The last 3 weeks were quite calm on MontrealHackers.com since most of the hackers (including me) took some time off during these weeks. Nevertheless, here is a few interesting posts that I enjoyed reading during that time:

Jonathan Palardy explains how to use Bundler in a non-Rails app.

Jérôme Gravel-Niquet, the creator of Ostrich, gives a very interesting technical overview of his app. That covers the front-end and also the back-end of Ostrich.

Cedric Dugas explains how to apply a binary search algorithm in Javascript. Can be useful for seaching data in large arrays.

Rob Britton wrote another geeky post about fractals algorithmic: Introducing the L-Systems.

Good reading! See you in two weeks!

Feeling Software has released recently a new product, Omnipresence 3D Pro Design. It’s a software which allows security planners to view and optimize virtually camera placement.

I could explain the software with a full review, but this video is much more efficient

It’s interesting since when I met first the Feeling Software team when they were doing general 3D work, such as 3D graphics and modeling. They were already doing architectural work, but were not specialized in security. I find it’s a good example on how a company strategically realigns and refocuses, based on its forces and unique advantages.

Here’s a Q&A with Joshua Koopferstock (@Joshkoop), in charge of marketing at Feeling Software:

This seems to be the third product you are releasing since your “realignement”. Can u tell us more about the market and FeelingSoftware sales? Or at least sales objectives?

Feeling Software’s specialty has always been in 3D graphics and computer vision software. Since the beginning of 2009, we’ve been entirely focused on the physical security space, bringing in an expertise traditionally reserved for video games and simulators to this new industry. The three products we’ve released: Omnipresence 3D Security Platform (a Command and Control platform for security operations), Omnipresence 3D Pro Design (for security planning), and iGuard (a mobile surveillance application) complement each other well, and are part of the Omnipresence 3D product suite that we are continuing to actively develop. Our sales focus is on critical security facilities such as airports, universities, prisons, etc.

Can you name any names you can disclose (current customers)?

One client that should be familiar to all readers of MTW is the Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. They are deploying our Omnipresence 3D Security Platform as we speak, to allow them to conduct faster investigations of incidents, and react more effectively in case of emergency situations.

Fun question: Omnipresence could be tied up with facial recognition software. If the u.k. Governememt wants to sign with you to help monitoring its 10s millions of cameras and wants to track and find citizens anytime, is it technically possible?

Yes and no. Tracking people anytime, such as when they go into private areas like homes would be very difficult to do, not to mention undesired by almost everyone. There has been a lot of innovation with facial recognition in the past few years, and this is starting to be applied in some cases to identify people on Most Wanted lists, such as when they pass through the door of a train station or airport. I believe we’ll see an expansion of this technology to more public spaces in the next few years, as it is extremely useful for police when investigating crimes.

Oh, and the UK “only” has about 4-5 million surveillance cameras (see: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/factcheck+how+many+cctv+cameras/2291167)

I’m excited today to introduce Julien Desrosiers (@jdesrosiers), from MontrealHackers. Julien will contribute to a bi-monthly feature, with the best posts from Montréal developers from the aggregator Montrealhackers.

The series are much more technical-oriented than usual posts on MTW, but this is a feature that MTW has been lacking. I’m looking to bridge the different communities and developers is on top of the list

During the last two weeks there was some pretty interesting posts on the Montreal hacker blogosphere. Here is my personal “best of”.

There was François Beausoleil who published Mongo Explorer, his Cocoa application to explore MongoDB databases.

Rob Britton talked about fractals and explained an example algorithm. Cool stuff!

Stephane Caron created a pretty, pretty 3D effect using jQuery and a little bit of (safari only) CSS3 properties.

Cedric Dugas described how you can hack the loading time of your Javascript with a couple of neat tools like LABjs, Minify and Dynatrace.

And the Montreal ruby peeps are looking forward to see Rumblers joining the upcoming Rails Rumble, which will be in October. Give them a shout if you’re planning to participate this year!

Teralys Capital, the new fund of funds for Quebec and Canada completed the first closing of its fund last week.

Founders & Funders is holding two networking events to welcome Mr. Jacques Bernier & congratulate him on the closing of his new fund.

On Wednesday July 22nd interested entrepreneurs, VCs and angel investors can either purchase a pair of tickets for the John Cleese gala event at the Just for Laughs festival (cost is $375 for a pair of VIP tickets) to join the welcome cocktail and attend the gala show OR there is an option to volunteer to be in the Gala event which includes no cost, but requires the volunteers to rehearse with John Cleese and the Just for Laughs staff from 1:30pm-4:30pm on Wed. July 22nd, then these volunteers will watch the show from backstage and play a small role in the 2nd half of the Gala show that evening.

Details on the July 22nd Gala Event including tickets, registration for volunteer & VIP tickets can be found here.

