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!

StartupDrinks is this upcoming Wednesday! If you read this blog, you should seriously consider come up and share a drink with us.

We had more than 50 people at the last startupdrinks, and I expect more than 70 people for this first meetup of the Montréal tech community.

What: StartupDrinks is an informal event where you’re invited to take a drink and talk with other people interested in technology startups. StartupDrinks is organized by both MTW / TechEntreprise and FlowVentures
Where: Brutopia bar, 1219 Crescent Street, south of Ste-Catherines. Thanks to Felipe Coimbra and Robin Ahn from FlowVentures for the venue.
When: Wednesday Jan 28th, from 5.30pm
Who: Everyone interested in building and help build technology companies. Tech entrepreneurs, web developers, investors, consultants & experts are welcomed.
How: Sign up on TechEntreprise if you are planning to come [Note: This is required]

See below pictures of the last StartupDrinks:

See also Robin’s post at flowventures’s blog on StartupDrinks.

The second FreeHackers event was held last week, and like the first meetup, it was a success. 

If you are new to the concept, do read this post, which is a report about the first FreeHackers event. Compared to the first one, we had the same setup at Bolidea, the same date (the second saturday of the month), and practically the same schedule. 

We did have more people though. This time, we had 3 people from foulab, the new hackerspace in Montréal, who were curious about the concept and what exactly was happening at the event. Also the team from Arkalumen were there, plus coders and hackers from the previous meetup. Others came in, but later, such as Evan Prodroumou from identi.ca

The event was hosted by Bolidea, a new technology incubator founded by successful entrepreneurs aiming to bring solutions to problems, and working closely with tech and biz entrepreneurs.

I’ve got to say thanks to Raphaël, and most importantly Magda from Bolidea, who hosted wonderfully the event, and prepared food & drinks for everyone. Their support means a lot, and without them, the event wouldn’t have been possible — and also adding to the fact that I couldn’t unfortunately spend all the time I wanted to organize and wrap up the January meetup. Bolidea has just published about the January FreeHackers.

Raphaël is one of the entrepreneurs working with Bolidea. He was continuing to work in the offices that saturday, and he told us his story and relationship with Bolidea.

Bolidea offices. They have a simple, yet sophisticated setup which I love

How awesome is it to have this bike in your main entrance?

Felipe Coimbra discusses with hackers about double inputs

Foulab members, and also Pierre Phaneuf.

One of the tables became the main focal point of the meetup. You can see laptops everywhere. The Internet dropped 2 times during the event — most probably due to the unusual high usage.

There was a TikiWiki hacking session in another section of Bolidea, with Louis-Philipe Huberdau, and Marc Laporte.

It’s a little bit humbling and magical to have all of these developers and hackers at that place. One discussion at one point was about designing an input system that would allow the use of 2 mice in Adobe Photoshop. The discussion evolved around electronics, ports programming, and overriding of drivers.

One thing we are working on for the next events is the format of the event. For the past 2 events, it was largely free-form, with my goal of emulating Blitzweekend. However, we might use more guided schedules for the next ones, such as having presentations + workshops on a given subject. Alok Mohindra is going to craft a schedule for the third meetup, and I’m looking forward to see how it would unfold at the next event. If you have ideas or thoughts about this event, do not hesitate!

See the pictures at Flickr

CUSEC 2009, the best software engineering conference in Montreal, is due tomorrow.

World-renowned software engineers and programmers (RMS, someone?) are scheduled for the conference. 

See also here [techentreprise] and official website.

CUSEC (the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference) is referred to by many as the gathering of the future of Software Engineering. Students who are passionate about Software Engineering, from across Canada and diverse concentrations, gather under one roof for three full days to learn from the worlds most famous and sought after software engineering speakers, researchers and professionals.

CUSEC is not just about the presentations though. The conference gives you the opportunity to meet others who share your passion. To see what your peers are up to and learning at their schools. CUSEC gives you the opportunity to have open conversations with many of the authors of the books you read as well as the people you read and hear about in school. Allowing you to learn directly from the people you look up to. And don’t forget, we also have a growing career fair that might be of interest to you.

• Dan Ingalls, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, is best known for his work on the Smalltalk programming environment, which revolutionized computing for both users and developers through human-computer interaction, the object-oriented paradigm, and development in integrated environments. He also revolutionized graphics with BitBlt and its variations with rotation and antialiasing. For his noteworthy contributions, he has received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award and the ACM Software System Award. His most recent work takes these ideas to the World Wide Web through Sun Lab’s Lively Kernel Project.
• Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system (see www.gnu.org) in 1984. GNU is free software: everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates.
• Avi Bryant is the co-founder of Dabble DB, a venture-backed startup based in Vancouver, BC. He’s also the creator of the Seaside web framework, and has given keynotes at RailsConf, Smalltalk Solutions, and elsewhere about his unusual - some say heretical - approaches to web development.
• Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to friends. Leah is the lead developer for the site and spends most of her time working on feature development, fixing bugs, scaling the site, and maintaining the API. She’s a recent computer science graduate from the University of Minnesota and enjoys the challenge of developing a web application from scratch. Leah will be speaking about the career choices for recent computer science university graduates.

