Here are selections of pictures taken from the event.

Who are the event organizers? What’s your experience with social APIs? Anything you’re doing currently with social APIs?

BuildSocial was started by our team at UrbanOrca. We are a few crazy startup-ers who love to build social products, and believe strongly in the power of social data and APIs. Our social discovery product is heavily integrated with platforms like Facebook, which has been an important part of our early success. My first experience building a social product was at RootMusic.com, which is now the largest music app on Facebook with over 30 million users.

While Canadian companies haven’t been known for their leadership in the social arena, we have recently noticed some cool social projects emerging in Montreal. We started BuildSocial to bring this community together, pool resources and learnings, and give the community a voice in the global startup ecosystem.

It’s been a few years that companies have included social media monitoring strategies plus elaborate Facebook apps in their marketing campaigns. Are you also welcoming marketing agencies, IT companies and established companies at BuildSocial, or it’s going to be startup-focused?

BuildSocial events are for entrepreneurs, developers, designers, and product managers who are building a web or mobile product that is heavily integrated with social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Foursquare.  Big and small companies are welcome to attend, but as entrepreneurs we are slightly biased towards startups J.  Most importantly, the events are free for all!

The event has been introduced as a meetup. Is it about meeting people, or is it focused on the learning aspect? There are 2 talks scheduled in the event.

Both.  Each event will have a learning and presentation component, followed by a time for casual discussion and networking.

Our upcoming “Building on Facebook” event includes 2 amazing presentations, where we’ll learn tips for mastering the Facebook API from some of Montreal’s brightest:

• Serial entrepreneur Carl Mercier will be discussing his latest project (still in stealth mode)
• Nicolas Cadou and Alice Bevan-McGregor (senior members of Le Site) will share learnings from building the Facebook game Bachelor Bachelorette (based on the popular TV show)

Like any good tech event, presentations will be followed by free beer to help stimulate some great discussion and networking.

The event is Wed, March 14 6:30pm at Notman House. There are a few spots left. You can sign up at www.eventbrite.com/event/2990329155

It’s introduced as “BuildSocial is a Montreal community”. Does that mean it’s going to be more than a one-off meetup? Anything more planned beyond the March 14th event?

We plan to have a monthly event, each one covering a unique theme. Our vision is for BuildSocial to be a sustainable community, which will require the active support and involvement of its members.  If you’d like to be involved in any way please contact me (@andrewsider, andrew@urbanorca.com) or Paul Herrera (@pherrera, paul@urbanorca.com ).

The hackathon was planned at the Sauvé House in the beginning, but due to the popularity of the event, it was changed in the past week to the Thompson House. Backed by a team of volunteers, the organizers welcomed health professionals from all around the country, startups, programmers, designers, investors, plus of course the organizations supporting the event.

The Sauvé Foundation was the first organization to support the event. Others joined in, such as the BDC and Nightingale, the main sponsors of the event.

As you can see, the house was packed, and more people are expected to come saturday morning. The attendance proves that healthcare needs new solutions now.

Here, organizers and presenters are checking in details of who is going to present, and in what order.

John Brohan from Android Montréal suggests an application to know if an elder person has fallen. An accelerator sensor will send information to an Android tablet and can alert if there is a problem.

Pablo Duboue, Free Software fan and hardware hacker, offers his natural language processing expertise to teams. He also had a RFID project which aimed to transfer healthcare files to patient’s Nokia N9 phones.

It was interesting to see healthcare professionals from Edmonton, Alberta and around the country to pitch their problems and solutions. There’s much to do, and they received a well-deserved applause from the audience.

Meanwhile, a few programmers were already working on applications at the back of the room.

Martin is passionnate about the potential of the Microsoft Kinect, a hardware device available in all hardware stores, which can get a 3D reading of people, with also image recognition capabilities, a microphone and more sensors to enable new applications. He presented a project to cater to heavily burned patients.

All pitches received a lot of attention from the audience. Investors were taking notes, as well as programmers and other talent looking for ideas to work on. What’s also interesting is that a brand new web application was created for the event. It’s called sparkboard, with a list of projects, team members, project discussion, and more to enable collaboration.

David Chouinard, also TEDxMontreal organizer, pitched the idea of taking care of online accounts of dead relatives. The first technical barrier was how to know if the person died, and he was exploring various natural language processing ideas to solve the issue. Daniel Drouet, from local startup ajah.ca, and a data extractor guru, discussed with David various technical ideas.