On Thursday July 23rd interested entrepreneurs, VCs and angell investors can purchase a pair of tickets for the Lewis Black gala event as part of the Just for Laughs festival (cost is $375 for a pair of VIP tickets).

Details on the July 23nd Gala Event including tickets, registration for volunteer & VIP tickets can be found here.

On both evenings there will be a small cocktail reception from 4:30-6:30pm where Mr. Jacques Bernier will speak about the new Teralys Capital fund.

The next edition of MTEB, a bi-monthly breakfast for tech entrepreneurs, instigated by Ben Yoskovitz from Standoutjobs, is due June 9th at Boccaccinos, 1251 McGill College.

The event is sponsored by Nestor System and Sun Microsystems. It’s a great opportunity to chat and connect with another entrepreneur, angel, or a tech professionnal. Compared to StartupDrinks for instance, you will get time to know more someone and talk longer. Plus it’s a free breakfast, which is something you cannot refuse.

RSVP on Facebook. This is needed to plan for capacity.

For those on WordPress, there’s an upcoming camp this summer, here in Montreal. This follows the successful WordCamp Toronto.

WordPress has had a few interesting developments lately, namely the P2 theme, which turns it into a live-blogging/micro-blogging platform (see this for instance), as well as more elaborate products such as Buddypress, which gives it social networking features.

Of note, wordcampmontreal is looking for speakers, sponsors, venues etc. (hey at least there’s a website, I’m crossing fingers that this goes through, unlike BarCamps)

First day of the Web 3.0 Conference here in New York City where the name of the game is to be the biggest possible fish in the smallest possible pond, fast.

What is Web 3.0 ? About 100 attendees are gathered here to try to hammer out a convenient definition. Web 3.0 draws inspiration from the loosely defined beginnings of Web 2.0: 2.0 is Ajax, UGC, community and syndication, with APIs, mashups, angel funding, and Hawaiian-sounding domain names. So Web 3.0 ups the ante and fully embraces a fully effervescent sense of creative confusion: it is a machine-linked web of meta-tagged content arising from specified or behavioural semantic discovery, aggregated along the lines of your interests and/or social graph structure, but with heavy iron serving middleware functions, RDF, SPARQL, and few, if any, customer-facing interfaces, which you will actively use daily, because it will replace, yet support, extend, embrace, and completely annihilate the ordered chaos that is Web 2.0. That, and it will save you money. Excited ? You should be. It will change the world. Any day now. Got it ? The gift shop of the New Yorker Hotel is, perhaps not coincidentally, running out of Tylenol.

Let’s put the random Lego blocks apart though and take a look at what we can build with them.

Problem: Humans, whether they be your consumers or employees, have a fairly limited attention span borne out of a mind that is still by and large better adapted at understanding the Serengeti than it is at dealing with rivers upon rivers of disjoint information. As consumers, people tend to do the day-long web gerbil run: Facebook, blogs, e-mail, Twitter, planners, and back to the start again for one more spin of the wheel. They try to synthesize it all but can’t, so they run around looking hard for an elusive synthesis. As employees, they also have a lot of difficulty making sense of the torrential flows of information cascading through their senses, and face tighter deadlines and concentration-busting pink slips.

Solution #1: let the machines augment what they can do and know. Invent a new query language (SPARQL), to query random databases of unstructured information (which can be RDF, records of user behaviours, interests, and relations with other users), discover the links, synthesize it all, and feed it back the human. In other words, let the machine find the dots, link the dots, and understand the dots, and give you back the general outlines and dynamic trends of the whole picture. Who buys this stuff ? Right now: traditional media, health care providers, and intelligence agencies. If your business is to build, analyze, or enrich links, go see them now.

Solution #2: let the people remain confused, but use machine synthesis to analyze the memetic dispersal of ideas along the influence lines of social graphs, so you can sell them more goodies (including migraine medication). Who buys this ? Right now, advertising networks. If your job is to discover how information flows in a way that augments returns on advertising investments, run, don’t walk, to their doors now.

Solution #3: build microsites and streams that let you distill a whole domain of knowledge for users, web readers, managers and employees. Who’s very interested ? As of a few days ago, Google. Take tomorrow’s plane to Silicon Valley.

Why the rush ?

If there is something that many attendees seem to agree on, is that Web 3.0 is a giant zero-sum game. To win it, you must capture sectorial knowledge in such a way that nobody else can draw better analysis from it than you, possibly obviating the visibility of the sites that are the very sources of your data. When you do, the barrier to entry becomes vertiginously high: with every day that passes, your data gets refined and augmented at an accelerating pace; with every day that passes, wannabes lose ground to your accelerating momentum. Soon enough, you’ll be the biggest fish in the smallest pond, leaving no space for anyone else to grow.

