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. 

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.

Come all to StartupDrinks today. It’s FREE and very simple: register here, come at Brutopia today, get a beer, meet people launching startups, share experiences (lessons, technology, hacking, or marketing, whatever you fancy) all in good, informal company.

Led by our dear friends Arach Tchoupani and Yannick Gingras, MontrealPython is today at La Banque, 175 Roy Est.

MontrealPython7:

Here is our schedule for the evening:

• 18h00: Opening
• 18h20: Announcements
• 18h30: Flash presentations
• 19h00: Break
• 19h20: Main presentation

Our main presenter Olivier Bélanger on “Ounk, un environnement de scripting musical”.

What: The de-facto monthly meetup for Montreal Entrepreneurs, Technologists. Meet hackers, venture capitalists, angel investors, startup experts. It’s an informal, get-together, free, fun event where you can discover new projects, maybe find co-founders, maybe find resources for your next startup.

It’s also the last StartupDrinks at Brutopia, folks!

Who More than 70 people are expected, from the greater montreal area. Organizers are Flow Ventures and TechEntreprise, in the person of Raymond Luk and Robin Ahn and heri

When: Last wednesday of May, from 5.30pm

Where: Brutopia, 1219 Crescent Street, Montreal. We do have the terracce + the basement. Corner Ste-Catherine, Metro station Guy Concordia

How:

1. Register on TechEntreprise.
2. Show up and get a drink
3. Talk about your tech projects and startups

php Québec organized Codefest 3.0, a 3 day event where programmers are invited to work on their open source project, share their work.

This time, it was sponsored by Microsoft Canada (their office in Toronto), and was held at a Helm Café, on Bernard Street.

There’s something striking seeing 20 or so php programmers each in front of a laptop, all in corner of a trendy bar.

The event was “organized” in a very free-form way, similar to FreeHackers, but maybe with even less focus on having “results”. A few of the ingredients:

• it’s cool to have free food and beer (!)
• great idea to gather everyone in the same space, lots of energy. I met a few students, from a computer engineering school I didn’t know about (!!), and it seems there are lots to be done with them in the future. Also new ideas discussed about future direction of TechEntreprise 
• a conference/presentation was held to present tests suites for php, etc.
• I noticed lots of openess: there was a guy who will be doing Google’s Summer of Code, on Asterisk. A couple of people were also doing standard Java work, and also ruby (that’s me and Gregory)

Pics from the demo, test suites in php



MTW Pictures

Thanks to everyone who went to StartupDrinks, we had a good turnout (about 70-80), and as usual great conversations, with people staying up to 10pm and then afterwards to the (usual) late night restaurant dinner nearby.

I was planning to discuss about Blitzweekend and also the ongoing talks about having a digital and physical tech space, but it turns out a cocktail is not at all the way to get this started. It’s all about one-to-one conversations, meeting lots of people from the community around a drink, in an informal way, and maybe planning to see a few of them afterwards in a more appropriate setting.

Here are pictures I took, at around 9.30pm, with slightly less people than around 6 or 7pm

(see them here)

If you want to see who came to the event, see the event page

There are 6 “big” upcoming tech events in Montreal this upcoming week, one of the busiest weeks in recent times. Either you’re in marketing, in development, in social media, or into startups, there’s an event for you this week to meetup.

A group of programmers and developers from the SAT are doing Code Forum monday 4th. It’s an open event for all Montréalers, with the event format modeled after unconference principles.

Felipe Coimbra, the instigator behind TwtApps, is doing a NewTech meetup this upcoming Tuesday.

NewTech meetups are opportunities for startups and new projects to showcase a new piece of software or a product.

There’s a potential problem with the venue, and Felipe is looking for a space to replace Laika. If someone has a potential solution, do contact him.

Wednesday evening, Yulblog gathers Montreal bloggers in its first wednesdays meetup in may

StartupCampMontreal edition 4 is Thursday at the SAT. So far, StartupCamps are the events which gathers the most tech people in Montreal, with an attendance well beyond 300, for an evening of presentations and pitches by 5 startups. Selected startups to pitch the audience are Control Yourself, SiteZoogle, PraizedMedia, Klaxa, Twtapps.

Sylvain Carle is also doing an early session, with a more open format.

In the same day, php Québec is also holding a very interesting evening for php programmers: Rencontre php Québec at ETS. 1 presentation about the Facebook API, and 1 presentation about Atomik, an easy framework.

Also, of interest: Charles Sirois (TeleSystem, Enablis) and Robert Calderisi (World Bank) will present their views on entrepreneurship & africa at a Fraser Institute event, on May 7th.

Codefest is a weekend-long event targeted at php programmers, but also any other developers programming in other languages, planned from May 1st to May3rd. Come over if you want to meet other developers, and co-work on current & open source projects

Event website

Here is a report of a previous Codefest

Another report

Proposed Projects in 3.0:

• MediaWiki
• Drupal
• WordPress
• TikiWiki CMS/Groupware
• BeWelcome
• Habari
• Anne G. wikigraphe
• PHP Unit Tests
• PHP Quebec Employment section
• Laconica sera présent (ideas)
• sux0r.org
• Validation Testing Framework
• Your project! (Contact us contact@codefest.ws)

As a sidenote, Evan Prodromou worked on the first lines of identi.ca at Codefest 2.0. Organizers are also looking for additional sponsors.

There’s an “analysis” on TechCrunch on the StartupWeekend series, and the general conclusion is that it failed.

Since we’ve done Blitzweekend and there are discussions on holding another one, I have to take issue.

I don’t think StartupWeekends (or Blitzweekend) claimed at one point or another to build companies for every team that participates, in the same way that Y combinator, TechStars or Bolidea ambitions to.

They should be seen as a educational opportunity, and an opportunity to jump-start a new idea and team, get up to speed with what you’ve got to know when launching a new technology project, etc.

If at one point, a quarter of the participating teams got actually to get investment $ and/or launch a product, then that’s really more than everyone should expect.

We’ve had students, “9-to-5ers”, people in existing companies and startups, entrepreneurs, open-minded people who were curious in trying things out at Blitzweekend, and who would have never the opportunity to try out otherwise what would be the atmospehere and intensity when creating a product. That’s what Blitzweekend has to offer, and for the best and most motivated of them, it will be the first step for a company. Our role in this was to create the most favourable environment and support ecosystem for them to flourish and if possible, orient in the right direction.

Also, another interesting post related to this is John Stokes at Montrealstartup “Seedcamp mentoring“. There’s one interesting line co-opetition, which is also what one of first objectives.

So I have to conclude that TechCrunch doesn’t know what they are talking about or they haven’t actually participated in any StartupWeekend event at all, and it’s sad since they have titled the post “Analysis”

PS: And there’s StartupDrinks this afternoon from 5.30pm at Brutopia.