Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association is planning their annual conference here in Montreal just at the end of the month, with Chris Arsenault (iNovia Capital) the chairman of the event . This year’s theme is “The face of change”, with panels, conferences, sessions about the topic, as well as dinners and cocktails, plus the obligatory golf event. An “Entrepreneur of the Year” award will also be given this year.

This is a high-profile event where VCs from all around the country will get to opportunity to meet, connect and network. I’ve seen the sessions and the program, and while a couple of them have compelling descriptions, I am sure most of the value of this conference for new & experienced VCs wouldn’t be those sessions but the opportunity to mingle with others, share stories and more, in their own manner; in the same way that we are doing the Tech Entrepreneur Breakfasts or StartupDrinks, with our own jargon, habits and other codes.

It’s great to see this coming to Montréal, if I spot something good, I’ll report it back to you; and if you are an investor, bookmark the page.

It seems everyone agreed to schedule their events this week, and it’s the busiest week this year so far in Montréal. Here it is:

• MobileMondayMontreal, today from 5.30pm at la SAT, 1195 bvd St-Laurent, for people involved in the mobile industry.
• Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast, tomorrow from 9am, at Bistro ETC, 1291 bvd Mont-Royal Est, for technology entrepreneurs and anyone interested in technology entrepreneurship,
• 4th edition of Webcom Montreal, wednesday, 999 rue Université, a web conference (registration required),
• Founders&Funders, wednesday evening, a select dinner for startup founders and for VCs and angels, invitation only,
• StartupCampMontreal, thursday from 6pm at la SAT, 1195 bvd St-Laurent, a camp for technology startups,
• Codefest, by the php Quebec folks, starting from friday at 6pm up until sunday, Pub sans génie, École de Technologie Supérieure, for developers wanting to work together on a project

I know there was talks about a BarCamp originally scheduled this week, although this was fortunaltey (unfortunately ?) pushed back to an undefined future date.

So we’ve got here all sorts of events, from the pure networking, to the one “just for developers”, from the least informal to the select ones. If you’ve got free time this week and interested to see what initiatives are cooking up in Montreal, I am sure you’ll find one that interested

Update: Nicolas Cossette also adds:

• Journée infopresse on Search Engines, SEO/SMO (wednesday, ex-centris, registration required);
• Yulbiz (mardi soir);
• WebCamp (wednesday, a camp during webcom);
• Yultour (mercredi soir)

The 2nd edition of StartupCampMontreal is due this upcoming thursday at la SAT, May 15th, from 6.00pm.

The event is dedicated to technology startups, the main feature being 5 new startups pitching the crowd about their product and business plans. You can view here a report about the first edition. This time, we will have:

• camwii is an easy-to-use screensharing application.
• LoyaltyMatch, a new website that allows trading of loyalty points, outside of the normal program and offers setup by companies. This is one of those services where you’d say why didn’t i think about this.
• Healthivate allows consumers to purchase high-quality health services on a global scale. Not sure if there is anything behind this apart from the concept.
• Startyourtube allows anyone to create their own youtube video website, around a community (see last post)
• Vencorps wants to do crowdsourced funding, which would be a revolution

The guys from Embrase are also bringing in Dan Mothershill and Austin Hill as keynote speakers. From what I saw last time, there was also lots of networking going on and also a section for other startups who want to present a demo, making startupcamp an unmissable event for this week.

Codefest is a 3-day event due next week, from May 16th to May 18th. The event’s tagline is “2 days to optimize and improve your favorite free / Open Source project”.

I have been to the last codefest and here is a glimpse of the event:

The last Codefest gathered consultants, programmers from various IT companies, students, as well as various Free Software advocates. There isn’t really a definitive way to qualify those who attended the event, I’d just say that most were curious on building new tools and trying out new things. In this regard, Codefest is reminiscent of Blitzweekend, although it doesn’t put a focus on “business issues”. It also puts more focus on the community aspect; as there are no “teams”, projects are shared informally. Another way to put it is that Blitzweekend is focused on the end-result, while Codefest is focused on the coding and work-sharing process.

While there was a majority of php developers at the last event, the upcoming codefest is presented as open to other languages and projects (drupal, typo3, tikiwiki, python, ruby etc.). The event is also opened to contributions by the community and sponsors — if you are a company looking for talented developers, it’s a great way to reach them.