As the evening progressed, hackers were invited to meet those who pitched and create teams. Most teams were looking for front-end and back-end techies.

Here, organizers and sponsors are asking what attendees and VIPs were thinking about the event. There was a lot of energy, and everybody agreed that it was about time an event like this was coming in Montreal, Canada.

A few teams were already busy brainstorming, making plans and downloading software.

In a recent post, the popular movement MontrealOuvert announced that the group has fulfilled their objectives, with the public launch of the open data portal by the City of Montréal. They have succeeded in promoting the cause to the public opinion, the press, and also key members of the administration. In terms of results, we’ve seen many applications using the open data, and also various organizations such as OpenNorth dedicated professionally to open data.

Yet, it’s just the beginning. Beyond applications, various projects are looking for long-term viability, such as financing, with a few choosing the open source code + consulting model, or others putting their applications on sale for smartphones. Of course, the movement has also been focused only in Montréal, with much more data held by the provincial government.

That’s where QuébecOuvert comes in, a new initiative officially announced today, with the goal of getting the provincial government be more transparent and release their data to citizens. It’s ambitious, and there will be friction in the process, but it has already been done on the federal level, as well as in many other countries, so there’s no reason the movement wouldn’t succeed.

In the inaugural statement, mentioned benefits are decreased corruption, economic benefits, and better governance. The group gathers MontrealOuvert, as well as the Gatineau and Québec groups, and plan to gather all interested citizens and groups in March 2012. Meanwhile, they invite everyone to follow the site, or on twitter and linkedin

• Scaling Socket.IO apps with Redis by Jerome Paradis
• Rapid development workshop with RocketJS by Gabriel Lespérance

We will also be doing a recap on the Node.js hackaton. All teams who’ve presented a web app at the hackathon are also invited to come, and discuss what they’ve been doing, and get also help from the group. If you participated and continued working on your project, we’d love to hear about your progress.

RSVP

Friday afternoon, we had 70 to 80 people for the presentations. To be fair, they were planned as workshops, but there wasn’t any room to plan a proper class and get 70 people getting their first node running. Nevertheless, presentations like James Duncan’s (@jamesaduncan) inspired everyone, on how nodejs gave new tools and new ways to build web-based tools. Other presentations like Olivier’s (@oliv_oil) were more technical, while Christian Joudrey (@cjoudrey, nodemtl group) did a beginner-friendly presentation on how you can build your first node app with the express framework. Gabriel Lespérance followed with a cool presentation about RocketJS, born out of wavome’s requirement for rapid development.

Even though it takes significant time to arrange all those presentations, it gave a warm welcome to attendees, and got them into the node spirit. Thanks to all the presenters, and also the different groups & organizations who helped put together the line-up!

All in all, there were 8 groups working on different nodejs projects. There was a large team of 8 while there were also 3 projects with only 1 developer. At the end of the day, all teams had to present in front of 4 judges: Alexis Smirnov from RadialPoint (@alexissmirnov) , James A Duncan from Joyent, Gabriel Lespérance (@gablesperance) from wavome, Will Stevens from Cloudops (@willkite),

1. exsub was presented by meeech. The project was done in collaboration with Cheryl and Dov (@doooov)

exsub gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s happening on github. Select the projects you are interested in, and it will send you email updates every week, in a more readable way. Mitch said he’s following a lot of projects on github and one of the challenges is being able to keep up with all the commits, the branches and the tags. The team spent time in the hackathon to do the smart aggregation.

exsub presented to the audience a great lickable UI, although it was not immediately usable since the team didn’t have the time to implement email.

2. fus.io a dead-simple file-sharing too, was the winner of the hackathon, and goes home with the $300 prize. Congrats!

The project is by Arlen Stalwick (github – twitter), and born out of the frustration of sending large files over the Internet. It presents the user with a simple upload button, and as soon as the file selected, it gives the user a shareable url. Users of the service don’t even have to wait for the upload to finish — downloads will begin right away.

For large files (think 2GB and more), usually you have to wait for a couple of hours or more, and it’s frustrating for professionals who get interrupted in their workflow. The judges were also impressed that fus.ly was Arlen’s first node projects

3. BrainTripping is an artistic interpretation of famous people’s words, with the user invited to mix words of what Jesus, Charles Darwin or Paul Graham said and wrote. Matthew Huebert (@geoshift) had a first glimpse of the idea back at the Disrupt Hackathon, and amazingly, found a team of linguists at the hackathon, who worked on the corpus, data analysis. Additional programmers (such as Martin Provencher) worked on the front and back-end.

