys, Flow Ventures, StationC, Ben Yoskovitz, startupnorth or MontrealStartup comes to mind, and so many more, certainly too many to do a list here. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank each of you, thank you for making this a great city for technology, and thank you for your enthusiasm, innovation, relentless work, and entrepreneurship.

As 2009 comes, I have *absolutely no doubt* that Montréal will rock, and the tech scene will be stronger, more diverse, and with shining examples of entrepreneurs boldly succeeding.

If 2007 was the birth of the tech scene in Montréal, 2008 the development, I’d say then that 2009 would be the year where it will reach its full maturity.

In the case of Montréal Tech Watch, I don’t have also any doubt that 2009 will be a great year.

I see the end result, compared to last year: the blog posts at mtw, techentreprise, blitzweekend, events like startupdrinks, freehackers, without counting the hundreds of connections made between fellow techies. I sit back, thinking that all of this was done with nothing but lots of unvaluable collaboration with people I loved working with. Who knows what would it be like if I have spent more than the planned $0 annual budget and more than the average 10 or so hours each week spent in this.

Now, looking back, I’ve had a hectic schedule for the past months and I have idea what’s coming up, if I look ahead. But seeing the year-to-year result, it would be fair to say you will see the same level of innovation and the same sense of wonder.

Ok. The last expression was perhaps a bit too much. But that’s obligatory these days since many just think about the “economic recession”, which, to be honest with you, is the least of my worries, maybe at the same level of how many snow storms we will have this winter (which is a micro-second of thought each day)

I wish then that MontrealTechWatch (& Associates) will be as strong, innovative and as lively as the Montréal tech scene.

That’s my wish for MTW for 2009. I’d wish success for each of you for the upcoming year, but maybe you’ve got (bigger/other) plans. If you care to share with the community, leave your thought and resolutions below.

What’s do you foresee for you & your ventures for 2009?

There’s Montréal StartupDrinks, for all entrepreneurs and startup fellows, and then there’s FreeHackers Montréal.

FreeHackers is a movement started by Zed Shaw, the programmer famous for having written mongrel, and infamous for having dissed ruby:

The Freehackers Union is a gang devoted to preserving hacking and invention as methods of personal artistic expression…by any means necessary.

Whatever you make of the definition, I thought this was definitively a must for Montréal.  MTW once had a tagline, Technology and Innovation, and events like FreeHackers or Blitzweekend are main drivers to make this happen. Like Blitzweekend, FreeHackers promotes original and new work, gathers brilliant developers/engineers/hackers, and can be the origin of many new innovative technologies.

We had the first meetup on the 13th of December. A small group of developers/hackers came up for the event, hosted by Bolidea, the new web incubator on bvd St-Laurent. 

Bolidea focuses on developing technology products that bring solutions to problems and they also work with business and tech oriented people helping them execute their ideas. Apart from having great offices on St-Laurent, they are a dynamic and awesome team, which made the Bolidea / FreeHackers match perfectly from the start.

Alok Mohindra was the first to show up, and he brought with him the prototype for Arkalumen, a new LED light which would be much more powerful and more efficient than existing LEDs. A *bright* idea considering the switch we have to do with lights. Alok also demonstrated later how we could use a graphing library to chart stock markets. 

We also discussed in the first hour how we would setup the group, and what would be the schedule. We quickly realized thought that each one of us had different backgrounds, with focuses on different languages and stacks that it would be impossible to do things like group projects. The consensus was that each would work on his own project, but would also benefit on the same time of being around brilliant developers. Here are a few examples taken from my notes:

• Pierre Phaneuf (who works for Google) was re-engineering the server for a multiplayer c++ video game, a competitive and fast Tetris clone
• Arach Tchoupani tested pinax, for a possible implementation for montrealpython
• Louis Philippe Huberdeau worked on TikiWiki and also discussed with Alok
• Gregory Whiteside looked at CouchDb and how it could be deployed on Amazon aws.
• I did a ruby plugin for the open micro blogging spec (although unfinished, it’s planned to be used on this website)

The team from Bolidea also provided food, coffee, and beer for the whole afternoon, which is great. I dreaded that the event would take so much organization and resources that it would be impossible to run it regularly. We could have 20 or even 25 people for the event (which is my goal for the next event), and the setup would be able to accomodate everyone. 

