Awesome initiative by Raymond Luk and Robin Ahn, who are launching StartupDrinks.ca

I’m amazed on how this picked up and there are now 10 Canadians cities joining the “movement”. I haven’t been able to be as active as I was before (which is an understatement, *cough*); and I’m glad to see Flow Ventures taking the lead and gathering tech entrepreneurs, and everyone interested in startups.

The Montréal StartupDrinks are of course due Wed 25th November, from 5.30pm @ Brutopia.

1215 Crescent Street, on Ste-Catherines Street.

For those who haven’t been yet, it’s an informal gathering, an opportunity to share, meet the Montreal tech entrepreneur community, to celebrate the launch of StartupDrinks.ca … and of course take a drink. Everyone’s invited, if you have a startup or not, if you’re a veteran or just someone considering launching a tech venture.

It’s the end of the month, and the monthly meetup for Montreal tech entrepreneurs is planned tomorrow wed 28th October, as you might have read on the Flow Ventures blog.

The event gathers Montreal entrepreneurs, developers and any Montrealer interested in startups. It’s been running for more than a year, and gathers every last wednesday of the month from 40 to 70 entrepreneurs. It’s a great (free) way to mingle and get to know what others are working on.

Subscribe to the event on techentreprise

Venue: Brutopia, 1215 Crescent St, Sth of Ste-Catherine

When: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 from 5:30pm

Event organization driven by Flow Ventures

Note: I won’t be able to personally come to this event

As you might have seen on FlowVentures, Montreal StartupDrinks are on tomorrow!

Register here

As the name suggests, the event gathers technology entrepreneurs, startuppers, developers, investors, as well as experts helping startups. We’re expecting 60 and more people for the evening, with always new entrepreneurs coming in to join the community.

The event starts at 5.30pm till the end of the evening.

The other good news is that StartupDrinks are spreading in other cities, after Toronto and Ottawa, there’s an edition also scheduled in Waterloo.

If you know about co-workers, students, engineers, marketers looking to launch or working on a startup, don’t hesitate to forward them the event.

Register for the event

StartupDrinks @ Helm

StartupDrinks during the last summer

It’s already the end of August, with another new installement of StartupDrinks Montreal. If you read MontrealTechWatch, you are warmly invited for a drink and (re)connect with other fellow Montreal techies next wednesday 26th.

It’s a parallel event, with the Toronto edition held at the same time at C’est What. For Montreal, we’re doing it at Brutopia on Crescent Street. Brutopia is a winner thanks to its selection of beers and location.

Read last month’s report if you haven’t been lately to one, or if it’s the first time.

We’re especially calling students to come over for the drinks. If you know anyone in university who is interested into technology entrepreneurship, we’d appreciate if you can extend the invitation to them. It doesn’t matter at what stage one is, and I believe making diverse minds meet would make StartupDrinks even more interesting. So forward the link to friends & students, suggest the meetup, put it on Facebook or your other social networking website.

We ask everyone to register on TechEntreprise, in order to print name tags. ALL EVENT DETAILS also available there

Co-organized by FlowVentures

With the invaluable of our friends at StartupNorth for the Toronto event and @davidcrow’s magic touch

Solutious, a company started by Delano Mandelbaum (@solutious), has released last monday Rudy version 0.9

Rudy allows simplified development and deployement on Amazon’s cloud computing platform by using a Ruby DSL (Domain Specific Language), allowing then quick and easy provisioning of custom environments on Amazon’s hosting platform.

The best use case for Rudy might be software development companies who’d use Amazon as a staging and a testing platform, since the servers are only needed for a fraction of time, compared to the “real” production environment, which might be at Amazon, or much more probably in a different hosting company.

Since an example is much better than long text descriptions, compare the following lines to the usual raw command lines a sys-admin has to type to provision instances on EC2:

 machines do
   env :stage do                   # Define an environment
     ami 'ami-e348af8a'            # Specify a machine image

     role :app do                  # Define a role
       disks do                    # Define EBS volumes
         path "/rudy/disk1" do
           size 100
           device "/dev/sdr"
         end
       end
     end

   end
 end

 routines do

   startup do                      # $ rudy startup
     adduser :rudy
     authorize :rudy               # Enable passwordless login

     disks do
       create "/rudy/disk1"        # Create and mount a volume 
     end                       

     remote :rudy do               # Run remote commands via SSH
       mkdir :p, "great"           # $ mkdir -p great
       mysql_init :start
       your_script 'arg1', 'arg2'  # Call your own scripts
     end
   end

 end

The user only has to provide the AMI, and of course the custom scripts to setup and launch its software stack.

I really like Rudy, since it illustrates what Amazon is best at: provisioning for a finite timelapse a custom infrastructure, for a specific job. Fire the rudy/ruby script, provision as many instances as you need, launch the job, get test results. It will bring shorter development cycles for software companies, and also an easier path to try out EC2.

Gigdoggy has unveiled a new version of its service last week, nicknamed Fanteraction™ release. It comes up with a new music blog, written remotely by a sound engineer, and of course the Fanteraction™ mobile platform, which allows music bands to interact with their fans during gigs.

Strangely, the blog post announcing the release is very sparse on the product’s features, namely on the why and the design of the system, and I’ll try then to decode what the creators of the service wanted behind the service.

I think it’s fair to assume that the creators were thinking about every music fan having mobile smartphones at hand when going to shows, at least in the near future. The music fan would click through pages to find out about upcoming songs and features, comment & tweet about performances. There’s also a tune downloading feature (which would be the monetization path).

The scenario above can be found easily in barcamps and startup conferences, with digital natives finding out very easily (and on their own) if there is any online information about the current speaker, only if you give them some kind of Internet connection. I am not sure how it plays out for the casual fan. Picture this in a standard Francophofolies show, where GigDoggy would be able to display an url to invite fans. Would fans & casual listeners tune in? Would they spend a few minutes to go through the information online? That’s a lot to ask imho, unless the band asks specifically for it.