It’s fair to say it was the most creative project at the hackathon, and generated amazement and aah and ooh from the audience, but it wasn’t clear for the judges what was done during the hackathon vs what was already done.

4. Node Gamification is a collaboration between Jerome Paradis from Buyosphere and George Peristerakis, researcher and LeSite developer. By writing simple rules, it’s possible to add a gamification component to an existing application. Simple user actions for instance would give points to a user who’d be pushed through a leaderboard — an interesting ux pattern to encourage good behaviour in a web app.

Jerome Paradis said it’s a system that they want to develop at Buyosphere, and could by used by other startups like wavo.me. Judges said though that the service would be better architectured as a SaaS service

5. LiveChat. is by LastRose. Like many developers at the event, it was his first nodejs project. As opposed to popular live chat systems using a database or a file text, LiveChat is using epxress, and allows the user to have multiple 1 to 1 chats. Groups are also implemented. Needless to say, it was impressive to see a fully developed system in just one day.

6. Orgnz.it was one of the two biggest teams (the other one being BrainTripping)… Orgnz.it gets your shit done, collaboratively. In its current state, it’s a spreadsheet with a conversation element added to each cell, making it a super powerful tool to track to-dos.

Orgnz.it uses socket.io, mongodb and node. While the core of the system was already done a while ago, the team really got together saturday to give the app some meat & bones. Marc-Antoine Ross (@MarcAntoineRoss) said they’re also working on a google spreadsheet script, and also on columns with data types.

It’s great to see an immediately usable product. The judges had an interesting comment though — what if orgnz.it provided an extension or an API so that it adds features and functionality on top of existing tools, instead of competing with users’s existing tools?

7. Twitter Wave js lets you see what people are typing, before they even click on the Tweet button. It’s one of those creative what-if apps that amused everyone at the hackathon and provided a fun demo. The team learned a lot during the hackathon and worked its way with all the libraries.

Twitter Wave is Nicolas Lupien, Kim Pettersen, and Benjamin Boudreau. Thanks to all 3 to making the trip all the way from Sherbrooke!

8. Logizo Web is Alex Angelini‘s project, a Live log from a distributed system. You can track different local and server logs. Other cool features includes live updates, and search. It uses socket.io and backbone

Thanks to everyone for coming to the hackathon and congrats for all the work.

Thanks to RadialPoint, Cloudops, Wavome, and Joyent for sponsoring.

Thanks also for Kolabria, Team Up and Founderfuel for helping co-organizing. Have a look of what they are offering!

And last but not least, thanks to the amazing community (MTLStartupTalent team, FringeDev, 10gen, github, MontrealTechWatch )

A few links for reference:

• #hackmtl on github
• there’s also a new facebook group for everyone’s who’s been to the hackathon and who would want to follow up with their projects. Will probably gather every developer who wants to work on new technologies (NLP, scala, node, virtualization etc.), outside the silo-ed startup community,
• #hackmtl on twitter

Une page spéciale conçue pour développeurs permet le téléchargement de données concernant les trains de banlieue, spécialement les horaires et aussi la géolocalisation des tracées. Avec ces données, on peut concevoir des applications qui permettent de calculer des trajets, que ce soit uniquement en train, mais aussi en conjonction avec d’autres moyens de transport, comme le vélo ou la voiture.

En parallèle, on parle aussi de certaines données qui seraient ouvertes par Bixi lors de #TranspoCampMTL, le hackathon prévue ce jeudi à la Maison du développement durable, qui veut rassembler tous les développeurs. Le hackathon se veut aussi ouvert aux designers d’interfaces et aux idéateurs. Allez voir la page de l’événement, quelques pistes sont proposées!

Déjà la fin de semaine passée, une équipe de développeurs s’étaient donnée rendez-vous à Station-C pour travailler sur OpenTripPlanner, avec des versions pour le web et pour Android.

Avec Open Trip Planner, on peut planifier un trajet en vélo, en tenant compte des paramètres comme l’élévation ou le niveau de danger. On a pu voir la démonstration pour San Francisco, et ils veulent proposer les mêmes fonctionnalités bientôt pour Montréal. Il ne manque plus que les données de la STM pour le métro et l’autobus pour développer un planificateur complet de trajets!