This looks like a great event that should be a blast, if you are a developer and want to hone your skills. Or you could just want to meet similar-minded people.

What: Codefest, a weekend-long coding session
When: May 16th, May 17th, May 18th
Where: Pub sans génie, Ecole de technologie supérieure

When Tanya McGinnity first told me about her idea, I was thrilled. Who wouldn’t be? The premise is simple: find a girl geek to speak about an exciting project, hunt down a restaurant that will host a group dinner, and let people mix.

Now simple as that sounds, it isn’t easy to organize. So after the first Montreal Girl Geek Dinner ended in a resounding success, Tanya’s been working hard to host one a month.

There have been talks ranging from starting your own business to hacking on open source software to innovative computer games. Because Montreal is fast becoming an exciting place for technology, there’s no surprise that it’s full of talented geeky women.

Recently, I found a chance to interrupt her busy schedule to ask her a few questions.

Tanya McGinnity
Originally uploaded by Simon Law.

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m a transplanted Maritimer who, due to cod-overfishing, needed to find a new job. So I landed a gig with Matrox Graphics way back in the pre-bubble days.

After the bubble burst, I got into digital marketing and project management with some cool web firms here in Montreal. Now I am currently freelancing with ihaveanidea.org as their Director of Social Medification and webology.

How did Girl Geek Dinners get started?

Montreal Girl Geek Dinners are an offshoot of the London Girl Geek Dinners, started by the awesome Sarah Blow who also runs the Girly Geekdom blog which I contribute to (albeit sporadically!)

What inspired you to start Girl Geek Dinners in Montreal?

Montreal is an incredible city and there are so many interesting and innovative things going on in all sectors—the music scene, startups, film, arts and so on. As a tech geek by trade, I would attend tech events and see that there weren’t too many girls in the crowd. I came across a video clip from one of the Barcamp events where Martine Pagé asked the crowd “Where are the Women?” and I felt like maybe there was something to be explored in creating some smaller scale mixers where girls could hone their presentation skills and meet other people who are as jazzed about being geeky.

Who shows up?

Mainly girls, but we do get quite a few guy geeks too. Most people who attend are invited by someone who has attended a previous event and many others are new Montrealers who are looking to meet new people. There have only been four dinners, so we are a new group but we’re looking to grow and evolve.

What happens at each event?

We eat. We talk. We network. We exchange business cards. A featured speaker gives a presentation on a topic. Then dessert and the cheque. So far, we’ve had dinners featuring Heather Kelley, Angela Byron, Aleece Germano, Kim Vallee and Bronwen Zande.

Heather
by Simon

Angie
by Simon

Aleece
by Janina

Kim
by Simon

Bronwen
by Simon

What topics are you looking for?

Absolutely anything, as long as you are geeky about it. There are plans to do sessions on time-management, comics, nutrition, rock-bands, developing negotiating skills, crafts, as well as some “surprises” in the works.

How can people get involved?

Visit the blog or our Facebook group for more information.

I’m looking for speakers, restaurant suggestions, translators, event planners, help with promotion and anything else that could help this group evolve and meet everyone’s needs. It takes a village to grow a nation of geeks.

Special article by Simon Law.
Photographs by Janina Szkut and Simon Law,
used under Creative Commons licenses.

There were a half-dozen keynote speeches yesterday, sandwiched between the day’s seminars, exhibits, and the sideshows of the unconference, and the evening’s libations and mixers around the offices of San Francisco notables.

Tim O’Reilly went on stage to repeat what Bob Metcalfe and others were saying over 12 years ago, that the network is really the computer. Tacked on were two side concepts. The first idea is an invitation to tackle large common-good projects so that even failing is contributive. The second is an interesting take on the market’s valuation of centralization (Facebook, Google, etc.) even as Web 2.0 is pulling the web towards decentralization (Open APIs, shared contexts, etc.). The end-result is that market-valued centralization will happen through interoperability. The unstated conclusions are interesting though; we can’t value or buy a share in inter-operating companies, unless through a mutual fund (assuming the companies are public) or a Yahoo-style consolidation (if not). Is centralization dressed in new clothes still the same old successful maid of yore ?

