Montreal Tech Watch

In an IT world hammered again and again by trends like cloud computing, usedservers.ca is a curious play. Many IT directors got already memos about moving their servers to the cloud and also using cloud services instead of buying good old software. It’s easy to forget though that outside the world of web startups, cloud [...]

Last night was a test for iWeb Technologies support team. A fire broke near their iWeb-CL data center, and as a result, power supply was spotty. In such a scenario, and to prevent any sudden power outage for hosted servers, generators are started and iWeb waits for HydroQuébec to provide again regular electricity. iWeb was [...]

First a disclaimer: I’ve been involved with iWeb in the early stage of this project, in product design. I believe though that the following is a impartial review! For those who are unaware of it, iWeb is a web hosting provider, based in Montréal. They own and run their own data centers, setting them apart [...]

James A Duncan (@ jamesaduncan), serial entrepreneur, kindly shared his experiences at last week’s mentoring event. The event was at Café République, a quieter place, right in downtown Montréal, probably a better place than last month’s spot. Indeed, last month felt more like a group of friends gathering for a summer drink, amongst all the buzzy [...]

Ostrich, launched just a week ago, got one of the largest and comprehensive media coverage … well for a Montreal-based product that is. It has been covered on most Apple-focused and tech blogs, got noticed by John Gruber, and is now today featured on extensions.apple.com This page is brand-new and has just been published this [...]

I’ve met Hugo Duncan (@hugoduncan) at the first Blitzweekend; he wasn’t the most vocal but yet he’s one of the programmers who impressed me most, having managed to develop a UML interpreter based on 2 new languages, Cat and Heron. Everything was against him: his team was setup just late Friday evening so there was [...]

Solutious, a company started by Delano Mandelbaum (@solutious), has released last monday Rudy version 0.9 Rudy allows simplified development and deployement on Amazon’s cloud computing platform by using a Ruby DSL (Domain Specific Language), allowing then quick and easy provisioning of custom environments on Amazon’s hosting platform. The best use case for Rudy might be [...]

iWeb Inc. announced yesterday a whopping $22 million funding by Goldman Sachs, a leading New York investment bank. The funding is mostly debt, with also $3 million provided in shares. The funding is said to fuel growth for its data centers, add infrastructure for their dedicated servers offers. iWeb announced a new & third data [...]

Syntenic has launched a brand-new website, which explains their full array of services. Previously, Syntenic just provided a blank homepage and an interface for their clients. The new Syntenic website focuses on 3 services: optimization of the network used by the web application, the design of a customized web hosting environment for the web application, [...]

In a poll which run here for the past 3 months, Amazon AWS and Google App Engine were choosen by MTW readers as the most promising technologies, well ahead of other new technologies with 34% of votes. I’ve grabbed then the opportunity to delve into virtualized and on-demand web hosting, aka cloud computing. We sat [...]