Congratulations to Stéphane Daury who developed with two other wordpress hackers the plugin for the iPhone!

You can now download it at wordpress.org, it provides a new user interface to a wordpress blog, which is suitable to the iPhone’s touchscreen capabilities.

There was a prize, which is a shiny new iPhone for each for them, and we thank Wordpress to oversee local Québec laws and extend the “competition” to the province too. Who knows, maybe they would have had to pay the RACJ a few hundred dollars to host the “competition”.

/sarcasm

I would never blog about Silicon Valley initatives, because there are bloggers who are way more resourceful than I am in this game. However, Google’s Android SDK is interesting from a Québec perspective.

The whole story is that Google is moving into the mobile networking industry with a framework that allows any third-party developers to use a common toolset, accessing for the first time functions like messenging with SMS, touchscreen, video and audio, and even 3D functions. This is great from a developer’s perspective, making cell phones now as attractive as web or desktop software development. Compute into that the growth of mobile phones worldwide, in countries like China, India, Brazil where many of their citizens would only have access to a handset, and you have a whole new market opened for new innovatie applications. To raise the platform’s adoption rate, Google has also announced today a $10millions challenge, where they invite developers to create applications for cell phones, beginning early 2008.

I was thinking this would be great news for our upcoming blitzweekend, but after reading the fine-print, it turns out that residents of Québec cannot participate

While we seek to make the Challenge open worldwide, we cannot open the Challenge to residents of Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Myanmar (Burma) because of U.S. laws. In addition, the Challenge is not open to residents of Italy or Quebec because of local restrictions.

I don’t know about you, but it’s weird to see Quebec after Cuba, Iran, Syria … ! Is this because of the scandalous data rates? or maybe because they would have had to make a track in French? Well surely no, we are not there yet. After a little bit of digging and emailing, it’s because in Québec, if you want to launch a competition with a final prize, you have to pay the Québec governement 10% of the prize as a permit to host the competition, even if noone in the province wins. That means Google would have had to pay Quebec $1 million just to allow Quebecers to participate.

Oh well … today, i see this as a sign that there is way too much legistation in Quebec.

Non, Montreal Tech Watch n’est pas engadget, mais comme je l’ai annoncé auparavant, les technologies mobiles sont en pleine croissance. Comme on m’a offert récemment de tester un téléphone de Bell Mobilité, le LG Shine, c’était une occasion de tester le concept.

À en croire leur dépliant, chaque nouveau cellulaire serait capable d’envoyer des courriels, de jouer des MP3, de prendre des vidéos, d’être un dictataphone, de tchatcher, de surfer sur le web, bref un mini-ordinateur dans votre poche. Mais la réalité est loin de là, puisque dans la pratique, il faut être extremmement patient si on veut aller sur le web avec un cellulaire; et la qualité des images prises rappelle fortement les webcams de la fin des années 90.

Le LG ne fait pas exception. La synchronisation avec un ordinateur (pour le carnet d’adresses ou le calendrier) est maladroite, les photos sont pâles et le navigateur web est toujours aussi lent. Mais qu’importe me direz-vous, puisque le LG n’est pas fait pour ceux qui sont intéressés par les gadgets, mais pour ceux et celles qui font attention à leur apparence. Le deuxième écran est un miroir quand il est désactivé (!!!) et l’habillage métal suffit à lui seul pour faire un “fashion statement”. La fonction caméra est même optimisé pour prendre des photos de nuit, pour vos sorties tardives.

Bon, comme on est quand même sur Montréal Tech Watch, je vais en profiter pour parler du réseau cellulaire de Bell. J’ai testé la fonction télévision, en direct et en streaming, et j’ai été surpris de la qualité et de la vitesse. Il y a une liste d’une trentaine de chaînes disponibles à partir du téléphone; on a par exemple accès aux dernières nouvelles provenant de Radio-Canada ou des capsules de hockey. La qualité est convenable pour un cellulaire, et tient le coup. On en vient donc à ma critique principale des opérateurs au Canada: ils aiment annoncer que leur réseau supporte des bandes passantes de plus en plus élevées, alors que de par leur nature même, les téléphones cellulaires ne sont pas faits pour aller sur le web. C’est la connexion qui prend le plus de temps; comme une page web nécessite de télécharger plusieurs parties (images, fichiers css etc.), les temps de connexion vont prendre en moyenne 30 sec. et plus, indépendamment de la bande passante supporté par le réseau. La logique veut donc que les opérateurs et les constructeurs mettent un récepteur wifi sur les nouveaux cellulaires, s’ils veulent offrir la fonctionnalité web. Mais là vous comprendrez qu’on touche aux sources de revenues des opérateurs canadiens, ce qu’ils n’acepteront jamais.

Radioactif, a local internet service provider, announced earlier this summer that they will deploy a Wimax network in Montreal, with Nomade Telecom as the mobile wireless expert partner for this project. The announced date was then September 2007, but they have now a page about the details of the service, which is now due Dec. 2007.

Interestingly, the page also mentions mobile IP telephony, which means customers who are subscribed to the $30 monthly service will also be able to leave Bell Canada in the process. For me this is a very smart move from Radioactif. It doesn’t require a mobile license to deploy a wimax network, which is considered by the CRTC as a wifi technology. Videotron wishes on the other hand to be the 4th mobile carrier in Canada, but are stumbling instead in political games and bullyinglobbying by the 3 other telcos. I know other entrepreneurs here in Quebec who wanted to launch a mobile phone network, and this might be the answer.