Pictures by Magda Rocki 

One thing that this picture do lack is the level of discussion and exchange which happenned during the event. Of course, there was also code/work going on, but I enjoyed mostly getting everyone together and getting everyone’s feedback on new problems. If you’re up to it, FreeHackers Montréal is going to be organized every 2nd tuesday afternoon of every month. The next one is already planned 10th of January. Sign up here.

Carl Mercier, of Karabunga, took lots of pictures at last week’s party, CelebrateCamp, organized by Austin Hill‘s expert hand.

Here are a few, ripped off from facebook (but anyway, they were public there):

Karabungas

Heineken models

Devs from Praized

execs from Praized

smarthipppo / Karabunga folks

If someone has pictures of Simon Law, please let me know.

Or pictures taken by other people. Thanks everyone!

Last week in Paris, the largest European web event was a wrap. As you may know, it is organized by the very public Loïc Le Meur and his wife Géraldine. Both now living in San Francisco but originally from France. Also, out of the 1600 attendees, only a few Montrealer’s made the trip. One investor, John Stokes from Montreal Start-Up, and three bloggers, Claude Malaison, Patricia Tessier and Caroline Allard were there.

Previous LeWeb events were great, in fact they were considered premium quality, in terms of content and organization. Unfortunately, the 2008 edition had a few hiccups.

I would like to quote a UK investor that was sitting with us at dinner on the first evening. Here’s the answer to my simple question about how she liked the event thus far, “Aside from the lack of heat, food, coffee and internet, this conference is excellent!”. The exact response anyone of the participants would have given. Unfortunately, the issues have been debated far more than the actual content, conferences or companies present and it has simply eclipsed everything else. (This post, as you can see, is no exception).

Although the now famous Guardian article written by Paul Carr and the picture of Scoble playing Solitaire are here to stay, most speakers were great. The second day was warmer and significantly better in terms of content. The recorded footage of the main stage is available on UStream.tv, including the ones with Chris Anderson, Merrisa Mayer and Marc Simoncini which are seriously worth watching.

As for the Startup Challenge, it was quite hectic. Issues varied from the lack of Internet connection (when they specifically asked the participants to prepare a live demonstration) to a very confusing winner announcement. At the end, Viewdle, Webnode and Zoover where the winners selected by the jury. And the People’s Choice Award went to Silentale! Read how Nicolas and I lived those two days and our views on the Competition.

On the day after the event, Loïc released a formal apology. Accepting the facts and going into details about what went wrong. After all, if we look over the organization issues, great speakers came from Europe and the US and made this event a success. I just hope we’ll have LeWeb09 next year.

Thursday 8pm at RadioLounge on Blvd. St. Laurent Montreal’s tech community will join together to celebrate 2008 and kick in the festive season.

Thursday Dec. 18th 8pm – RADIO LOUNGE MTL
3553 St-Laurent
Montréal, Québec
http://mtl.radiolounge.ca

We’ve opened up ticket purchases again if you weren’t able to get your tickets before.   You can still purchase them up until noon of Thursday.  Go to CelebrateCamp to obtain your tickets.

We have close to 200 attendees showing up so it should be a great event.

There will be a small draw for door prizes at 10pm.

If you want to get involved, please feel free to post any photos of your team, any Montreal community events or holiday messages to Flickr with the tag of CelebrateCamp.  We will have a live stream of these photos on the displays for the party.

You can also send messages to the community & party on Twitter using the tag CelebrateCamp.

go here

As announced previously, the Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast are now scheduled every 2 months, and next tuesday morning, starting from 8am, we’ll have the first one following the new schedule.

There hasn’t been one in November, nor will be one in January, so I’m expecting lots of people. There’s already 72 people registered attendees on the Facebook page, which is at the same time bad news and good news for Google Montreal, the company sponsoring the breakfast. [Kudos by the way to Ben Yoskovitz to get Google on board, and thanks to Google for sponsoring the breakfast.]

Reminder: The Tech Entrepreneur Breakfasts are informal get-togethers for Montreal technology entrepreneurs, mostly software but there are also hardware folks, with a good dose of service providers, early-stage investors, wanna-preneurs, bloggers. The format encourages long discussions with other people at your breakfast table, but there’s nothing stopping you to go around and talk to other entrepreneurs. If you’re a newcomer, just remember the event is informal & anyone is welcomed, so feel free to talk about your venture(s).

