Here are long overdue updates to Montreal Tech Watch:

• Updated “about” page with current and past contributors listed. I’m expecting to have the bio of past contributors on that page at the end of this week.
• Events listed on MTW are now taken directly from TechEntreprise, on the events page, instead of using the old gmail/google calendar hack. There’s an iCal feed (http://techentreprise.com/Montreal/events.ics) where people can subscribe and add to their desktop or mobile phone calendars. The major thinking for this is that anyone can add an event on TechEntreprise, and given that the event gets enough “recommendations” from other members (it’s actually approximately 6), the event gets on the main feed. If you have an event to promote, no need now to email me or news@montrealtechwatch.com, just put it there, and if it’s interesting, it will find its way on the MTW homepage,
• The “found” column on MTW is now taken directly from the news section, instead of using tumblr. Again the thinking is the same: anyone can write a post on TechEntreprise, and given that it gets enough recommendations, it will get on the main feed, like at digg.com. 
• Directions to submit a job is now at TechEntreprise too. Submit a job listing in this section. For those who wish to get them on MontrealTechWatch, I’ll get back to you. Again, this is to save time for both parties, as the system is automated on TechEntreprise, whereas it was mostly a manual process on MTW.

All of these updates should make Montreal Tech Watch more dynamic, since members can now make their events & announcements appear on the homepage, with the approval of the community, and without me having to go through everything in Montreal. 

This is very important; as I stated in past posts, the biggest problem I face is lack of time, having to race between requests, events, and work in Montreal. With this new system and the help of TechEntreprise, members of the Montreal Technology community have now each a voice, and a place to get things and projects organized.

I hope you’ll try out the new updates; it’s up to you to be an actor of a vibrant Montreal Tech community.

And for help or feedback, do not hesitate to leave a comment or use the feedback feature on TechEntreprise.

Also, the Technology map of Montreal is also going to be updated this week, as announced previously

One of Akoha’s inherent charm is how it manages to tie an offline game with an online component. It gives much more meaning to the service, and certainly a better experience for members of the website.

One of my current ideas right now is to be able to print business cards-like from this section of TechEntreprise. So you sign up there, fill in a few information, and afterwards you could get a “member card” that can be used for local events, with details about what’s your profile (a web programmer, a designer, an investor etc.), and what you’re looking for. Other ideas:

• show the username so people can hook up with you just after the event,
• have color codes on the avatar depending on your profile,
• list projects you’re working now currently etc.
• being able to print on different kind of papers (such as a special color for a special category of the website’s members)
• being able to completely automate it (and not spend hours printing one business card)

Now, I’m vaguely aware that one can get sheets of blank business cards-like at a store like at Staples, and then print them from your laptop with a normal printer; but from my perspective, you need special software plus they do have a fixed size for the business cards.

Does someone here have experience in these sort of thing? what kind of setup is needed (such as what kind of printer)? Is it possible to print it with the HTML or TechEntreprise will have to render it in PDF?

Thanks for any feedback :-)

I’m about to update the Technology Map Of Montréal. It was done a year ago, but since then, new people came to the scene, new startups rose, while others left to do something else. If you are interested into being in the map, or update the details, now is the time to leave a comment with details. I’m also collecting suggestions on making a better, usable map [and most likely, improvements and functionality should be integrated here at one point or another]

Thanks!

Kudos to Ashkan Karbasfrooshan’s watchmojo, one of the biggest web video producers in the world, which announced they’ve reached viewership of 33,333,333. Ashkan has obviously a sense for communication and show. I’m sure he’s could work in the PR department of General Motors and still find a way to put a positive spin on things:

It took the company two and a half years to reach the milestone. To put the 33 million figure into perspective:

• Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird and One Hundred Years of Solitude have all sold 30 million copies since being published in 1936, 1960 and 1967 respectively.
• Nintendo has sold 30 million Wii consoles since 2006.
• The Grand Theft Auto video game series have sold 30 million copies since launching in 1997.
• The average Friends or Seinfeld episode and the finales of American Idol garnered around 30 million viewers each.
• Each year at baseball stadiums, 30 million hot dogs are eaten.
• Each week, 30 million people visit Starbucks.
• Canada, Uganda, Morocco and Algeria each have just over 30 million inhabitants.

The media group Transcontinental launched last Thursday weblocal.ca, which as the name suggests, is a local search website for Canadians wanting to find local businesses. 

Transcontinental launches regularly new web destinations, be it web magazines, blogs and portals, in 14 different vertical markets. Weblocal is different though from their previous projects since it allows users to sign up, review + recommend businesses, tag them, as well as upload pictures and photos. It also has a mobile version.  Lots of user-generated content then, which puts weblocal in the same category as other websites such as monavis.ca or praized.

