Tourisme Montréal unveiled today a new version of their website, with a focus on slick videos and an innovative user interface.

I see the logic on producing videos, the featured video here certainly gives Montréal a modern/european/vibrant look. But I find the whole idea wrong on many levels.

There are lots to be said about the flash interface, which is reminiscent of the late 90’s era, when “designers” who felt much smarter than the rest of the population wanted to create their own user interface. But those user interfaces actually break people’s expectations and pretty much everything else. Here is one example how they broke the navigation at Tourisme Montréal:

It sucks to use flash for the user interface; for accessibility, usability, seo, and so many other reasons.

But my biggest concern is that the project is reported to cost Tourisme Montréal $1.5million, with the project work awarded to Sid Lee and Cactus. I can’t help thinking that the management team at Tourisme Montréal must have missed the train about user-generated content. We are in an era where everyone and their dogneighbor are gladly taking pictures and videos, remixing content, sometimes doing (very) stupid work, and sometimes producing gems with a quality beyond what you can get with a profesionnal design agency.

Compare this for instance to the Montréal network of public librairies which held a simple contest, asking Montréalers to send their own videos how they like librairies. (from fagstein) Here is the video that won the contest

I find this video as powerful as the one produced by Sid Lee; the main difference being that it didn’t cost the libraries a cent. And it isn’t the only good video, 93 other videos were submitted, uploaded to Youtube, and will certainly have a much greater impact on the long term than one proprietary non-embeddable video with fancy buttons.

For $1.5m, I can you list 10 other wonderful projects that could have been done, with a much better roi. But hey, I guess digital artists have to live.

There were a half-dozen keynote speeches yesterday, sandwiched between the day’s seminars, exhibits, and the sideshows of the unconference, and the evening’s libations and mixers around the offices of San Francisco notables.

Tim O’Reilly went on stage to repeat what Bob Metcalfe and others were saying over 12 years ago, that the network is really the computer. Tacked on were two side concepts. The first idea is an invitation to tackle large common-good projects so that even failing is contributive. The second is an interesting take on the market’s valuation of centralization (Facebook, Google, etc.) even as Web 2.0 is pulling the web towards decentralization (Open APIs, shared contexts, etc.). The end-result is that market-valued centralization will happen through interoperability. The unstated conclusions are interesting though; we can’t value or buy a share in inter-operating companies, unless through a mutual fund (assuming the companies are public) or a Yahoo-style consolidation (if not). Is centralization dressed in new clothes still the same old successful maid of yore ?

The most expected talk of the day was the announcement of Microsoft Live Mesh, a long-haul project built and hyped under the supervision of Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Once you take all of the buzzwords about collaboration and data synchronization out, you essentially get, as far as I can tell, a RSS-enabled shared folder with a public changelog and a programmable API. The first application of Live Mesh is one in which multiple devices can share preference and settings files (bookmarks, contacts, personal Windows settings, the kind of thing you get for a decreasing premium on certain USB keys) so that they are all using the same basic data (as long as they run Windows, although Microsoft promised wider support to a snickering audience). They claim over a hundred developers were assigned to work on this for two years. Taking into account the complexity of building shared-storage systems (instead of, say, collaborating with Amazon or acquiring the likes of Nirvanix), I wonder what the other 90 were doing.

By far the most interesting talk of the evening was a live stage interview with Max Levchin (PayPal, Slide). If you are running low on smart, well-articulated, incisive content, you can always count on Levchin to deliver. Max covered his early attempts at start-ups (4 of them until he found success with PayPal), but focused especially on the social entertainment software that is the core of Slide’s applet business. He went at length exploring the relationship between social actions and advertisers as a non-abrasive promotional vehicle; witness, for example, the addition of a wildly popular pregnancy test to be thrown at others in SuperPoke to coincide with the release of the movie Juno. He covered new ways to segment the market based on behavioral commonalities rather than demographics, an idea that the market analysts at an earlier Consumer 2.0 panel hinted at. Levchin then offered an interesting distinction between applets and traditional software: that applets draw on users’ wish to participate through one destination, made valuable through its character and popularity, unlike traditional applications which are meant to be chosen not for their intrinsic identity but rather for the predominance of certain features and qualities differentiating them from the feature lists of others; that this is what makes widget companies so valuable. Interspersed in the talk was a fourth idea on the lifecycle-prolonging value of widgets as the novelty of social networks erode. Good stuff.