Francis Hwang is a writer, artist and software engineer. An active member of the Ruby community, he founded Ruby-NYC in 2003, helps organize the annual Gotham Ruby Conference, and is currently a software engineer at Diversion Media. His writing on technology and culture has appeared in Spin, Wired, ArtByte, and FEED Magazine. His artwork has received press coverage in Wired News, Art in America, and Liberátion (France).

Here’s an event at Station-C this upcoming thursday:

Scott Annan and Scott Lake, two startup entrepreneurs from Ottawa are doing a roadtrip to co-working spaces in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to connect with local startup communities and share their story about a new method of open and collaborative development to create dex, their recently launched personal and social CRM system. Scott Annan is a founder at Mercury Grove. Scott Lake is a co-founder of Shopify.com and ThinkSM. They also both write for StartupOttawa.com.

You can sign up for the event here.

A few “community updates” that I overlooked in previous posts:

• There’s a discussion on hacker news about colektivo, a new crowdsourced fund for entrepreneurs and businesses [disclosure: I'm involved in this]
• there’s a php Québec workshop January 8th, with Philipe Gamache who will demo symfony, and then a Q&A session for the upcoming php Québec Conference 2009
• there seems to be another “hackers” event, called Montreal.rb, for rubyist. Not sure if there’s one in January and where exactly. See montrealonrails for updates
• Do take the time to vote for akoha on the crunchies. Akoha has been nominated for “Most Likely to make the world a better place”. Thanks for the votes! Link to vote

For those who want to get into the loop, here’s the line-up of technology events in Montréal:

• FreeHackers Montréal is for developers, technology hackers. It’s a meetup planned for Saturday afternoon next week, 10th January, from 12.30pm. It’s organized by me with Bolidea hosting the event. All developers of all horizons are warmly invited to experimnent, dicuss, hack and meet other techies in Montréal. 
• Montréal New TechMeetup is planned Tuesday 13th January, from 6.30pm. It’s organized by Felipe Coimbra, with startups and entrepreneurs demoing their startups and business ideas. There’s also networking after (&before) the event. 
• Cofounders Monday is planned Monday January 19th. It’s a networking event aimed for entrepreneurs & startup co-founders who wish to launch a startup. It’s organized by Felipe, more details avalaible on the meetup.com group
• Montréal StartupDrinks is planned the last Wednesday of the month, which is then 21st of January. It’s organized by me and Flow Ventures, and is an evening to gather everyone interested in startups and discuss startups, at whichever stage you are in (business idea, prototype, team gathering, development, funding search, growing, etc.) 
• CUSEC 2009, or Canadian University Software Engineering Conference, is from January 22nd to January 24th. The quality of presenters is top-notch, and makes it an un-missable conference: Dan Ingalls, Richard Stallman, Avi Bryant, Leah Culver, amongst others. It’s at Omni-mont Royal Hotel, 1050 Sherbrooke West. 
• iPhoneDevCamp, organized by the Praized folks, is January 23rd, and is for developers of iPhone applications.
• Montréal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast, which are bi-monthly, should have an edition the 11th of February, and should be again at Bocaccinos, on McGill Avenue [TBC]. Follow Ben Yoskovitz’s blog to get latest details.

I wrote a post one year ago to sum up 2007; ending with the outlook for 2008.

2 years ago, there wasn’t any tech scene to speak of in Montréal, except from a few techies who’d connect at a place like Laïka and interact through blog posts.

How things have changed. There is now a strong technology community in Montréal, with a diversity of actors, community events, startups, places and new technologies coming up every month, up to the point where we hear about it in Radio-Canada now (shocking!)

Names like Felipe Coimbra, Austin Hill, Roberto Rocha, the Praized guys, Flow Ventures, StationC, Ben Yoskovitz, startupnorth or MontrealStartup comes to mind, and so many more, certainly too many to do a list here. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank each of you, thank you for making this a great city for technology, and thank you for your enthusiasm, innovation, relentless work, and entrepreneurship.

As 2009 comes, I have *absolutely no doubt* that Montréal will rock, and the tech scene will be stronger, more diverse, and with shining examples of entrepreneurs boldly succeeding.

