We had last week StartupDrinks at Brutopia, an open gathering of entrepreneurs and people involved in tech startups.

The Drinks was organized both by MTW/TechEntreprise and Flow Ventures. Although it’s fair to say that the event was fairly promoted between Montréalers thanks to Twitter

Matthew Harrisson from BDO also came in and “sponsored” the event by buying food.

All in all, a great evening, with around 70 entrepreneurs who came for the event, many welcomed new faces. Next time, with spring in full bloom, we’ll get the terrace, and surely get more people coming in.

Thanks for everyone who attended, and do follow MTW to get updates on the next one (Apr 29th)

Embrase, a Montreal firm supporting early stage companies, has announced the 4th edition of Startup Camp Montreal 4.

It’s an evening where 5 chosen technology startups will get to pitch to investors. The formula is similar in principle to Capital Innovation, albeit attendance is more open; and previous startupcamps attracted filled the SAT room.

Be sure to check the event’s page for more details

This upcoming wednesday March 25th, technology entrepreneurs and everyone interested in startups are invited to Montreal StartupDrinks. The event is done in association with FlowVentures and TechEntreprise. It’s an informal but intense event, where you get to finally meet people behind all those twitter accounts and websites, and talk to them about your technology challenges, new viral marketing tactics, the life of an entrepreneur :-), and the opportunity to meet other Montréalers valuable for your venture.

The meetup will be at Brutopia, 1219 Crescent Street, from 5.30pm.

We haven’t had a Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast this month, so it’s an ideal meetup to hook up with others starting new technology ventures (or wanting to start new ones). If you have a passion for technology, if you are looking for opportunities in the technology space, if you are the sort of person who checks several times of day Hackers News and cie, then come over to share a drink with us. The past StartupDrinks have had a solid 50+ attendance of new entrepreneurs, programmers, investors, service providers and more.

Register on TechEntreprise if you want to come. Note: we need this to print tags for attendees.

Hint: If you are coming to the event, and want to start something special, do read the profile page of attendees.

Capital Innovation (see also for a (partial) list of people attending), a forum gathering entrepreneurs and funders, is also planned this wednesday, with high profile speakers such as Guy Kawasiki. If you are going to Capital Innovation, be sure to drop by Brutopia later in the day for a beer.

Seen below are shots from StartupDrinks in January

I dropped by (quickly) at the Tikifest 5 à 8 today.

The meetup gathered TikiWiki users, developers and the TikiWiki community, who gathered in Montreal for the Tikifest 2009 event.

The 5 à 8 was quite impressive, with a jolly crowd, a very good presentation by Marc Laporte, and the announcement of the beta version of Tikiwiki 3.0, which was produced during Tikifest.

So far, Tikiwiki has been downloaded 700.000 times, has 1000 options/features, and sees user contributions very frequently. Lots of good numbers; Marc Laporte wondered at one point at a php Québec codefest how come Drupal or Wordpress were ahead, but I think there’s nothing to be “jealous” about.

One thing which surprised me a lot, as an outsider, was how open the TikiWiki community was. There is a sense of welcome, openess, inclusive participation. It’s the sort of community any software project (or for that matter, a web startup who’d want to offer a “platform” and foster a development community) would want to take lessons from. Kudos to Marc, congrats to every member of Tikiwii.

We’ve missed the event for last month for FreeHackers, but we’re back with the event, with an exciting schedule.

From the event page @ techentreprise:

FreeHackers is a free, open event targeted at programmers, hackers and everyone interested in experimenting in new technologies.

Schedule:

• 12h30pm Sébastien Pierre, from datalicious, is going to present Sugar, a new programming language meant to replace Javascript for front-end user interfaces
• A workshop by Sébastien Pierre, covering Sugar, will follow for one hour or so

The event will follow the unconference format, which means attendees will be asked to participate, lend a hand at co-organizing, present, or organize a workshop. We should have a couple more workshops alongside Sébastien’s workshop.

For the remaining 3 or 4 hours, there will be free hacking. Anyone is free to code/hack/work on his/her project of choice.

Any technology, programming language, platform, software or hardware is welcomed. The focus is on community, experimentation, hacking etc. You can view it as an intense R&D session, an opportunity to network or exchange, visit the bolidea offices, or just be curious and see what’s hot in Montréal currently.

Organizers: Heri (MontrealTechWatch), Alok Mohindra (Arkalumen), Bolidea

• MontrealTechWatch covers Technology and Innovation in Montréal
• Arkalumen markets a new revolutionary LED light, much more efficient, programmable, and more powerful than any LED light available currently.
• Bolidea generously provides the space, with the goal to connect with local hackers, brilliant programmers and software Engineers

What’s been added in FreeHackers this time is a featured presentation (Sébastien’s) to begin the event with.

We’ve also added workshops to the event. This will be “organized” following the unconference format (wikipedia link), which means you should lend a hand, present, interact, organize a workshop, discuss. The event will be participant-driven, and will be as great as you want it to be. 

Free Hacking will follow. 

I believe this makes it an exciting schedule, and should be a great platform for experimentation and enabling new projects. 

As the previous edition, the event is done in close association with Bolidea, a startup incubator started by sucessful entrepreneurs. The event is hosted by Bolidea, on 4115 bd St-Laurent, suite 200.