CITIZENShift, an open platform by the National Film Board where all citizens are invited to contribute to a social topic, from blog posts, videos to podcasts, was distinguished as an official honoree in the activism category.

The Webby Awards are annual awards, where members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences choose the best of the web. They proclaim themselves as the equivalent of the Oscars for multimedia works.

CITIZENShift went through an overhaul at the end of last year, transforming itself from a group blog into a full-fledge open social platform. This selection is in a way a direct acknowledgement of the work done. Congratulations!

Greetings from very chilly San Francisco where the 2nd edition of the SF Web 2.0 Expo, organized by O’Reilly and Techweb, is going strong. Yesterday was the kick-off to the geeky celebration of all things surrounding social computing, with a full-day of seminars and demos for those willing to shell out a few extra bucks. Attendees could choose from a whopping 14 3-hour workshops during the day. The most promising of the morning track was a presentation by Vanessa Fox (the lady who organized and promoted Google Webmaster Central) and Nathan Buggia (Program Manager for Microsoft Live Search Webmaster Center) on “SEO-friendly web application design”: tons of tips and techniques to help search engines crawl, understand and index web applications and applets, as well as a list of dangerous pitfalls to avoid. There are pages and pages of great ideas taken out of this workshop, and you can get it all for free off of the private website janeandrobot.com (an already very valuable resource to be further enriched in the near future based on workshop participant questions).

The afternoon seminar was a promising one on making innovation happen on time. The fact that it was presented by an ex-Microsoftie is somewhat ironic (as it would be if the topic had covered bug-free code or open-source), but Scott Berkun has clearly learned from the depths of the trenches and came up with a toolbox of ideas and concepts useful for firing up innovative thought processes in teams larger than an entrepreneur and a few dedicated buddies (if you lead Facebook or a corporate MIS dev team, this one was for you; for startups the material beyond idea generation was academic). The “on time” part was a trifle thin on details (it was delivered in the last 20 minutes) and basically summed up to three ideas: account for weekends and natural downtimes when planning schedules, cut features before you get late on delivery instead of after, and build in a scheduling/design/experimentation dry-run stage before the start of any project to see how your expectations about tasks and times gel together.

The evening entertainment was an eye-opener. Held in Jamie Zawinski’s technodive-ish DNA Lounge, Ignite SF was a fast-paced Demo-like presentation platform where selected speakers could come and entertain the audience for 5 minutes on a topic of their choice; they were awarded 20 slides of presentation and usually not enough time to cover them all. Topics ranged from startups’ relationships to user commentary (metblogs.com), one lady’s particular love for giant Cloverdale-like monsters, Salim Ismail’s experiment with explaining startup growth through Pirsig-like metaphysics, Christian Crumlish’s hilarious take on social anti-patterns (the bit on how to send automated friend-plea rejection notices from social networks was priceless), an exploration of the open SMS-accessible digital signage around DNA lounge, and a few oddball speeches on successful interviews, the leveraging of your user base, and search engine optimization. The event was a bit like StartUpCamp but with more presenters and no experts, a lot less presentation time than at BarCamp, and a whole lot of hecklers droned out by the chatty crowd whose discussions were lighted up by the variety of topics at hand. This is great way to get to know local techies and entrepreneurs through a wide variety of quirky angles. It is also very fun — we should have this back home.

The Praized website was launched last year, when they announced a $1m investment by Garage Canada, and the product in itself was presented as a new way for people to find local places and merchants, thanks to “praizes” from other users.