If 2007 was the birth of the tech scene in Montréal, 2008 the development, I’d say then that 2009 would be the year where it will reach its full maturity.

In the case of Montréal Tech Watch, I don’t have also any doubt that 2009 will be a great year.

I see the end result, compared to last year: the blog posts at mtw, techentreprise, blitzweekend, events like startupdrinks, freehackers, without counting the hundreds of connections made between fellow techies. I sit back, thinking that all of this was done with nothing but lots of unvaluable collaboration with people I loved working with. Who knows what would it be like if I have spent more than the planned $0 annual budget and more than the average 10 or so hours each week spent in this.

Now, looking back, I’ve had a hectic schedule for the past months and I have idea what’s coming up, if I look ahead. But seeing the year-to-year result, it would be fair to say you will see the same level of innovation and the same sense of wonder.

Ok. The last expression was perhaps a bit too much. But that’s obligatory these days since many just think about the “economic recession”, which, to be honest with you, is the least of my worries, maybe at the same level of how many snow storms we will have this winter (which is a micro-second of thought each day)

I wish then that MontrealTechWatch (& Associates) will be as strong, innovative and as lively as the Montréal tech scene.

That’s my wish for MTW for 2009. I’d wish success for each of you for the upcoming year, but maybe you’ve got (bigger/other) plans. If you care to share with the community, leave your thought and resolutions below.

What’s do you foresee for you & your ventures for 2009?

There’s Montréal StartupDrinks, for all entrepreneurs and startup fellows, and then there’s FreeHackers Montréal.

FreeHackers is a movement started by Zed Shaw, the programmer famous for having written mongrel, and infamous for having dissed ruby:

The Freehackers Union is a gang devoted to preserving hacking and invention as methods of personal artistic expression…by any means necessary.

Whatever you make of the definition, I thought this was definitively a must for Montréal.  MTW once had a tagline, Technology and Innovation, and events like FreeHackers or Blitzweekend are main drivers to make this happen. Like Blitzweekend, FreeHackers promotes original and new work, gathers brilliant developers/engineers/hackers, and can be the origin of many new innovative technologies.

We had the first meetup on the 13th of December. A small group of developers/hackers came up for the event, hosted by Bolidea, the new web incubator on bvd St-Laurent. 

Bolidea focuses on developing technology products that bring solutions to problems and they also work with business and tech oriented people helping them execute their ideas. Apart from having great offices on St-Laurent, they are a dynamic and awesome team, which made the Bolidea / FreeHackers match perfectly from the start.

Alok Mohindra was the first to show up, and he brought with him the prototype for Arkalumen, a new LED light which would be much more powerful and more efficient than existing LEDs. A *bright* idea considering the switch we have to do with lights. Alok also demonstrated later how we could use a graphing library to chart stock markets. 

We also discussed in the first hour how we would setup the group, and what would be the schedule. We quickly realized thought that each one of us had different backgrounds, with focuses on different languages and stacks that it would be impossible to do things like group projects. The consensus was that each would work on his own project, but would also benefit on the same time of being around brilliant developers. Here are a few examples taken from my notes:

• Pierre Phaneuf (who works for Google) was re-engineering the server for a multiplayer c++ video game, a competitive and fast Tetris clone
• Arach Tchoupani tested pinax, for a possible implementation for montrealpython
• Louis Philippe Huberdeau worked on TikiWiki and also discussed with Alok
• Gregory Whiteside looked at CouchDb and how it could be deployed on Amazon aws.
• I did a ruby plugin for the open micro blogging spec (although unfinished, it’s planned to be used on this website)

The team from Bolidea also provided food, coffee, and beer for the whole afternoon, which is great. I dreaded that the event would take so much organization and resources that it would be impossible to run it regularly. We could have 20 or even 25 people for the event (which is my goal for the next event), and the setup would be able to accomodate everyone. 

Pictures by Magda Rocki 

One thing that this picture do lack is the level of discussion and exchange which happenned during the event. Of course, there was also code/work going on, but I enjoyed mostly getting everyone together and getting everyone’s feedback on new problems. If you’re up to it, FreeHackers Montréal is going to be organized every 2nd tuesday afternoon of every month. The next one is already planned 10th of January. Sign up here.

Carl Mercier, of Karabunga, took lots of pictures at last week’s party, CelebrateCamp, organized by Austin Hill’s expert hand.

Here are a few, ripped off from facebook (but anyway, they were public there):

Karabungas

Heineken models

Devs from Praized

execs from Praized

smarthipppo / Karabunga folks

If someone has pictures of Simon Law, please let me know.

Or pictures taken by other people. Thanks everyone!