The most expected talk of the day was the announcement of Microsoft Live Mesh, a long-haul project built and hyped under the supervision of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Once you take all of the buzzwords about collaboration and data synchronization out, you essentially get, as far as I can tell, a RSS-enabled shared folder with a public changelog and a programmable API. The first application of Live Mesh is one in which multiple devices can share preference and settings files (bookmarks, contacts, personal Windows settings, the kind of thing you get for a decreasing premium on certain USB keys) so that they are all using the same basic data (as long as they run Windows, although Microsoft promised wider support to a snickering audience). They claim over a hundred developers were assigned to work on this for two years. Taking into account the complexity of building shared-storage systems (instead of, say, collaborating with Amazon or acquiring the likes of Nirvanix), I wonder what the other 90 were doing.

By far the most interesting talk of the evening was a live stage interview with Max Levchin (PayPal, Slide). If you are running low on smart, well-articulated, incisive content, you can always count on Levchin to deliver. Max covered his early attempts at start-ups (4 of them until he found success with PayPal), but focused especially on the social entertainment software that is the core of Slide’s applet business. He went at length exploring the relationship between social actions and advertisers as a non-abrasive promotional vehicle; witness, for example, the addition of a wildly popular pregnancy test to be thrown at others in SuperPoke to coincide with the release of the movie Juno. He covered new ways to segment the market based on behavioral commonalities rather than demographics, an idea that the market analysts at an earlier Consumer 2.0 panel hinted at. Levchin then offered an interesting distinction between applets and traditional software: that applets draw on users’ wish to participate through one destination, made valuable through its character and popularity, unlike traditional applications which are meant to be chosen not for their intrinsic identity but rather for the predominance of certain features and qualities differentiating them from the feature lists of others; that this is what makes widget companies so valuable. Interspersed in the talk was a fourth idea on the lifecycle-prolonging value of widgets as the novelty of social networks erode. Good stuff.

Greetings from very chilly San Francisco where the 2nd edition of the SF Web 2.0 Expo, organized by O’Reilly and Techweb, is going strong. Yesterday was the kick-off to the geeky celebration of all things surrounding social computing, with a full-day of seminars and demos for those willing to shell out a few extra bucks. Attendees could choose from a whopping 14 3-hour workshops during the day. The most promising of the morning track was a presentation by Vanessa Fox (the lady who organized and promoted Google Webmaster Central) and Nathan Buggia (Program Manager for Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center) on “SEO-friendly web application design”: tons of tips and techniques to help search engines crawl, understand and index web applications and applets, as well as a list of dangerous pitfalls to avoid. There are pages and pages of great ideas taken out of this workshop, and you can get it all for free off of the private website janeandrobot.com (an already very valuable resource to be further enriched in the near future based on workshop participant questions).

The afternoon seminar was a promising one on making innovation happen on time. The fact that it was presented by an ex-Microsoftie is somewhat ironic (as it would be if the topic had covered bug-free code or open-source), but Scott Berkun has clearly learned from the depths of the trenches and came up with a toolbox of ideas and concepts useful for firing up innovative thought processes in teams larger than an entrepreneur and a few dedicated buddies (if you lead Facebook or a corporate MIS dev team, this one was for you; for startups the material beyond idea generation was academic). The “on time” part was a trifle thin on details (it was delivered in the last 20 minutes) and basically summed up to three ideas: account for weekends and natural downtimes when planning schedules, cut features before you get late on delivery instead of after, and build in a scheduling/design/experimentation dry-run stage before the start of any project to see how your expectations about tasks and times gel together.

The evening entertainment was an eye-opener. Held in Jamie Zawinski’s technodive-ish DNA Lounge, Ignite SF was a fast-paced Demo-like presentation platform where selected speakers could come and entertain the audience for 5 minutes on a topic of their choice; they were awarded 20 slides of presentation and usually not enough time to cover them all. Topics ranged from startups’ relationships to user commentary (metblogs.com), one lady’s particular love for giant Cloverdale-like monsters, Salim Ismail’s experiment with explaining startup growth through Pirsig-like metaphysics, Christian Crumlish’s hilarious take on social anti-patterns (the bit on how to send automated friend-plea rejection notices from social networks was priceless), an exploration of the open SMS-accessible digital signage around DNA lounge, and a few oddball speeches on successful interviews, the leveraging of your user base, and search engine optimization. The event was a bit like StartUpCamp but with more presenters and no experts, a lot less presentation time than at BarCamp, and a whole lot of hecklers droned out by the chatty crowd whose discussions were lighted up by the variety of topics at hand. This is great way to get to know local techies and entrepreneurs through a wide variety of quirky angles. It is also very fun — we should have this back home.