Unlike the textbook way of launching a web product, it seems like Praized is experimenting new ways to market their web product. First, one of the thing they did very early on was associating the praized.com domain to a blog. This blog is being regularly updated with new articles, and getting new exposure, trackbacks, comments, thus establishing an online & authoritive presence about everything local, even though there was no usable product (to be more exact: they didn’t have a working product a few weeks ago). I found incongruous though that it’s a personal blog, by one of the co-founder, Sébastien Provencher, who seems to identify himself as Praized, on twitter and many other places. But what do you know, I am not an expert in internet marketing and certainly a little bit lost in all those “personal brand 2.0″ discussions.

Fast forward, the startup has installed last week their product in 2 websites where you can get a peek of what’s coming.

The first one is mocolocal, where readers of the mocoloco art/design blog are invited to submit their favourite places. The goal here is to leverage an existing, dedicated community and get them to discover “artsy” places.

The second one is web2places, a blog where attendees to the Web2.0 Expo can find top places and events in San Francisco. In fact, the co-founders of the startup have planned an expedition are attending the conference. Compared to mocolocal, they are using here a different tactic, which is linking generously to other attendees, events, and places; the objective that the community (the conference attendees) notices the website and it gets adopted, in a viral way.

You can even try out the system, by creating a user account at auth.praized.com; although I won’t probably be using it anymore as I am neither in SF or an art guy. Even if I were an art guy, I’d think the interface could be simplified. Or could have more pictures. Less of the “list” feel and more content where people could identify to. Because that’s the kind of thing one would be need to be convinced to check a place. But as I said, don’t mind, because I am not an art guy, plus I have no idea what final objective this application is trying to achieve.

Like me, you might have now more questions than answers, such as: is this a test to see what works and what doesn’t with the product? or are those 2 websites a test to see if they can grow organically an audience with the existing product? or is this the “real deal”? or is it the first steps to an elaborate strategy, where they have taken into account every factor? You have to give credit to Praized’s executive team by trying out new innovative guerilla marketing tactics. This is quite creative, and I am curious to see what they have in mind next…

Note: Thanks to Jevon McDonald for the inspiration for the title. We are indeed working towards a MontrealTechWatch 2.0, although the website will have a permanent “beta” status.

As posted earlier, I’ve taken a few steps back to consider what MontrealTechWatch means on the long-term. We’ve done an open meeting at Laika too last wednesday, many showed up, and there were lots of suggestions. Thanks to everyone who commented or went to the meetup!

I’ve found out that this was in fact related to the essence of “blogging” in general, and its viability. MTW is dedicated to a small (albeit very active) community, and its success relies on reporting about latest news and on relevant insights on what those news means, beyond simple facts reporting.

And that’s where the problem is. “Relevant insight” means you have to be an active actor of the industry, someone who innovates/designs/codes/markets products and then have the necessary background to give those insights. Which means blogging has to be restriced to a few hours, and can never be a full-time occupation.

I am sure this is a balance problem that many bloggers stumbles into, at a specific point of their lifespan.

My position on this is that I still want to contribute actively on MTW, but make no mistake, I will continue to design/develop/work on new innovative projects, and that’s not negotiable.

And my vision for MontrealTechWatch is a beacon of light, for technology and innovation, where entrepreneurs/hackers/students get inspiration and aspire to work on great projects.

Can the two visions/positions be compatible? Although I have no final answer, I’d like to think (for the moment) that it’s possible to do so.

A solution that rose during the last meeting was getting more actors of the “community” to contribute to the blog. See this for instance:

In this chart, there would someone taking care of developing MTW and all sorts of business-related/administrative stuff like getting partners, such as entrepreneurship centres or technology clusters, be it in Montreal or outside. This is not necessarily me, and I’m thinking about meeting a couple of persons here in Montreal who would rise to the challenge.

