Foulab, Montreal’s own hacker space, is holding an Arduino Jam this upcoming Thursday evening, starting from 7.00pm. It’s an open event is targeted at those who wants to learn about Arduino, and try their hand on the open source microcontroller hardware.

I recommend the event for those who are interested in hardware hacking, for instance to mix real physical events. You can think for instance about innovative interfaces, such as this bakery in London which alerts customers on Twitter, about fresh bread, through a specially designed knob. It’s also easy to think about software services which would offer an Arduino-enabled physical interface.

Photo Credit: Arduino Synthetizer, by Collin Mel

In the same vein as the various X-Prizes setup by private and public organizations, the Netflix prize spurred lots of interest in mathematicians and hackers circle.

The competition invited programmers and scientists all over the world to find a better recommendation engine. It would allow Netflix to predict better if a user would like a movie, based on his previous ratings, and other users’. The winning mark was a 10% improvement.

Now it looks like the Pragmatic Theory snatched the prize, with 10.05% improvement. Pragmatic Theory is made of Electrical engineer Martin Piotte and software engineer Martin Chabbert of Montreal, working in the telecommunications industry, and apparently algorithm crafters in their spare time. Their work came up at the 1st place since March this year, and they’ve reached the final mark by adding work made by Comendo, Yahoo! Reasearch and AT&T.

The Netflix prize came with a $1million prize. Initially, it wasn’t open to residents of Québec, but on 24th of March 2009, when Pragmatic Theory got the lead, Netflix changed the rules to accept as well residents of Québec. That’s good for Netflix, a wise decision (compared to the Régie des Jeux du Québec’s rulings…), and fortunate for all of Quebec residents, since it would have been the laughing subject of tech publications otherwise.

The rules of the competition also stated that the winning team could also commercialize the product of their work, on top of the cash prize. Congrats to the Pragmatic Team, congrats for their perseverance and sheer brilliance, since they present it as only a “leisure project”.

Led by our dear friends Arach Tchoupani and Yannick Gingras, MontrealPython is today at La Banque, 175 Roy Est.

MontrealPython7:

Here is our schedule for the evening:

• 18h00: Opening
• 18h20: Announcements
• 18h30: Flash presentations
• 19h00: Break
• 19h20: Main presentation

Our main presenter Olivier Bélanger on “Ounk, un environnement de scripting musical”.

A documentary film by Jack Oatmon.

A look into the hardware hacking community in Montreal, including the Foulab collective. Why are more and more hobbyists experimenting with hacks and circuit bends? What relationship does this imply about consumer society and technological advancement? Is this a real-world analog of ‘user generated content’?

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,

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

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

Felipe Coimbra has launched 2nd of January twtpoll, a web service which allows twitter users to have a poll functionality for their followers.

The service in itself is not innovative in itself (there are dozens of web polls available out there); what’s interesting though is that he did the design and implemention in one night, making it an overnight web startup.

Calling twtpoll a “startup” might be a stretch, since Felipe didn’t probably do a formal market research or doesn’t have any revenue model sketched out for twtpoll, but by developing this application in one night, it’s easy to see the entrepreneur thinking about other new ideas and new web services, and develop them right away with an “overnight” prototype, to see if there’s any traction or market interest. That’s a paradigm from the traditional paths for entrepreneurs, where you have to plan carefully, since schedules are in months & years.

In this case, twtpoll was featured on TechCrunch.

Availability of APIs and application platforms (look at Facebook’s, Myspace’s or the iPhone’s platform), coupled with development frameworks which makes programming more productive, makes this kind of ventures possible. I like the idea of an entrepreneur/hacker who can wrap up a prototype by himself, from his/her original vision, almost like a craftsman. If the prototype do get some sort of traction, it’s easy to to imagine the entrepreneur gather more resources and build from that original traction. And who knows what lies ahead, as more and more sophisticated tools come, barriers of entry are lower each year, making overnight web applications like twtpoll more common.

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.

One of the first posts at TechEntreprise, back in August, was about an idea by Zed Shaw, which was to get developers and hackers together and work on projects. 

The post was meant to test the publishing system there, but it generated quite some attention, up to the point that doing an event like this in Montréal made sense. 

Now, I don’t know Zed Shaw nor do I completely understand his “fight club” rules; all I know is that there is a substantial group of developers in Montréal willing to get together, share projects and code, and experiment new technologies.

All without necessarily thinking about underlying business models, but just to hack things together and see what comes of this.  

That’s the vision, and all we needed was a place to host this. I’m happy to announce that we found it!

Bolidea, a new technology incubator founded by successful web entrepreneurs, graciously offered to host the event in their awesome offices on St-Laurent boulevard, right near Laika. Bolidea develops technology companies that strive to provide solutions to real market problems. They share our vision of gathering developers, entrepreneurs and everyone else interested in experimenting with new technologies.

So here it is:

A first FreeHackers event is scheduled Saturday 13th of December, beginning from 12.30pm, for an entire afternoon of freehacking, up until 6 or 7pm. 

Every python, ruby, C, java, php, erlang, sql, javascript, css developer is invited to come over. It’s your chance to work on a new library, or on a new algorithm you’ve never had the time to work on, or just meet other developers. Of course designers, and people wanting to work on hardware are also welcomed.

I’m expecting between 10 to 20 people. Registration will close after the first 20 people so sign up here (the event is open but places are going to be limited)

Note: I am aware that there are talks about doing a programming event at montrealonrails, but as far as I am concerned, it’s only about rails (or ruby) stuff, which I find very limited. Getting everyone onboard would be much more interesting than restricting an event to a language or one implementation