As posted earlier, we are planning a startupdrinks next week, wednesday late afternoon, at Café Santos, 191 St-Paul Street, in the old port. The nearest metro station is Square Victoria.

Here is a description of the startupdrinks concept:

A simple concept: startup culture in cities around the world gathers around a bar to have a pint and discuss what they are working on, what they need help with and what they can do for each other.

Basically, the idea is that if you are involved in a startup or looking to get into a tech startup, come have a drink, meet new people and discuss startups. no rules, no keynotes, no schedules, nothing fancy, just some plain good old drinks, great people, hopefully good weather, hopefully awesome startups to talk about :-)

The event is shaped up together by Alok Chowdhury (fluide media group / custom content ) as a continuation of our last meetup at laika, but this is no way related to MTW, although if you talk to me, chances are that I’ll only talk about that.

If you are interested, please leave a comment now so that we can have an idea who is coming, to organize with the café.

When: Wednesday Apr 30th from 5pm to … late in the evening
Where: Café Santos, 191 St. Paul St.
What: drink and discuss openly about startups and your projects.

Austin Hill and Patrick Lauzon are hosting the 2nd Founders&Funders dinner. It’s scheduled May 14th, with 100 attendees planned, with each ticket costing $100.

A Founders and funders dinner gathers startup founders, venture capitalists, angel investors with the objective of meeting new business partners, or who knows, initiate an investment between an entrepreneur and an investor.

For the first event, I worked on the web2.0 map of Montréal, an idea which was started off by Austin Hill. Here are my thoughts about the first event, although strictly speaking, it’s not a true event report, but more an assessement of the event’s contribution to the startup scene in Montreal. It was an undeniable success, an event where every major actor of the startup scene should aspire to go to.

Unlike the open source technology events, where anyone and their friends can “join the party”, Founders & Funders dinners are private events, with attendees screened by the organizers. You will have chances to attend it if you are starting a solid startup/technology company. I guess you can think of it as an upscale Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast; without service providers, with definetely more VCs — the sort you would never meet in an informal setting; and where every other person is either a CEO, CTO, a venture partner or an entrepreneur in residence.

Unlike the previous event though, there is a registration form if you think you apply.
This is an effort to open up the event. In addition, they will also host an open after-hour cocktail for those who won’t make it to the dinner:

Given the interest we received after the first event and the fact that we won’t be able to invite everyone who has expressed interest to the dinner. As a result we are also going to be hosting an after dinner open cocktail networking (A nice roof top terrace party). The networking event will cost $20 and include two drink tickets.

The fourth Interfaces Montréal demo-conference of 2008, New Frontiers in Gaming, will be held next Tuesday, April 8th, at the SAT. The theme of the conference appears to be an exploration of the new platforms and gameplay that are changing the way we interact with and experience video games.

Since it is a “demo-conference” it makes sense for the speakers to use their own games for demonstrative purposes, but I hope that doesn’t limit the scope of their talks. For example, Reid Schneider, Senior Producer at EA, will be speaking about co-operative play in the company’s upcoming game Army of Two. I don’t expect, however, that he will talk about how Rock Band/Guitar Hero has changed the nature of co-operative gaming, or attempt to explain how the very interesting and recent idea of shared singleplayer gaming fits into our traditional perception of co-op.

In any case, it should be an interesting night with some insight into the ideas behind the latest games coming out of Montreal studios. If that kind of thing doesn’t interest you then you still might want to consider attending for Bart Simon’s more academically focused talk titled “The Material Imaginary of the Wii: Bodies, Spaces and the not-at-all Virtually Real.”

A full list of speakers and more information can, as usual, be found on the Interfaces Montréal website. Tickets are $15 if bought in advance or $20 at the door. $10 for students.

Tuesday, April 8th
5:30PM-9:30PM
SAT - 1195 Saint-Laurent boulevard