One of the first posts at TechEntreprise, back in August, was about an idea by Zed Shaw, which was to get developers and hackers together and work on projects. 

The post was meant to test the publishing system there, but it generated quite some attention, up to the point that doing an event like this in Montréal made sense. 

Now, I don’t know Zed Shaw nor do I completely understand his “fight club” rules; all I know is that there is a substantial group of developers in Montréal willing to get together, share projects and code, and experiment new technologies.

All without necessarily thinking about underlying business models, but just to hack things together and see what comes of this.  

That’s the vision, and all we needed was a place to host this. I’m happy to announce that we found it!

Bolidea, a new technology incubator founded by successful web entrepreneurs, graciously offered to host the event in their awesome offices on St-Laurent boulevard, right near Laika. Bolidea develops technology companies that strive to provide solutions to real market problems. They share our vision of gathering developers, entrepreneurs and everyone else interested in experimenting with new technologies.

So here it is:

A first FreeHackers event is scheduled Saturday 13th of December, beginning from 12.30pm, for an entire afternoon of freehacking, up until 6 or 7pm. 

Every python, ruby, C, java, php, erlang, sql, javascript, css developer is invited to come over. It’s your chance to work on a new library, or on a new algorithm you’ve never had the time to work on, or just meet other developers. Of course designers, and people wanting to work on hardware are also welcomed.

I’m expecting between 10 to 20 people. Registration will close after the first 20 people so sign up here (the event is open but places are going to be limited)

Note: I am aware that there are talks about doing a programming event at montrealonrails, but as far as I am concerned, it’s only about rails (or ruby) stuff, which I find very limited. Getting everyone onboard would be much more interesting than restricting an event to a language or one implementation

Come out an celebrate 2008 at CelebrateCamp2008 with the Montreal Technology Community.

As a community we have many things to celebrate. A successful year of Barcamps, StartupCamps, Democamps, Podcamps and a host of other community events flourished in 2008. We’ve seen more startups launched, more investing activity and a number of our local community have had great personal & professional success created in 2008.

In Montreal we are use to surviving tough winters.   With many fretting about a cold & long winter (metaphorically the word Nuclear Winter has been heard by some) we invite the grateful and thankful to join the community in celebrating a good year and to wish our community well for 2009.

Come to CelebrateCamp where we will drink, dance, play and be merry with those in our community who have something to be grateful & thankful about this year.

Location will be finalized depending on final ticket numbers. It will be on the Plateau (St. Laurent) area and be a cozy, casual bar with affordable drinks and invaluable company of friends.

On Thursday December 18th at 8:00pm everyone is welcome to join us at CelebrateCamp (was HolidayCamp). This shared holiday party will allow us all to come join in the holiday festivities, drink, be merry, dance and celebrate 2008 together.

Tickets will be $25 per person which includes 3 drink tickets, cost of the event with the all event profits to be donated to the Montreal Childrens Hospital.

You can purchase tickets for teams, friends & couples through Eventbrite.

Please purchase early so we can confirm final headcount and announce the location.

We also need help in spreading the word. Please link to CelebrateCamp and help us bring out the community.

StartupDrinks, an informal meetup for technology entrepreneurs, investors, developers and anyone interested in launching new technology companies was scheduled last week. The last editions were back in august, in summer, and after a brief hiatus, we’re now bringing them back. It was a good suprise to see so many entrepreneurs showing up at the event, making connections, and using the opportunity to meet new partners. We did have an initial head count, but lost track, and from the used named tags, attendance was around 45. Thanks for everyone who came up to StartupDrinks!

The event was organized with FlowVentures, and also used for the first time TechEntreprise, which did a good job of acting as a central place for the event. Peter & Robin from Flow were regularly attending the summer StartupDrinks and came up this time with cool name tags; and also found out a great place for the event, with the 2nd floor at Reservoir reserved for the event.

There’s obviously room for improvement, and next time in January (as always the last wednesday of the month), there should be up to 60 people. For now, we’re thinking about bringing in companies or service providers who would be interested into sponsoring the event, meeting entrepreneurs, and which would get in return a placement both on-site and at TechEntreprise.

If you have ideas to improve the event, or if you have specific needs to solve as entrepreneurs, feel free to leave a comment below.

See the series of pictures from the event.