Go over to TechEntreprise to register. Do leave a comment, here or at TechEntreprise, get in touch on twitter,

I don’t expect many MTW readers to choose this event over StartupDrinks, but for anyone who might be interested, this Wednesday at 7pm the IGDA and SAT (1195 St-Laurent) will be hosting Clint Hocking, Creative Director at Ubisoft. Admission is $5 at the door.

The talk he’ll be giving is titled “The Next Generation Player”, and is likely a slightly more polished version of the one he gave at the Game Design Expo in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago (techvibes has a summary). We can expect him to use numerous statistics and some informed prediction to take a look at how the next big change in games won’t necessarily be coming from new technology, but rather the demographic shift, as Generation Y replaces X in terms of both players and the creative leaders within the games industry. One thing to keep in mind is Hocking’s focus has always been the hardcore gamer, so he probably won’t even touch on the truly “next-gen” types of players — those people who play ARGs and games like Akoha.

Those interested can head over to the Montreal IGDA website for more detailed information, everyone else: Have fun at StartupDrinks!

The guys at FlowVentures had the “scoop” on this one: the February edition of StartupDrinks is this week.

For those late to the party, StartupDrinks are the de facto gathering of the Montreal Tech Community. Meet entrepreneurs, bloggers, investors, service providers, hackers, and pretty much involved in one way or another in startups.

This time, we’re coming back to Brutopia, which has been a hit last month, again from 5.30pm this upcoming wednesday 25th

Register for Montréal StartupDrinks on TechEntreprise

Brutopia is on 1215 Crescent Street. The bar brews its own beers, which is good for err… drinks. For those who were hungry, we also went to the nearby 3 Brasseurs on Ste-Catherine afterwards for an after-drinks.

Here are pictures from last month’s gathering. around 45 people came, which is extraordinary since we had a snow storm that day. I’m not expecting again more than 60 people coming this time.

Register on TechEntreprise

With Bolidea and Alok Mohindra (Arkalumen), we did a poll on how the last FreeHackers meetup went, to see how attendees felt about the event, the structure, if they liked it and what we could do to improve.

(see original report here)

You can see the public results of the poll here.

Here’s one thing: everyone who answered the poll had a positive feedback about the event. I won’t say rave reviews, but it’s obvious to see that everyone who was there liked FreeHackers.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect — from an organizer’s point of view, and from attendees, the most “uncomfortable” part was the scheduling. Or perhaps to better rephrase it, the lack of schedule. I did previously Blitzweekend, a weekend rally where teams would create and launch projects overnights, an unequivocal success; and I have to say that so far FreeHackers hasn’t reached that level of success.

We had to think about FreeHackers (hmm lots of work too I admit) and how it’s organized before doing other FreeHacker meetups, and this is one possible schedule:

• have someone present a new technology, programming language, framework or any other project he’s working 
• then have a workship where attendees could hack and try out the presented tool/framework
• this would last for a couple of hours; we’ll have also a couple of other workshops, suggested by other attendees, 
• the 2nd part of the meetup, a full 3 hours, would be left for free hacking

Did you know that dirty water kills more people than ALL forms of violence, including war? Twestival Montreal is one of 175 cities around the world hosting an event today, Thursday, February 12th to raise money for charity: water.

charity: water for Twestival from charity: water on Vimeo

Charity: water puts 100% of money raised towards building wells and provide access to safe, clean drinking water around the world. A $20 donation = 20 years of clean, safe drinking water to a person in Africa.

Twestival Montreal features some amazing raffle prizes for the event, including our grand prize of a trip to Vancouver courtesy of Air Canada and Opus Hotels. DJ Luv and DJ Maus will be sharing music duties, radio personality Winston McQuade is our MC, and we’ll have a photobooth set up for you to take home a souveninr of a great night.

Come down and join the fun while helping to provide access to clean, safe drinking water for people around the world.

Location: Suco Lounge in the Opus Hotel (2108 boul. Saint-Laurent)
Time: 18:00 to 23:00 (6pm to 11pm)
Tickets: $10 in advance (http://montreal.twestival.com) or $15 at the door
View Larger Map

You can follow the action on Twitter on TwestivalMTL, but we would love to see you come out and support such a great cause.

Special kudos goes out to the event sponsors for helping us put on a great event with special thanks to Aquabrass, Opus Hotels, Air Canada, Molson, Akoha and Aquaovo

Montreal’s Twestival is being organized by a great group of volunteers including,

This is a reminder, for those who haven’t seen the post on Ben Yoskovitz’s blog. The bi-monthly tech entrepreneur breakfast is next tuesday morning:

The Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast will be on Tuesday, February 10th @ 8am.

Here are the details:

• Who should attend? Anyone that’s into the tech and entrepreneur scenes in Montreal. That includes entrepreneurs, startup employees, angel investors, venture investors, service providers, students, etc. Every event sees new people, and hopefully the connections made turn into real value in the long-term.
• When and where? Tuesday, February 10th at Boccacinos on McGill St.(downtown) at 8am-10am.
• How do we connect? Stay connected using our Facebook Group.
• How do we RSVP? It would be great if you RSVP’d so we have a sense of how many people are coming. You can do so using the Facebook Event listing.
• Who is sponsoring? BDO Dunwoody!