Searching for places gives the user a classical list of nearest places matching the search keyword. If there were options to sort search places by most recommended places, I haven’t seen it. Of course, I don’t know the perfect formula for local search websites, but so far weblocal leans more towards a classical directory like yellowpages than a website which takes advantage of user-submitted content to provide more relevant results.

As stated earlier, it’s a crowded space. Right now, if I’d want to find hang out at a good place with a good experience, Praized shows places which has been “validated” by your network, while monavis (a Yelp clone) provides a list of places reviewed by the “crowd”. Of course Weblocal is just launching; and they do highlight that the website is targeted to local communities, so we’ll wait a little bit before giving a final verdict.

I’ve bumped into SeeYourHotel a while ago, when they listed the url on the 1st startupcamp montreal wiki. At that time, it only looked like a very simple Google Mashup, with pins for hotels. They had data for a few Canadian cities, as well as Paris, with video guides of selected hotels. Overall though, it looked more like a experimentation, so I didn’t mention it on MTW.

Fast forward, and it now looks like a solid and useful website. Other sites like TripAdvisor or Expedia err on providing exhaustive information to travellers, such as key places, activities, user-reviewed places, flights, etc. etc. SeeYourHotel on the other hand does only one thing: let you see through the list of hotels, select a few & compare them, with pictures and videos of the hotels.

Compared to the initial debut of the website, they don’t produce videos anymore but get videos and pictures from other websites such as youtube or flickr. Of course, the mapping technology also relies heavily on Google Maps, which makes SeeYourHotel the quintessential web2.0 / mashup site.

When you finally choose a hotel, reservations are handled by hotels.com which gives them referral fees for successful reservations. The business scheme is so simple and one of the most elegant one could hope for.

YourSeeHotel is made by Jean-Francois Noel and Vincent Desjardins, from a joint venture named 3rd Crust, a company based in Quebec city.

Last week, RailsRumble ’08 was held, with programmers invited to team up and launch an application within a weekend. As the name suggests, it’s targeted to Ruby On Rails programmers, the framework known for its rapid development. The organizers had an array of servers provided to the teams, which could be used to deploy and host the applications. 

You can see the list of applications on the event’s page, and what suprised me is that this year, many teams did manage to actually have a running website at the end of the end. A few of them (looking at the entries from intridea for instance) even looked like your standard web2.0 startup. For me, this does prove that technologies like Ruby On Rails has reached their maturity point (also read: mainstream)

In Montreal, a team named GiraffeSoft, with James Golick, Daniel Haran, webmat, and François Beausoeil created the application What Does This Error Mean, which allows Ruby On Rails programmers to get insight from other programmers about application errors. I see it as mix between GetExceptional, FiveRun’s TuneUp, and Marc-André’s refactormycode

The second team from Montreal, named the Webeppis, with Benjamin Jørgensen and Gordon B. Isnor, did Comical, a website for comic artists and their fans.

Both applications obviously need a little bit of finishing touches, but it’s still impressive to know that all work were done in just one weekend. Incidentally, a service provider named HashedRocket took the concept to reality last year, promising their clients to build a web application in under 3 days. Working under these conditions require a very solid methodology (XP and agile development); and good if not great developers.

One of my most memorable experience was studying two years here. No, it wasn’t due to the lush environment, nor the crazy melting pot of international students, but because of the never-ending hard work and competition. And by hard, I mean solving impossible problems everyday. I never broke any sweat before, as things always appeared so easy; but there, everyone was as smart and as capable, if not more.

The concentration of talent, and the mix of work, projects, and deadlines did push me to the limits. Everyone thought the same way, and at the end, we all longed for it to finish. 

I also recalled this back at Blitzweekend. We gave a deadline to teams, we had the most motivated entrepreneurs, designers and developers in the Montreal area, and we also had a great setup which favored communication, and of course hard work, which resulted into applications, software, and in a few cases, businesses at the end of the weekend.

Now, the point about this article is now to tell about my experiences, but to tell how environments can work for you, or against you.

In both stories told above, the environment did push us to our limits, by seeing peers coming up with innovative new ideas, by watching people working relentlessly on projects, all in a friendly but intense competition. You’d walk in at those moments, and you’d start doing something, even if you had doubts.

In our case, much has been written about places like Silicon Valley or the Boston area, the Meccas of technology entrepreneurship with all the necessary universities, the money and the energy etc.

Now, I can’t really do anything about money or universities, although we do get a fair share in Montreal, but I believe we can do something with the last part, energy. 