You may agree or disagree on this. Not that I’ll be around to persistently debate either side of the issue tonight. You see, I have this gigantic headache, and there are quite a few more days of deep confusion ahead for us all.

Deux articles bien écrits dans Le Devoir aujourd’hui: La fracture numérique, Faire d’Internet un service essentiel, via @pgmartin.

2 phrases-clés cités de ces articles:

En cinq ans, le Canada est passé du 9e au 19e rang mondial en matière de technologies de l’information et des communications

…

Après avoir bombé le torse, au milieu des années 1990 avec un réseau de transmission de données numériques à l’avant-garde et des branchements au Web dont la rapidité faisait brûler d’envie le reste de la planète, le Canada n’a désormais plus les moyens de plastronner.

Le Québec et le Canada me font beaucoup penser à la France fin des années 90. Ce pays avait misé sur le minitel, une innovation technique (et commerciale) dans les années 80; mais avec pour résultat un retard certain dans les habitudes des français sur l’Internet et les services fournis par les entreprises, par rapport au reste de l’Europe, de l’Amérique et de l’Asie.

Au Canada, la construction des infrastructures télécom semble s’être s’arrêté dans les années 90. 10 ans plus tard, on a des réseaux CDMA (qui doit faire place au GSM), de la fibre noire non utilisée (deployé par Hydro-Québec et le gouvernement du Québec en 95), et peut-être aussi des modèles d’affaires à revoir, surtout au niveau de la tarification des services.

Pour reprendre l’exemple de la France, le gouvernement français a exigé la dérégulation, forçant France Télécom à ouvrir ses accès, et favorisant l’entrée de nouvelles compagnies innovateurs. Je pense à Free, Orange et tous les opérateurs maintenant qui offrent maintenant la quadruple play (TV numérique, téléphone, Internet, cellulaire au même prix d’une connexion internet ADSL au Québec)

Les 2 articles du Devoir concluent en évoquant les conséquences. Je me dit que dans un pays où on ne voit pas toutes les possibilités de connexion, il y a forcément beaucoup moins d’idées d’innovation, on se ferme la porte à des opportunités (ou on n’est même pas au courant…).

Interesting video showing a data center in Montreal operated by iWeb

I visited 2 years ago another iWeb data center; and what a change since then.

More videos seen here.

The recent Quebec provincial budget included a range of announcements that represent the most significant set of commitments ever done by any provincial government (or to my knowledge state government) to support entrepreneurship.   To help shed some light on the announcement and what it means for Canadian entrepreneurs, I asked my partner at iNovia Capital, Chris Arsenault to write a guest post for MontrealTechWatch – Austin Hill.

Disclosure: I’m on the board of Reseau Capital, Anges Quebec and MontrealStartup some of whom stand to benefit from this issue and I was involved in consultations with the government in the establishment of these programs.

$5 billion to end up in the hands of Canadian entrepreneurs, as a result of Québec’s support of Venture Capital initiatives nothing less!

Now that the dust is starting to settle down around the recent Québec government budget announcements, the high tech community is wondering what concrete actions will come out of what is believed to be the most important “commitments” ever done by any provincial government to date towards fully supporting the build-out of the entrepreneur’s ecosystem.

I feel confident that the recent Quebec initiatives (link to budget) will ignite a flurry of positive impacts that will solidify Quebec’s entrepreneurship foundation, and that we will see numerous successful companies be launched, existing companies be financed which otherwise would not exist or would not be able to further their development because of today’s economic downturn, yet many of these companies will prove to become tomorrow’s industry leaders.

Here are some highlights from the budget:

• $825M  for the creation of a privately managed fund-of-funds – to invest in a certain number of VC funds;
• $500M for a privately managed later stage fund – to invest in existing high growth companies;
• $125M for the creation of 3 privately managed seed funds – covering all sectors;
• $60M for existing FIER regional funds – as additional matching capital with private investors;
• And a 10-year provincial tax holiday for new ventures that commercialize research from a Quebec university or research centre.

So, what is so great with the above initiatives? Other than the obvious large amount of dollars that will be  flowing towards entrepreneurs old and new?

What is great, is the way all of the above is being delivered! First, it’s important to the that over the last year, Minister Bachand conducted many market and industry assessments, done by qualified individuals and the results were then compared to existing initiatives found elsewhere in the world. Many, if not most of the ecosystem key players (venture capital firms, fund of funds, private equity firms, angels, angels groups, Réseau Capital, CVCA, successful entrepreneurs, incubators, coaching and mentoring service firms, tech transfer offices… and so on) were asked to share their comments and recommend solutions. Finally, and most importantly, the above listed budget highlighted initiatives are being executed in partnership with the private sector and with the financial support of the existing Quebec government affiliated institutions with industry expertise such as the Fond de solidarité FTQ (FsFTQ), the Caisse de depot et de placement du Québec (CDP) and Investissement Québec.

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