That’s where the application seems lacking in polish. One can see the core of the product & the vision, but there’s still a lot to do in terms of presentation and working on edge cases.

I also understand it’s a new service, but I would have expected much more interaction and marketing for the service. I’d love to hear how this plays out vs other music portals and platforms such as myspace. I’d love to see a more dynamic homepage where you would see activity coming from bands. Also read: I’d love to love this service, only if it could give some material to give me the reason to.

While technically MontrealTechWatch focuses on Technology and Innovation in Montreal, it’s with pleasure that I hear what’s being done in Ottawa, especially by Scott Lake (see startupottawa), Scott Annan, or Aydin Mirzaee.

Scott Annan, who was a regular contributor to StartupOttawa, was nowhere to be found though for the past 6 months… which for an entrepreneur means that he was working non-stop on a new project, unveiled today. The application’s name is Network Hippo, and it’s a CRM focusing on quality and qualification of relationships.

The product is designed for consultants, individuals, as well as small businesses. In an earlier blog post, Scott Annan tells how rotten the CRM market is, with most providers selling unusable entreprise software. NetworkHippo’s bet is then to focus on contacts; with its unique algorithms, it will be then be able to show in a glance the deal flow as well highligting the best opportunities.

Unlike popular competitors like HighriseHQ, NetworkHippo offers email integration via imap (good!), free trials and free plans for individuals, plus also integration with social networks (for instance, showing the Twitter stream of your contact).

I am in no way qualified to state if NetworkHippo is going to revolutionize the CRM market. I have to say though that it brings fresh ideas, in a space where you always need a whole week to learn your way around a software… and then fight with the software every day after that. The clean user interface, the focus on usability, great prices, and the team’s experience (it’s the version 2 after dexapp) gives it winning points and get them quickly customers.

Congrats to the whole team at Mercury Grove!

Like many tech people in Montreal, Ian Rae (@ianrae) went through Coradiant in the early 2000’s, before eventually starting his own business. He now runs a successful company which I’d describe as the “Jaguar of web hosting companies”. It might not be affordable for all companies, but it does offer top of the line expertise and service that would be hard to find in more “mainstream” companies like Rackspace.

Ian Rae has had many ideas, and one of them was to get technology entrepreneurs and companies together in a space. I actually met him 2 years ago, and my immediate answer was that he wasn’t the first one to think about this, and the hardest thing was covering operational expenses and marketing, like Mark McQueen from the Wellington Fund pointed out in an earlier MTW post.

Unlike many in Montreal tech scene, who make much more noise than Ian Rae on starting incubators and the like, it seems actually Ian Rae got things starting off the ground, quietly. He now has a large space, in a University Street building. The office is of course Syntenic’s headquarters, with its staff setting up servers hardware and also Syntenic daily operations, but it also is home for several Montreal startups, a few funded by MSU, plus also companies where Ian is an active contributor, and also consulting companies providing key advice to startups.

Not shown in the pictures are the variety of office spaces being occupied by the various Montreal startups.

If you see this, it’s immediate to conclude that it’s a de-facto startup incubator, with all the advantages (proximity of entrepreneurs, people focusing on innovation, technology-oriented allowing quick development, having a central space for discussion and meetings), and none of the disadvantages (since everything has been managed very informally so far, with tech companies coming in by word of mouth). There’s also no marketing at all done, and it’s easy to see the national & international potential of such a place, plus the immediate benefits for any entrepreneur who’d move in there.

Ian Rae says he doesn’t want to compete at all with projects like Station C ; he’d just want to “let’s get things working right now, we’ll see how things go in 90 days…”. Seeing the success so far, I’m asking myself questions if the entire community wouldn’t be better after all to support that space, and see if it’s possible to present it as the main hub for Technology in Montreal … although it probably needs a clear plan and clear intentions before being presented as such.

Raymond Luk (@rayluk) from FlowVentures planned to be in Toronto this week for DemoCamp Toronto ed. 21; thus was born the idea of having Toronto StartupDrinks, in the same evening as the one in Montreal.

It’s a great idea; we’ve been running StartupDrinks in Montreal for well over a year, with every time a large audience. Actually, having one just after a democamp makes even more sense. It’s awesome to have David Crow (@davidcrow) and everyone from the Toronto tech startup community get together for those informal, simple, but in a way, so crucial for the life of a community.

For the Montreal edition, I was surprised to see many new faces, many entrepreneurs, consultants, business and marketing folks, as well as a strong group of technology people. Lots of people talking, getting to know each other, and I’ve seen a few trying to recruit actively talent for new ventures.

Hats off to Robin Ahn (@RobinBirdSounds) who is doing a fabulous work

For those who were there, you can see again the list of attendees here, and (re)connect with them.

See pictures on Flickr

At last week’s OSCON conference event, Evan Prodroumou won an award from Google and O’Reilly Media for his work on identi.ca and the laconi.ca platform.

OSCON is by far the conference with the biggest profile in the year; and it’s a statement well-deserved to Evan’s magnificent work on the laconi.ca platform, which has now reached 7.000.000+ “dents” and 60.000 users.

Google and O’Reilly Media, the co-organizers of the conference awarded Evan, as well as other open source/Free Software leaders, such as the people behind Drizzle, PostgreSQL, etc. The award is given to individuals who innovated in open source and lead by excellence

Evan can be proud of himself; he’s in many ways a model for entrepreneurs and hackers alike, proving that all you need is a laptop and a spot in a co-working space somewhere in the world (ok that was maybe stretching it a little bit, but not so far from the truth…)