Akoha has announced this morning $1.9 million in funding from various angel investors. The list of investors include David Chamandy (Lavalife), John Bromley, JS Cournoyer, Ron Dembo (Zerofootprint.net), Jake Eberts (film producer), Alan Gershenfeld (E-Line Ventures, Games for Change), John Meeks, Reg Weiser, Jonathan Wener, Rober Montgomery (Achilles Media), Chris Emergui (BAM Strategy), and Montreal Start Up.

The funds are supporting ungoing development and launch of Akoha.

The news has been picked by many blogs, in Techcrunch, StartupNorth, Techvibes, and mashable

What’s curious is that the startup got featured on those high-profile blogs even though noone was able to tell what exactly Akoha was doing — it probably has a lot to do more with Austin Hill’s profile than the product. The funniest on the blog coverage was Fagstein’s post:

… It could be a social-networking site for fundraisers or it could be a giant multiplayer Pong game with the Sesame Street theme playing all the time. They’re still kind of being coy about it …

Of course, it’s due to the fact that Akoha is still under development. I can’t myself tell you more what Akoha is doing - other than they are playing with social gifting, both on and offline. There are couple of things to get though from the announcement:

1. if you read the announcement well, the funding was not made recently but earlier this year, with the first tranch provided late last year. The Akoha team is also going to CIX this week. This is not fortuitous and I believe has been planned meticously. Frequent media apparitions means Akoha is looking for impact, either for an upcoming launch/beta, or either for anohter funding round.
2. the list of investors is quite interesting; apart from the financial investors, there are media entrepreneurs, professionals in games, and leaders in social initiatives in the provided list, which is smart for Akoha’s founders. As Austin Hill said in a previous talk, it’s important to meet investors in the same space, as they can also be an advisor to your business.

In lieu of news and articles, I thought it would be interesting to know what were your computing environment.

The following poll accepts multiple answers

This one is for *developers*

Feel free to comment below about your choice.

The proposal for a Montréal Mobile developer meetup received an unexpected interest, and I have now nearly 20+ people interested in showing up.

I am excited to announce that we have now a venue, which is Station c, 5369 bvd St-Laurent, and a date, which is Friday 21st of March, at 5.30pm

Station C is Montréal’s new coworking space, and I arranged with Patrick Tanguay so that we can use exceptionally the place for this meetup. Thanks, Patrick!

The meetup is open to hackers, developers, user interface designers, or anyone interested in mobile applications and its usage. The format of the event will be barcamp’s — we will have an open schedule/live wiki, and anyone wishing to talk about a special topic can just write an entry. If you have been to RococoCamp, then we are heading to exactly the same format.

As always, be prepared to share, and also come with your mobile devices/laptops/tools.

I caught the reports that the Sécurité du Québec and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided 12 locations early wednesday, and arrested 16 “hackers” who allegedly were running through a botnet more than one million PCs tlocated in Manitoba, US, Brazil and Poland.

If you go through the news reports, this is all very spectacular. “Hackers” were aged from 17 to 26, and allegedly made up to $45 million through ID theft and phishing. Police is said to have begun investigation since the summer of 2006.

Bot networks are created through trojans, worms, or “malware”, propagated from PC to PC through backdoors. Worms creators for instance craft messages for the Valentine’s day or any other special event that might deceive innocent users. Upon opening the message, the worm is installed and begins to replicate by going through the user’s address book for instance.

Bot networks are rented to send spams. They can also be used for denial of service attacks, like the famously known attack on Estonian government websites in May last year. A few of them are also used for phising and Identity theft, although the latter use is stupid, because it’s always possible to retrace the creators of the scheme through DNS and investigations, which is what the SQ and RCMP did.

I find though that the official figures in this case were overblown. I’ve done some research and couldn’t find the name of the group, which is surprising for a botnet running 1M+ bots. It just seems a random group of teenagers who downloaded a couple of trojans and worms generators. It’s also funny to hear a SQ rep saying that they were guilty of “hacking”, a word I am sure he doesn’t really understand.

Yesterday, over 30 people attended MontrealPython’s first meetup at standoutjobs’s offices. Having all these Python developers gathered was a good surprise, as many thought previously that there weren’t that many people using the programming language in Montreal. Arach Tchoupani, and to a certain extent Akoha, launched the event nonetheless, and it was undeniably a success.

We had one presentation by David Goodger, who invited developers to come to Pycon 2008 in Chicago. He then followed to present his deep interests in polyforms puzzling, which is more or less fitting geometric pieces into a predefined geometric complex shape. He showed how he was able to find solution thanks to a paper by Donald Knuth.

