First published at TechEntreprise:
Télé-Ressources Ltée (Les Services de placement) is a staffing firm in Montreal. We are currently looking for a Facebook App developer to create a French game application based on words. We have an idea for an application but we are also open to other’s inputs, thus the project has a lot of room for creativity.
You can contact me on
or e-mail: alpha@teleressources.com
StartupDrinks is this upcoming Wednesday! If you read this blog, you should seriously consider come up and share a drink with us.
We had more than 50 people at the last startupdrinks, and I expect more than 70 people for this first meetup of the Montréal tech community.
What: StartupDrinks is an informal event where you’re invited to take a drink and talk with other people interested in technology startups. StartupDrinks is organized by both MTW / TechEntreprise and FlowVentures
Where: Brutopia bar, 1219 Crescent Street, south of Ste-Catherines. Thanks to Felipe Coimbra and Robin Ahn from FlowVentures for the venue.
When: Wednesday Jan 28th, from 5.30pm
Who: Everyone interested in building and help build technology companies. Tech entrepreneurs, web developers, investors, consultants & experts are welcomed.
How: Sign up on TechEntreprise if you are planning to come [Note: This is required]
See below pictures of the last StartupDrinks:
See also Robin’s post at flowventures’s blog on StartupDrinks.
Neuralitic Systems, a company which provides marketing insights for operators and mobile service providers, has announced a $3m investment from the Blackberry Partners fund last week.
The company also raised additional funds from Vertex Capital, BDC Venture Capital, and Go Capital Fund in the past 4 months, in a total of $10million.
See this post for more info about the Blackberry fund.
Neuralitic allows mobile carriers and service providers to know exactly the behaviors of their users and how they use data-based services. This would be useful especially to the likes of Bell or Telus to craft Blackberry and Windows Mobile offerings, although I am not sure how it could be used by other platforms, such as Android or the iPhone, since the latter two has taken away the “packaging” role of carriers, with this being done now by Application stores.
Nimonik.ca, launched earlier this month, is a new website for companies wanting to be certified ISO14001, and then manage and track ISO14001 requirements, for companies planning on international expansion, and need to be “certified green”.
As I understand it, the Canadian law landscape is complex, with provincial, municipal and federal laws and regulations on waste water, air emissions, management of hazardous materials and so on. Corporate environmental managers typically have to delve into paper documentation and books, track different levels of regulations, and be able to update them as soon as they change.
Nimonik is at its core a reference, with a regulary updated database of regulations. Environmental managers can go through the regulations, track the relevant ones to their company, collaborate and discuss with other colleagues, and use the tool to set goals and metrics for their company.
To be honest, It took me a while to understand what Nimonik is and what kind of problem it solves. And this is for a software that is meant to simplify their users’ lives. I can’t imagine how dull doing environmental management work is.
Embedded below is a video preview of NIMONIK
The second FreeHackers event was held last week, and like the first meetup, it was a success.
If you are new to the concept, do read this post, which is a report about the first FreeHackers event. Compared to the first one, we had the same setup at Bolidea, the same date (the second saturday of the month), and practically the same schedule.
We did have more people though. This time, we had 3 people from foulab, the new hackerspace in Montréal, who were curious about the concept and what exactly was happening at the event. Also the team from Arkalumen were there, plus coders and hackers from the previous meetup. Others came in, but later, such as Evan Prodroumou from identi.ca
The event was hosted by Bolidea, a new technology incubator founded by successful entrepreneurs aiming to bring solutions to problems, and working closely with tech and biz entrepreneurs.
I’ve got to say thanks to Raphaël, and most importantly Magda from Bolidea, who hosted wonderfully the event, and prepared food & drinks for everyone. Their support means a lot, and without them, the event wouldn’t have been possible — and also adding to the fact that I couldn’t unfortunately spend all the time I wanted to organize and wrap up the January meetup. Bolidea has just published about the January FreeHackers.
Raphaël is one of the entrepreneurs working with Bolidea. He was continuing to work in the offices that saturday, and he told us his story and relationship with Bolidea.
Bolidea offices. They have a simple, yet sophisticated setup which I love
How awesome is it to have this bike in your main entrance?
Felipe Coimbra discusses with hackers about double inputs
Foulab members, and also Pierre Phaneuf.
One of the tables became the main focal point of the meetup. You can see laptops everywhere. The Internet dropped 2 times during the event — most probably due to the unusual high usage.
There was a TikiWiki hacking session in another section of Bolidea, with Louis-Philipe Huberdau, and Marc Laporte.
It’s a little bit humbling and magical to have all of these developers and hackers at that place. One discussion at one point was about designing an input system that would allow the use of 2 mice in Adobe Photoshop. The discussion evolved around electronics, ports programming, and overriding of drivers.
One thing we are working on for the next events is the format of the event. For the past 2 events, it was largely free-form, with my goal of emulating Blitzweekend. However, we might use more guided schedules for the next ones, such as having presentations + workshops on a given subject. Alok Mohindra is going to craft a schedule for the third meetup, and I’m looking forward to see how it would unfold at the next event. If you have ideas or thoughts about this event, do not hesitate!
CUSEC 2009, the best software engineering conference in Montreal, is due tomorrow.
World-renowned software engineers and programmers (RMS, someone?) are scheduled for the conference.