Currently, there are all the ingredients one could imagine in the city, from events, supporting experts, VC and angel funds, places, technology groups, conferences and hackfests, plus star technology companies. But as far as I can tell, there are still a few things which are very hard to do, such as finding co-founders for a new technology company, or asking questions to the community, or as mentionned previously, an environment capable of showing the energy and giving support for engineers, entrepreneurs, developers alike, everyday. 

At one point, MTW did the job. I had back then the time, and could spend a few hours here and there to connect people, ask and encourage a few guys to continue their open source projects or would-be startups, hold startupdrinks, and even contribute to a team, whenever possible. The model was not scalable though, as one can guess. 

So here comes TechEntreprise

The network is meant to create the same sort of energetic environment that would push you to excel, connect, work, and innovate in technology. If you want to meet people and publicize an event, go there. If you want to see what’s up with marketing experts or python developers in Montreal, it’s going to be there. If you want to find help and post jobs, then it’s also going to be there. If you want to talk about your new shining software, then yes, it should be there too. 

The promise is to create a strong, dynamic technology community in Montreal, and possibly in other places too. Quote from the website:

We bet that Montreal can become a technology centre, and believe that TechEntreprise can be a key resource and platform for this to happen.

Here is also a few Q&A for the unavoidable comments:

- Does this impact news and blog posts in Montreal Tech Watch?
No, not at all, MTW is going to be about the results, such as new products or covering events, whereas what you’d see in TechEntreprise is more about the process of building these products. So MTW is going to operate the same way. 

- Is this serious?
it’s not complete and there are lots to be done, but yes, as serious as it can be, and much more serious than any other “feature” or announcement done previously here. the word “beta” would be suited here, although I can’t use since it’s overused. 

Here’s the 2nd part of the interview with Philippe Gamache (Part 1 here). As stated previously, Philippe Gamache is opening Sensio Canada offices with a new training session due soon.

The web frameworks mentioned above were all released to the public and owned by its “developer community”. Symfony, in the other hand, seems to be tightly associated with the Sensio Labs Company. Do you see it as a threat since Sensio can orient the framework’s roadmap towards
their own private interests?

Sensio Labs is the primary sponsor of symfony, but its no way completely ties to us. There is programmer in the core team that comes from different companies, like Yahoo. In fact, many of their newer sites are made with symfony. Hundreds of plug-ins are made from people all around
the world.

Like I said before, open source projects work on the principle: I take and I give back. But sometime giving back is difficult. Let me explain. There are three generals trend is open source software: developer community, foundation base and company’s base. For some companies, the only way to give back is paying for the service.

Community base development usually lack some focus and programmers usually are doing this in there spare times and have a day job, or are already paid by a companies to give back.

Foundation base development, have more focus and you can pay them. But, because they don’t have any others means of funding, only a small part is actually give to full time development.

Companies base projects, usually have focus, bases on there clients. Sensio Labs had hundred of clients over the last ten years, those experiences drive symfony development. So when you what to give back with money, you give it by helping yourself again, at the same time:
training and professional consulting.

Sensio Labs are opening Sensio Canada this fall, the first office in North America. What are Sensio Canada’s plans? Are we going to see you in local dev events such as codefests or barcamps? Or it’s more about Enterprise support & consultancy work?

To be fare, the US office did open at the same time. Sensio Labs what to offer different services in Canada, that is usually divided in main areas of expertise. Audit and Consulting: benchmark, audit (technical, methodological), Open-Source expertise, and symfony certification. Integration and development: Customized solution providing (Internet, Intranet, e-commerce…) with Open-Source technology. Training: inter and in-company, symfony seminar (elementary, intermediate, expert,
hosting/operating). Technical assistance: expertise mission, training, technical assistance / development.

We will add a new area of expertise: security. I’m now working on some PHP security training and it should be available soon. There will do security audit at the same time.

Remember, symfony is an open source project, so we do participate to many camps. We actually already have a symfonycamp. But, I’ll be at the PHP Codefests, barcamps, etc. I’ll encourage any new employees to do the same. In fact, I’m working to revive the local OWASP chapters (Open Web
Application Security Project).

Do you have any examples of websites that used the symfony framework?

http://www.mobivox.com
http://delicious.com/
http://answers.yahoo.com/
http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/
http://www.Francesoir.fr
http://go.edgehill.ac.uk
http://www.housetohome.co.uk
http://www.marieclaire.co.uk
http://symfonians.net/

I met Philippe Gamache for the first time at a codefest (a phpquebec event); where he discussed web vulnerabilities and potential security problems. The discussions were focused on php, however I found his comments extremely insightful. He was then at MOBIVOX, a Montreal voip startup.

