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

Guillaume Germain from the Montreal Scheme / Lisp User Group is writing:

The MSLUG is having a meeting this week. Marc Feeley, professor at Université de Montréal, will give a tutorial on Scheme and an introduction to more advanced features anduses of Scheme and the Gambit-C implementation.

What: Montreal Scheme/Lisp User Group Meeting — Scheme for the Novice and Beyond
Where: Room 3195, André-Aisenstadt Building, Université de Montréal, 2920 chemin de la Tour
(a plan of the UdeM campus)
When: Thursday March 27th 2008 7pm

Dominique Boucher wrote previously a great article on MontrealTechWatch about Scheme/Lisp in Montreal.

This weekend at Station C, there was Coder’s Saturday, a conference/meetup/camp which gathered 30+ web developers. The meetup was a joint collaboration between the folks from Station C, Nurun and Yahoo Québec.

The event came up with the venue in town of Christian Heilmann, from Yahoo! UK.

He gave a insightful presentation about how web developers should work with web standards, and also about the challenges about web standards. Christian Heilmann also gave his input about web accessibilty and usability issues.

We also had Ara Pehlivanian, who talked about web2.0 development. He works for Nurun, and said it’s important to understand usage of HTML, javascript, and CSS when developing a website. Great advice.

Sarven Capadisli also talked about microformats, and how it will help machines understand human meaning behind web documents. I am working myself with other fellow Montréalers on a microformat project and it’s great to hear about other developers evangelizing microformats.

There was also a presentation about the Google Web Toolkit, which allows web developers to build AJAX apps by using the java language, and Christian Heilmann sealed the day by presenting the tools made freely avalaible to web developers by Yahoo!.

This was a good surprise for me. I didn’t expect all the high quality and insightful presentations. Hats off then to the organizers for Coder’s saturday.

More pictures

Patrick Tanguay introduces the conference.

Introduction by Karen Bennet, Director of Engineering of Yahoo! Canada (Toronto)

Attendees

Last friday, a small group gathered at Station C to talk about developing services and applications for mobile phones.

The meetup was somehow improvised after rapid exchanges on twitter, around me, Martin Dufort, who started previously Kakiloc, a mobile “location-based twitter”, and Fred Brunel, who was already poking the iPhone SDK.

And so was born the idea for a meetup. Which is completely crazy for me to announce, given the fact that I am weeks late on my own current work schedule, and had about 0 hours to start a new project on mobile apps, let alone organize a new meetup, à la barcamp. But what do you know, it occured to me that the iPhone SDK completely changes the game and introduces a new paradigm on how we will access and use information. I have to thank though Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mireault for the support they gave for this meetup, and who are doing an awesome work on putting things together at Station C.

For the meetup in itself, about 10 people or so came up, with a good mix of developers/hackers/entrepreneurs/geeks/early adopters. Fred Brunel told us that he worked for a french company for 5 years, which was developing and distributing games for cell phones, and one of their biggest technical challenges was the diversity of platforms. For instance, they had a proprietary technology that would compile on the fly a binary for use for a given customer. Apple’s distribution system, on the other hand, completely overrides those challenges, and for the first time in mobile history, you can imagine a single developer capable of creating one application that would fully run on millions of devices. The beauty of the system is also the fact that it bypasses the user’s telecom carrier, whose standard business practices is to tax any service that its subscribers wants to use.

We also talked about Google Android, whose set of features matches Apple’s platform. But here again, the fact that cell phone manufacturer will have their own implementation of Google Android will be a huge burden to developers: for instance, you can’t be sure that your end-user will have access to 3D features, or you don’t know if the user has a touchscreen, a full keyboard, or a standard cell phone keyboard, amongst other things.

We continued afterwards the discussion at Chilenitas, a small family-run restaurant nearby with great food and drinks. While, Station C is a great place, you feel sometimes like being in a modern art museum, and Chilenitas was just the right place to take a beer, chill out, and get real on what we exactly wanted to do.

Rick Segal, partner at JLA Ventures, a fund investing in emerging tech companies, is touring Canadian cities in a series of “VC Roundtables” to meet entrepreneurs and local startup community. The goal is to present and explain what really is a technology investor; and also present documents and information about the investment process.

The planned date for Montréal is Aril 16th, from 4.30 to 6.40pm.

This was the proposed format for the Roundtable:

The format will be something like this - and I’m open to suggestions:

• Evening, about 3 hours in length
• Informal/Free (super important!)
• Small Groups (super important!)
• Information on VC/Angels and the process.
• Sample Term sheets, documents, business plans, PowerPoints
• Example Pitch or Pitches to show what’s interesting/good/bad
• Open questions for a good chunk of time.

What it will not be:

• Demo/Startup/FooBar/Camp/Conference/MESH/MASH
• Me trashing your ideas
• You trashing somebody else’s ideas
• Three hours of me showing you PowerPoint slides

The hope is that at the end of the get together you will have:

• An understanding of my world
• A good set of reference documents/examples/materials
• Some of your top of mind questions answered
• A better feel for my industry and if raising third party capital is right for you.
• A good place to start

Here are some reasons why you might want to attend:
- it’s free and informal
- Rick Segal is one of the rare VCs who participate actively in the startup scene in Canada, he is an active blogger, sponsors and goes regularly to demoCamps, and is committed to support Canadia-based startups,
- you are planning to launch a startup, and looking to raise third-party capital,
- you might be an engineer/a tech guy, and clueless about term sheets and due diligence processes,
- you want to know how to approach angels and VCs and what kind of relationship to have with them,
- you want to know the business criterias (and other) that investors are looking for when investing

Registration is here. It is limited to 25 seats for each session.

There are also sessions in Ottawa on April 16th, and in Toronto the following day, if you can’t make it.

In addition to the Mobile Developer Meetup, Station C is hosting “Coder’s Camp” on Saturday, focusing on javascript, AJAX and usage of APIs. As Patrick Tanguay explains, the folks at Station C took advantage of Christian Heilmann coming in Montréal to organize a mini-barcamp:

Christian Heilmann, a well known web developer (Yahoo! UK) who’s written for many respected online publications will be in Montréal end of March, we’ll use the occasion to hold a mini conference centered around javascript, Ajax and APIs. In collaboration with Nurun and Yahoo! Québec, the “Coder’s Saturday” will be held Saturday March 22nd at Station C and will start at noon with a light lunch and a chance to meet everyone.

Other than Heilmann, 3 other presenters are already programmed, we are looking for 4 other subjects to present. Contact us if you are interested but first, register to the event if you want to attend, space is limited to 30 lucky people. (it’s a free event)

If you are developing a “web2.0″ application, then Coder’s Camp is right up your alley. Registration is free, but limited to 30 places. And as I write this, there are only 13 spots free.