See also here [techentreprise] and official website.
CUSEC (the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference) is referred to by many as the gathering of the future of Software Engineering. Students who are passionate about Software Engineering, from across Canada and diverse concentrations, gather under one roof for three full days to learn from the worlds most famous and sought after software engineering speakers, researchers and professionals.
CUSEC is not just about the presentations though. The conference gives you the opportunity to meet others who share your passion. To see what your peers are up to and learning at their schools. CUSEC gives you the opportunity to have open conversations with many of the authors of the books you read as well as the people you read and hear about in school. Allowing you to learn directly from the people you look up to. And don’t forget, we also have a growing career fair that might be of interest to you.
- Dan Ingalls, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, is best known for his work on the Smalltalk programming environment, which revolutionized computing for both users and developers through human-computer interaction, the object-oriented paradigm, and development in integrated environments. He also revolutionized graphics with BitBlt and its variations with rotation and antialiasing. For his noteworthy contributions, he has received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award and the ACM Software System Award. His most recent work takes these ideas to the World Wide Web through Sun Lab’s Lively Kernel Project.
- Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.
- Avi Bryant is the co-founder of Dabble DB, a venture-backed startup based in Vancouver, BC. He’s also the creator of the Seaside web framework, and has given keynotes at RailsConf, Smalltalk Solutions, and elsewhere about his unusual - some say heretical - approaches to web development.
- Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to friends. Leah is the lead developer for the site and spends most of her time working on feature development, fixing bugs, scaling the site, and maintaining the API. She’s a recent computer science graduate from the University of Minnesota and enjoys the challenge of developing a web application from scratch. Leah will be speaking about the career choices for recent computer science university graduates.
Francis Hwang is a writer, artist and software engineer. An active member of the Ruby community, he founded Ruby-NYC in 2003, helps organize the annual Gotham Ruby Conference, and is currently a software engineer at Diversion Media. His writing on technology and culture has appeared in Spin, Wired, ArtByte, and FEED Magazine. His artwork has received press coverage in Wired News, Art in America, and Liberátion (France).
Company: EA Montreal
Position: Director of Engineering
Responsibilites and Tasks:
As Director of Engineering at EA Mobile Montreal, you will be responsible of the direct management and support of a group of software developers (software engineers) assigned to multiple teams and projects. You will be expected to work closely with lead software developers and department leaders to ensure that games are delivered on time and on budget while meeting high quality standards. You will also be responsible of improving the department’s productivity while nurturing a strong development team.
Responsibilities
• Oversee the technical implementation and estimates of projects.
• Work with lead software developers and other leaders to validate important technical decisions, identify and mitigate technical risks and solve problems encountered along projects.
• Lead the improvement and application of software development processes, standards and good practices.
• Maintain regular meetings with other studio leaders to share ideas, improve communication and work flow between departments.
• Interact with senior studio management to gain a good understanding of long‐term objectives for the studio and adjust short‐term objectives to match.
• Collaborate with the technology team to drive the development of libraries/ tools targeted towards boosting efficiency of production and quality of products.
• Ensure diffusion of technical expertise through projects and teams.
• Coach and mentor software developers, guide their professional development and oversee performance reviews.
• Develop processes to handle growth and hire the right people needed to make the team successful.
• Create a positive, forward‐focused and rewarding work environment.
• Emphasize project goals and maintain core focus.
Required:
• Experience as a Director of Engineering, Technical Director or Engineering Manager within a videogame developer/publisher.
• Solid grasp of C/C++ and Java.
• Proactive and creative problem solver.
• Good communication, management, and documentation skills.
• Self motivated with a strong work ethic.
• Desire to participate actively in growing a strong development house in a new and rapidly expanding market.
Assets:
• Experience in Web Development.
• Ability to communicate in both English and French.
How to apply:
Jeff Goldstein
jgoldstein@ea.com
View original job listing
Submit a job ad
Here’s an event at Station-C this upcoming thursday:
Scott Annan and Scott Lake, two startup entrepreneurs from Ottawa are doing a roadtrip to co-working spaces in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to connect with local startup communities and share their story about a new method of open and collaborative development to create dex, their recently launched personal and social CRM system. Scott Annan is a founder at Mercury Grove. Scott Lake is a co-founder of Shopify.com and ThinkSM. They also both write for StartupOttawa.com.
You can sign up for the event here.
Last week, MontrealStartup announced a seed investment in ControlYourself.ca, which does laconi.ca & identi.ca
Identi.ca is an open source version of twitter, building on standards and openess, such as the fact that any user can download the software and open up their own laconi.ca instance, which lead me to dub the service as the “wordpress for microblogging”.
Another key advantage is that it’s federated and distributed, meaning that separate instances can still communicate with each other, thanks to the open microblogging standard. While Twitter has been getting a lot of press, identi.ca has also received a lot of press, both from free software/open source/creative commons publications, and also from technology blogs as a solid alternative to Twitter.
Identi.ca is the brainchild of Evan Prodromou, who has under his sleeve wikitravel and vinismo.
The upcoming months will be indeed very exciting to watch. Twitter’s Evan Williams announced they’ve got their business model under way, to be introduced early this year, and Jaiku is also going to enter the open/federated micro-blogging scene, sponsored by Google itself.
Congrats to MSU & the team at ControlYourself!
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