This presentation was quite intriguing and esoteric for me. There is some irony on trying to find solutions on problems you have configured yourself, instead of say, solving mathematical problems that can be found in Nature.

At the end, I also presented Blitzweekend, and invited people to register for the event. I believed that went well. We should have more than our fair share of python wranglers at the weekend and the 5 à 7.

Arach Tchoupani said at the end that they should have a meetup every 6 weeks, and should have presentations on Django.

More pictures at flickr (ok forgot to use the flash - but still interesting pictures)

Station C is Montreal’s new coworking space, and it finally opens today. It’s located 5359 St-Laurent, #430, and offers 16 working stations for freelancers and consultants, mostly graphic designers, web entrepreneurs, coders. The space also has a meeting room, a conference room, a bar, a lounge area and various utilities like wifi and a shared printer.

The project is the brainchild of Patrick Tanguay and Daniel Mireault, who started thinking about the concept 2 years ago, and who wanted to offer a “professionnal” alternative to coffee shops for freelancers.

In practice, members can be either residents, which mean they will have full access to the space, with a permanently assigned desk, or they can also be “flex”, with a basic plan starting at 14h./week, which is charged $130.

I am currently at the place, which was just renovated, repainted in red and white, with new furniture, and it looks great. They’ve got also a nice set of sofas and bean bags. It’s definetely a better place to work than being in a coffee place/library/home. It will be interesting how the dynamics will be here in the upcoming weeks.

oboro, which is a center focusing on interaction between art and new media, is starting a workshop mysteriously named : “Du tangible à l’intangible et vice-versa: un laboratoire ouvert sur les artefacts sonores”

The goal of the workshop is to make interactive stuff that responds to human interaction, via sound. If any of you is into hacking electronic and audio components, this is a fun way to interact with artists. Oboro is also getting a toy designer from LA to support soft interface making.

James Golick has setup a “reddit” for ruby-related news and articles. It follows reddit’s last week announcement that they will allow its members to create sub-reddits centered around “niche” communities. In practice, this means ruby.reddit.com will stay focused and on-topic, contrary to the main reddit page or other social news websites, such as digg.com, which inevitably begins to feature jokes, news specifically crafted for digg, and sensationalist items, in order to cater to its mass audience.

I’ve comed to the page and it’s already filled with news, blog posts and announcements. No doubt it will turn into a main reference for developers who use Ruby and Ruby gems, beginners and pros alike, from all over the world.

It’s a great initiative, and this comes after James was quoted in the latest Rails Envy podcast, for his ingenuous tips for Ruby on Rails programmers. In the last week, I have also seen him starting zookeeper, a project management software, which leads me to think we now have another Ruby guru. I know he also made plugins (attribute_fu and resourcecontroller) for the Rails framework, although I tend to use other alternatives like make_resourceful. This also shows how strong and innovative the Ruby and Rails community is in Montreal.

If there is an expertise that should shine in Québec and in Montréal, then it should be translation applications. The city’s diversity and heritage makes it an ideal setting for projects targeting the translation problem blossom.

I have already mentionned The Code Kitchen’s efforts in building a tool for localizing applications and how they provide multiple languages for their main product, CakeMail.

Today, Alain Désilets from the National Research Council of Canada presented Wiki-Translation.com at CodeFest’s 2nd day. As he explained in detail (Slides), translating content in wiki is a challenge, as there is never a definitive version or reference to work on. Worse, we might have several references, as the wiki’s contributors might have users in each country working on the same document and adding content on the same time. His presentation was in fact a kick-off meeting whose goal was to invite attending developers to participate in the project. Stephane Daury filmed his presentation today

I am not sure if the project would be successful, but, hey, I love challenges. Think about all Wikipedia content translated in each language, and all of this being done by harnessing massive collaboration.

Marc-André Cournoyer has released a new web server called Thin. Thin is built upon Mongrel and 2 other ruby packages, Event Machine and Rack, and is promised to be much faster than mongrel, which is no small feat. Thin gets the extra-speed by being 100% single-threaded and could be used to serve pages from ruby web frameworks, like Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails’s speed and scalability has been questionned, especially before mongrel appeared; everyone would point out for instance Twitter’s frequent errors to highlight Rails’s “fragility”. As I see it, Thin, in theory, has lots of potential and kill the speed problem, although I am still wondering how it serves concurrent requests in production mode.

Marc-André Cournoyer previously released refactormycode, a place where programmers could get help from other members for their code, as well as multiple plugins for Rails. His track record is impressive, and he is raising the bar very high for the rest of us. I am not sure what he is going to do next. Maybe a framework? Oh wait, it’s already done too. Here’s an idea: create a new programming language.