RSVP: http://hackathonmtl.eventbrite.com/

In about 10 days, beginners & advanced nodejs users alike are invited to a nodejs workshop and hacakthon.

Schedule
- Friday Dec 16th: Workshop
5.30pm: registration + drinks
6.00pm: Christian Joudrey @cjoudrey, fringedev: “Building your first Node app with Express & Connect”
6.20pm: Cloudfoundry demo, with Ian Rae  @ianrae and Will Stevens @willkite from cloudops
6.40pm: James A Duncan @jamesaduncan, nodejs and Joyent
7.00pm: Gabriel Lespérance @GabLesperance, wavome: RocketJS framework presentation
We will have then the workshop, Q&A, help setting up modules, setting up dev environment, up until 9.00pm

- Saturday Dec 17th Hackathon
9.00am: breakfast with tasty bagels!
9.30am: hackathon begins
12.00: lunch by ChefCallOnDelivery
5.30pm: hacakthon ends, each team or individual presents
6.30pm: each judge give technical review of each project. The winner (or winning team) gets a $300 gift card from Futureshop.

Judging
We have 3 expert judges who will each provide thoughtful feedback on your day’s work

• Gabriel Lespérance, wavome
• James Duncan, CTO joyent
• Ian Rae, CEO cloudops

Logistics

Coffe, food and beer will be provided during the workshop and the hackathon. Notman House will provide the space and also wireless. Joyent will provide hosting. Cloudops will help you deploy. Just bring your laptop!

Web Applications
Entries should be publicy accessible web applications. It’s hard for judges to fairly evaluate entries that require compilation or setup. Extra points will be given to applications with the code available on github.

Web services, APIs, Libraries
We encourage use of third-party web services and their APIs (e.g. Facebook, twitter, Google maps, Montreal open data). Everyone loves mashups.

Libraries and modules that are freely available are allowed and encouraged. During judging, please list all libraries that you use to give credit.

Ownership and Open Source
The code you write is yours. If you intend to share it after the competition, you can pick whatever license you love. We encourage contestants to open source their code, but it’s totally up to you.

Sponsors
This event has been made possible thanks to the generous support of wavo.me, CloudOps, and Joyent

Visit wavo.me, a new founderfuel graduate and funded startup, looking for part-time and full-time developers.

Embrace the cloud with CloudOps: migrate, optimize, and run cloud-based applications.

Credits
Organizers: Conor Clarke, Wavome, and Heri, MTLStartupTalent and MontrealTechWatch
Made in special collaboration with FringeDev
Thanks: NotmanHouse for hosting the event

RSVP: http://hackathonmtl.eventbrite.com/

Demain soir, un atelier citoyen est organisé au café l’artère coop, 7000 avenue du Parc, avec 4 intervenants principaux: Karl Dubost (blogue), Diane Mercier, de la Ville de Montréal, Sébastien Pierre, un des 4 fondateurs de MontrealOuvert, et André Trépanier, intervenant social dans le quartier Parc Ex.

L’atelier commence à 19h et l’atelier est ouvert à tous. Au programme, pas de design ou de développement de nouvelles applications, mais une refléxion et des discussions sur ce que ces nouvelles données et nouveaux outils peuvent apporter à chacun. Les organisateurs de l’événement font aussi un parallèle (à demi-mots) avec le mouvement Occupy et le thème de la corruption, présentant le mouvement des données ouvertes comme une chance pour le citoyen de rétablir l’équilibre des pouvoirs.

Voir l’événement sur Facebook.

Samedi dans la journée, un autre événement est prévu, nommé #hackmtl 3.1. Ce rassemblement se veut la suite logique du dernier hacakthon: puisqu’une journée est nettement insuffisante pour développer une application de données ouvertes, on propose aux équipes et aussi à toute personne de travailler, améliorer, et aider les projets existants. Au programme, on a remtl.ca (qui veut suivre les sites décontaminés et contaminés à Montréal), Kof kof (qui propose aux montréalais d’avoir une alerte si la pollution aérienne dépasse un seuil critique), mamairie.ca (qui vous donne les informations de base à propos de vos élus ainsi qu’une suivi des nouvelles de presse), et d’autres comme le fameux openparliement.ca qui vous permet de suivre ce qui se passe à Ottawa.

#hackmtl 3.1 sera ce samedi et se passera à Station-C, 5369 bvd St-Laurent, et comme les événements passés, l’entrée est gratuite (contribution demandée si vous voulez à manger)