Wimax is a wireless alternative to cable and ADSL, providing users a practical service like wifi but with speeds up to 5Mbps. Previously, it required to have a rather big device, the size of a router to get the signal, but manufacturers like Intel are now launching cards that can fit into PCMCIA slots.

Rogers has launched yesterday the highly-publicized HSPDA service in 22 cities in Canada. The coverage is mainly done in BC, Ontario, and Québec with 5 cities, Montreal included. As reported earlier, HSPDA is the only “true” 3G service currently avalaible in Canada, allowing data bandwidth similar to cable or ADSL.

Rogers has also developed mobile video conferencing, allowing callers to see each other. To this day, Rogers is the only carrier offering this feature in North America. It doesn’t come cheap though, because it costs an extra 25 cents per minute to have video calls, which is roughly more expensive than an international call to Europe. Still, I find this welcome, in a world where the Canadian telecom landscape is often seen as late compared to the US, Europe or Asia.

HSPDA will also let the user surf the internet at high-speed, and connect the device to a laptop, allowing thus true mobilility. Like video calls, this is also something that should not reach mass market because of its price tag, and because of the compatible devices, the Samsung A706, LG TU500, Motorola Q9, PALM Treo 750, HTC 621 and the HTC TyTN, which won’t win any design award.

Stephane Daury, a “web architect”, has released along with 2 other developers a new version of WPhone, a plugin for wordpress that allows iPhone and iPod Touch owners to visit and use wordpress blogs within a specially designed interface.

Like the new facebook iPhone interface, the new interface is specially designed to the device: it’s lightweight in size, buttons are bigger for better functionnality, main sections are highlighted, and it’s also optimized for the iPhone’s screen resolution. Because Apple’s products and WPhone caters to the same people (web geeks), I expect this plugin to be popular and be widely adopted. Wordpress administrators will get an additionnal functionnality and user interface for free, and focus instead on writing content.

As the version for iPhone is now somehow stable, Stephane Daury is now looking to extend the plugin to other mobile devices, like Nokia N60 series, Blackberries, Windows Mobile etc.. If you have any of the listed device, leave a comment on his blog.

Bluestreak Technology is the third Montréal startup to receive VC funding this week. Iris Capital, Solidarity Fund QFL, BDC Venture Capital and First Capital Group have invested $20 million into Bluestreak.

Buestreak makes MachBlue, which is more or less Flash 7 for mobile phones and for digital TVs. It allows users and service providers to get “rich applications” without downloading any (java) software. MachBlue is used by many carriers in Europe and Asia, as well as media companies like Time Warner. With MachBlue, it has become very easy to create games, provide services like weather, news, TV games, etc. as you only need flash programmers and the software from Bluestreak.

Roberto Rocha reports that Mobivox has raised today $11 million from IDG Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, and Skypoint Capital Corp.

Mat Balez previously met Mobivox’s CEO at Red Herring Canada, and hinted about this second series of funding. The new funds will be used for accelerating growth and additionnal services:

the money will go towards opening a Beijing office (China is their third largest customer base) and rolling out premium paid services, like voice SMS and getting info (weather, stock quotes, etc.) via voice commands.

I have to say I was quite skeptical about Mobivox. My first reaction was it was just another VOIP company, in a market that’s overcrowded, with players like jajah backed by big telcos and handset manufacturers. The voice agent also sounded gimmicky. But that’s where I was wrong, the voice agent and voice recognition software was in fact their most precious asset and differentiating factor from other mobile companies. Extending the voice agent to provide an array of services is a great idea, it’s scalable, it’s practical, and easy to use. Going to China is also smart. Congratulations to Mobivox then!

Kakiloc, an application that lets you share your current location and mood status with your friends, has relaunched this week. It is in fact very similar to twitter, plus the geolocalization feature. It was designed for instance to let you know if you had friends around the neighborhood, thanks to your mobile phone and a java application:

New features include a timeline which will give you a graphical representation about you did recently, and also a mobile interface avalaible at m.kakiloc.com. This mobile interface is streamlined, with just one clean page asking your current location and your mood, which will then set you on the map. This was a section I really liked, it’s straightforward, easy-to-use, and might just be the kind of service I will use on the go. It also lets you message your friends, by email, SMS or “kakimessages”, with 25 free messages avalaible each month. For this feature, I would have liked though an option to send both an SMS and email, because you never know if your friend has his mobile phone or is checking his email. Also one killer feature would be to send a message to a group of friends.

On a final note, Martin Dufort also assured me that an iPhone version was coming very soon and that they will be pushing adoption of the mobile interface

Deloitte, a top consulting company, has published this year’s list of the fastest growing Canadian companies, or Fast50. For instance, Reasearch In Motion, the makers of the Backberry, rank at 41. Montreal companies that make up the list are:

1. Airborne Entertainment, a company specialized in mobile industry,
2. Radial Point, which provides services to ISPs,
3. Genetec, specialized in IP security
4. Nstein Technologies, which makes software for print and internet publishers,
5. DTI software, which makes games for airliners,
6. Distech Controls, in electronics
7. Artificial Mind and Movement, a video games company
8. OceanWide, which makes software for international trade

Companies from Ontario, especially Toronto, dominate the list.

Congratulations to each of those companies!