Then, there would be an core team of 3 to 6 persons, who contribute weekly/daily to MontrealTechwatch. Patrick Tanguay wrote about having clusters, and that what we’re going to have:
- a section about entrepreneurship/startups
- a section about technology events (democamps, blitzweekend, breakfasts, etc.)
- a section about mobile technology (mobile platforms, telecommunications, mobile computing etc.)
- a section about video games
- a section about hacking + open source, which would be dedicated to the coder folks
- a jobs section
- and ideally, also a guide section, where posts like “Web entrepreneurship for students” or any other resource would be published.
If you would like to be part of this “elite”/official team and if the vision of MTW appeals to you, shout an email at news@montrealtechwatch.com or tweet a direct message at @mtw

Ideally, there should also be at least one person who would write in French, although as I wrote earlier, it’s difficult to do so in technology.

Around the core team, every other member of the community that MTW is geared to will also be invited to contribute, whether they post specific articles on a solution they worked on, or report news that might have been overlooked by the core team.

Next, there are the active readers, people who subscribe or comment on articles.

Now, here are the next steps that will be worked on, in no particular order:

• getting UI improvements done on MTW to allow more interactivity and more user-generated content
• finding the project leader / executive person for MTW, - work with other organizations like Alliance Numeriq, TechnoMontreal, universities and other partners
• write and publish a chart / a “declaration” to clarify the vision and the objective behind MTW,
• moving the MTW to a dedicated server, and also get an official status for MTW and all of its activities
• work out the workflow for the groups/teams as described earlier and publish this.

Note: if a company want to be an official sponsor (such as sponsoring development, or sponsoring gear or any other activity), shout an email at news@montrealtechwatch

We are also launching startupdrinks next week, either wednesday or friday late afternon (stay tuned for the final date/hour). The goal is to gather everyone interested in startups to get over a drink at a bar. No schedule, simple, free, an open source event, I will talk about MTW, but you are free to talk about anything you want to whoever you want.

I hope this will give you a better understanding on the future of MTW. I know there are some things that should still be worked on, but as one says, it’s about the journey, not about the destination. So here’s hoping you will enjoy the ride…

This weekend at Station C, there was Coder’s Saturday, a conference/meetup/camp which gathered 30+ web developers. The meetup was a joint collaboration between the folks from Station C, Nurun and Yahoo Québec.

The event came up with the venue in town of Christian Heilmann, from Yahoo! UK.

He gave a insightful presentation about how web developers should work with web standards, and also about the challenges about web standards. Christian Heilmann also gave his input about web accessibilty and usability issues.

We also had Ara Pehlivanian, who talked about web2.0 development. He works for Nurun, and said it’s important to understand usage of HTML, javascript, and CSS when developing a website. Great advice.

Sarven Capadisli also talked about microformats, and how it will help machines understand human meaning behind web documents. I am working myself with other fellow Montréalers on a microformat project and it’s great to hear about other developers evangelizing microformats.

There was also a presentation about the Google Web Toolkit, which allows web developers to build AJAX apps by using the java language, and Christian Heilmann sealed the day by presenting the tools made freely avalaible to web developers by Yahoo!.

This was a good surprise for me. I didn’t expect all the high quality and insightful presentations. Hats off then to the organizers for Coder’s saturday.

More pictures

Patrick Tanguay introduces the conference.

Introduction by Karen Bennet, Director of Engineering of Yahoo! Canada (Toronto)

Attendees

In yet another dramatic but expected turn of events, Capazoo, the “black sheep” of startups in Montréal, has layed off all of its development team late last week. 60 developers, mostly .Net programmers, were asked to leave the premises immediately, and all that was left was a sysadmin to run the whole system. The official explanation was that it’s because of the legal problems between the Verville brothers. The judge refused to come up with a final decision and ruled that Capazoo’s shareholders should settle the dispute between the two co-fonders. But there was no settlement, and nobody is officially running the company.

Roberto Rocha also reports that there is now a “a louer” (to rent) sign in front of Capazoo’s offices, and I was also told that remaining employees were layed off Monday. There are also rumours that Capazoo is trying to shop itself, to a Toronto-based venture fund interested into acquiring the technology behind Capazoo.

