Montreal Tech Watch

Ostrich, launched just a week ago, got one of the largest and comprehensive media coverage … well for a Montreal-based product that is. It has been covered on most Apple-focused and tech blogs, got noticed by John Gruber, and is now today featured on extensions.apple.com

This page is brand-new and has just been published this morning, featuring the diversity of available Safari extensions, and getting Safari in the same game as Firefox in terms of extensibility and as a browser for everyday and work use. Mac, Windows and also potentially new iPad and iPhone4 users are going to get those new extensions to enhance their browsing experience.

In less than a week, Jérôme Gravel-Niquet went from 1 user to more than 5000 users, an achievement few other Montreal startups achieved, perhaps just to the exception of statusnet. The exposure wasn’t painless though, as he has been working around the clock optimizing the server hosting the application, and also improving performance of Ostrich. Heroku, an Amazon EC2-based cloud service wasn’t fast and powerful enough to host the application, and he had to move to an iWeb dedicated server, and just upgraded again to a Xeon 12GB server, to serve all the additional users.

What next? Hopefully, Jerome can focus more on product design and development instead of sys-admin stuff. He tells he’d probably need funding to dedicate himself to Ostrich, and try to make a full product.

Can’t wait to see what’s next for OstrichApp. Go try it out if you haven’t yet!