Things have changed since then, my rails application are much more secure :-) , and for Philippe, the big news is that he’s opening Sensio Canada Labs, here in Montreal. Sensio does a php web framework called symfony, very similar in nature to Ruby on Rails or Django. The framework started out in France, and due to its popularity, especially in enterprise environments, they have now plans for international expansion. I took then the opportunity to ask questions to Philippe, who is to manage the Canada offices and also launch training sessions.

This “interview” was done via the web, although we did catch up and discussed in detail about the symfony project at last week’s codefest.

Can you present yourself, your background, and also what has been your experience and involvement with the symfony project?

Wow, you begin by a tough one. My name is Philippe Gamache. I’m the office manager of Sensio Labs Canada. I’m a security consultant specialize in PHP security. I wrote a security book “Sécurité PHP 5 et MySQL” with Damien Seguy a PHP specialist.

Virtual communities were my first passion. I began playing with BBS in 1988. In 1989, someone introduce me to the Internet. At the same time, I discover (real) programming. I did some modification on my own BBS, and a pirate did try to attack us. So I did discover the importance of good security. With the introduction of BBS network like FIDONet, more and more attack came into play. So to understand how attacker where working, I did “infiltrated” some groups, working as an ANSI artist.

In 1992, I began bridging my BBS with Internet service like email and Usenet (news groups). BBS was losing traction, so in 1994, I did my first personal and professional website. It’s only in 1996 that I did my first virtual community. Now, I’m managing three such communities. Unfortunately, none of them are in symfony for the moment, but there is a test version for all of them, with symfony.

Over the years, I did work on many projects (mostly in PHP): web games, forums, cryptography, authentication systems, and more.

The move to symfony was a professional one for me. I was doing MOBIVOX website at the time. The web team was growing, and we needed to have a better working process. There where an others problem: website translation. We did have a translation process, but it was only good for Latin language, like English or French. We wanted to have Chinese. So, we look to find a new framework. We look different frameworks: Zend Framework, eZ components, Seagull, CakePHP, Solar and symfony. We looks at different points for each framework: technical qualities, easy of use, support and the community around it. Symfony did come first on each count (some where even with some others framework).

Open source projects work on the principle, I take and I give back. Because, I did like so much symfony, I work on moving my personal projects to it. So, how could I give back? Yes, there where some plug-ins that I’ll give back to the community, but I wanted something more concrete. So I imagine a project I call SecureSymfony. It’s basically a set of plug-in for different security concerns, like multi-factor authentication, cryptography and auditing.

Can you present quickly symfony and what it does? What would it bring to a company that didn’t use previously a tool similar to symfony?

Symfony is a full-stack framework written in PHP5. It provides architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. The very small number of prerequisites make symfony easy to install on many configuration; you just need *nix or Windows with a web server and PHP installed. In addition, it has a very small overhead, so the benefits of the framework don’t come at the cost of an increase of hosting costs.

Using symfony is so natural and easy for people used to PHP and the design patterns of Internet applications that the learning curve is reduced to less than a day. The clean design and code readability will keep your delays short. Developers can apply agile development principles (such as DRY, KISS or the XP philosophy) and focus on applicative logic without losing time to write endless XML configuration files.

Symfony is aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context. This means that you have full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. Based on the premise of convention over configuration - the developer needs to configure only the unconventional. To match your enterprise’s development guidelines, symfony is bundled with additional tools helping you to test, debug and document your project.

It is database engine-independent, using states of the art ORM (Object-relational mapping) like Propel and Doctrine. The code is very readable using phpDocumentor comments, for easy maintenance. It is easy to extend, allowing for integration with other vendor libraries

New users join the community every day, and that makes of symfony the most popular PHP5 framework around. A large community means easy-to-find support, user-contributed documentation, plug-ins, and free applications. The documentation is available in more that 15 languages,
and there is more that 200 plug-ins.

Why would anyone pick the Symfony web framework over other web frameworks such as CakePHP, Django or Ruby On Rails?

First it’s the programming language. PHP is available almost everywhere and it’s very easy to install. Symfony is using the PEAR platform, so installing it is easy as writhing two command lines.

Symfony is based on experience. It does not reinvent the wheel: it uses most of the best practices of web development and integrates some great third-party libraries.

Then it’s scale better that the others frameworks, and because it’s lightweight, don’t need to scale as soon as others frameworks. Because we do co-operate with many of them, I’ll keep away from doing direct comparisons.

Then there is the community. It’s a great community that helps out, does new documentation every day, translates existing documentation, and produces news plugs-in almost every day. Like I said at the beginning, we didn’t choose some frameworks because of the community. Some of them are in constant war.

And, last but not least, commercial support. It’s very important for some companies, and there is hundred of companies doing it, in almost every countries.

The part 2 of the interview will come up soon, with details about Sensio, symfony and plans for Canada.