For those who didn’t get the story, the Capazoo adventure was started 2 years ago. It was advertised by its founders to be the next Facebook, and the founders proclaimed they would reach $650millions monthly revenues. Soon, they managed to get funding from athletes and wealthy individuals, up to an announced $10.6 million. The fact though is that audience and revenues never came, probably because the “executive” team knew nothing whatsoever about technology and how to design and market a web product.

So here we are. Lots of talk, lots of money, lots of weird ideas and creative “marketing schemes” thrown around, and now the end of a local company … which, in my opinion, doesn’t even deserve a post on Montreal Tech Watch. But I guess we have to write down history and facts so as the next new entrepreneurs would learn the lesson.

Yesterday, Branchez-vous reported that it acquired 2 niche successful websites in Québec, fanatique.ca and humourquebec.com.

I didn’t write about it, as I knew Branchez-Vous’s overall strategy is to become the #1 media destination in Québec, and their tactic is to acquire regularly new web destinations, on a bi-monthly basis, and launch new advertising partnerships. One of the websites’s price tag was $65.000, and well, for me… that was it, it closed the story.

And I moved on. It’s hard to report such a story when you hear about Bebo’s acquisition price or Meebo’s valuation.

I just read however a post that brings a new perspective about this. Jean-François Dubé thanks Émile Girard, who was behind both websites.

J’aimerais le féliciter pour cette belle réussite mais j’aimerais surtout le remercier. Pourquoi? Parce que sans même me connaitre, Émile m’a donné un solide coup de pied dans le derrière en me faisant réaliser qu’il est possible pour un jeune entrepreneur du Québec de réussir dans ce domaine de fou.

Tout comme Émile, j’aurai bientôt 24 ans et j’ai la tête (et le laptop) pleine de projets. Sans le vouloir, il vient d’envoyer un gros “FUCK YOU” à tout ceux qui n’ont pas cru en moi jusqu’à maintenant et qui m’ont dit que je devrais entrer dans une grosse boîte avant de tenter de voler de mes propres ailes.

And there I understood that this is really a meaningful symbol for new entrepreneurs. Émile Girard started both websites in his early twenties, was a solo-entrepreneur, gathered an audience, and through passion, hard, relenteless work, he made a substantial amount of money from it. The fact that we are not talking about digg or reddit.com might be even more meaningful for new entrepreneurs: it’s easier for a Montreal/Quebec/Canadian-based entrepreneur to see him/herself in Émile Girard’s shoes than say, in Kevin Rose’s, of Digg.com fame.

And I agree with Jean-François Dubé. Stories like Émile Girard’s needs to be heard more often. Yes, it’s possible to start something in Québec. Be it a “small”, dedicated website like fanatique.ca, or something big, like standoutjobs.

And I am now starting now a new section on Montreal Tech Watch, called it Technology Entrepreneurs Stars, and it will be dedicated to local entrepreneurs who succeeded, be it from a successful IPO or an acquisition. If you know anyone who fits there, feel free to comment and email at news@montrealtechwatch.com

In addition to the Mobile Developer Meetup, Station C is hosting “Coder’s Camp” on Saturday, focusing on javascript, AJAX and usage of APIs. As Patrick Tanguay explains, the folks at Station C took advantage of Christian Heilmann coming in Montréal to organize a mini-barcamp:

Christian Heilmann, a well known web developer (Yahoo! UK) who’s written for many respected online publications will be in Montréal end of March, we’ll use the occasion to hold a mini conference centered around javascript, Ajax and APIs. In collaboration with Nurun and Yahoo! Québec, the “Coder’s Saturday” will be held Saturday March 22nd at Station C and will start at noon with a light lunch and a chance to meet everyone.

Other than Heilmann, 3 other presenters are already programmed, we are looking for 4 other subjects to present. Contact us if you are interested but first, register to the event if you want to attend, space is limited to 30 lucky people. (it’s a free event)

If you are developing a “web2.0″ application, then Coder’s Camp is right up your alley. Registration is free, but limited to 30 places. And as I write this, there are only 13 spots free.