Montreal Tech Watch

In the same vein as the various X-Prizes setup by private and public organizations, the Netflix prize spurred lots of interest in mathematicians and hackers circle.

The competition invited programmers and scientists all over the world to find a better recommendation engine. It would allow Netflix to predict better if a user would like a movie, based on his previous ratings, and other users’. The winning mark was a 10% improvement.

Now it looks like the Pragmatic Theory snatched the prize, with 10.05% improvement. Pragmatic Theory is made of Electrical engineer Martin Piotte and software engineer Martin Chabbert of Montreal, working in the telecommunications industry, and apparently algorithm crafters in their spare time. Their work came up at the 1st place since March this year, and they’ve reached the final mark by adding work made by Comendo, Yahoo! Reasearch and AT&T.

The Netflix prize came with a $1million prize. Initially, it wasn’t open to residents of Québec, but on 24th of March 2009, when Pragmatic Theory got the lead, Netflix changed the rules to accept as well residents of Québec. That’s good for Netflix, a wise decision (compared to the Régie des Jeux du Québec’s rulings…), and fortunate for all of Quebec residents, since it would have been the laughing subject of tech publications otherwise.

The rules of the competition also stated that the winning team could also commercialize the product of their work, on top of the cash prize. Congrats to the Pragmatic Team, congrats for their perseverance and sheer brilliance, since they present it as only a “leisure project”.

Since MTW and FlowVentures began Montreal startupdrinks last summer, we’ve had regularly an attendance of 60 to 90 people each time, went to two different places (Café des Éclusiers and now Brutopia on crescent), turning into what I call the de-facto meetup for the Montreal technology community.

It’s a great way for new tech entrepreneurs to meet other entrepreneurs, discuss about venturing into the technology space, along with tech-oriented programmers, speak about business with fellow startuppers, angel investors, or VCs, every last wednesday of the month.

For this month, we’re making exceptionnally 2 worlds meet, with a joint event with the Montreal Girl Geek Dinner. It’s a regular event instigated by Tanya McGinnity. Like StartupDrinks, it has now a regular and growing audience, filling rooms every time for their girl geek presentations.

I’m excited to see this happen, as we’ll get most probably 150+ people for the event, and a new talks + drinks formula. Of course, the most interesting thing is getting the 2 communities to mingle — who knows, you might meet a co-founder or get expert help for your startup, or get to know new ideas.

The schedule is as follows:

• Wed. June 17th, 5pm: A Talk by Christine Renaud from e-180 (@180) at Montreal Girl Geek dinner
• Wed. June 17th, 6pm: Montreal StartupDrinks, where it’s all about taking a drink and talk about tech startups and entrepreneurship.

The event will be hosted at Brutopia again, upstairs, on 1219 Crescent Street. Look for Tanya McGinnity, Robin Ahn, also Raymond Luk

If you are interested, DO register here. It takes 30 seconds and we need it to make name tags.

Once again, it’s a community event, and FREE. As such, we need your help as much as possible to get the word out. If you can put it on twitter, or facebook, forward the registration page to friends, then the better it will be. 

 Company: Sitezoogle

Position: Web Developer

Responsibilites and Tasks:
Sitezoogle creates website building tools for niche markets. Thousands of people around the world use our software every day. They are a diverse group, from artists to small businesses to nonprofits. The common thread is that they don’t want the expense of hiring a designer and need higher quality results than what generic website builders provide

Why Work With Us?

• We decided to charge people money for an application they love to pieces. It worked! We’ve been profitable since 2004 and are growing fast, even in this economy.
• We are a small team, so you will play a key role.
• You’ll get to play with the latest web tech (Amazon S3/EC2, jQuery, Ruby)
• We work in a “virtual office”—you can live where you love to be and set your own hours.
• $60k-$80k salary, based on experience.

Required:
We Are Looking For:

• A web developer with 3+ years experience.
• Able to learn, adapt and create clean code regardless of language (we use Coldfusion/Flash/Perl/Ruby/MySQL).
• Comfortable in a Linux/Apache environment.
• Able to work and communicate effectively in a “virtual office”.
• Bonus points for strong CSS and jQuery skills.

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From the event page

On the 13th of June Foulab will be holding a DIY Party at its 183 Chemin Bates location. From 2pm until 7pm workshops and presentations will be held. From 7pm until 12am chaos will ensue. Spread the word. More details to follow by June 2nd, including workshop and presentation schedules. Bring your own BEvERages.