BookOven, a startup by fellow Montréalers Hugh McGuire and Stéphanie Troeth, under development for the past year, launched an alpha version last week, with one simple feature showcase. It allows anyone to edit excerpts of an author’s work, also called by BookOven bite-sized edits.

It’s usually a short sentence, presented in the work’s context, and the user is given the opportunity to submit an improved edit. As soon as this is finished, another edit is presented to the user.

I find the mechanics used by BookOven to be similar to HotOrNot, where the visitor gets a few seconds to submit his/her thoughts to the system, which would then give a crowdsourced feedback to a user-submitted picture. Obviously, BookOven works also along the same line as Librivox or Wikipedia. Those online destinations bet on building a fanatical user base bringing user-generated content, rivaling quickly with more established entities in results quality. Wikipedia is free though (as in free beer and Free Software), so it would be interesting to see how users would see themselves contributing to a commercial work.

As the BookOven blog suggests, this is only one of the final product’s feature, which would ultimately give the opportunity to anyone to submit their litterary work, and publish it on BookOven.

I wouldn’t dare to comment if BookOven would actually revolutionize the book publishing industry or not. It’s of course a compelling alternative to traditional publishers. But the service would also need to be able to gather readers to make it interesting to its customers. I couldn’t also get myself to continue to use the service; the service obviously caters to writers, and also the Wikipedia/Librivox contributors work, none of which I never participated in. If you fit that description, I invite you though to try out the service. It has a wonderful user interface, as well as a dedicated team which am sure would love to answer to your feedback.

BookOven is funded by MontrealStartup and is based in the “no-name” shared startup space

Gigdoggy has unveiled a new version of its service last week, nicknamed Fanteraction™ release. It comes up with a new music blog, written remotely by a sound engineer, and of course the Fanteraction™ mobile platform, which allows music bands to interact with their fans during gigs.

Strangely, the blog post announcing the release is very sparse on the product’s features, namely on the why and the design of the system, and I’ll try then to decode what the creators of the service wanted behind the service.

I think it’s fair to assume that the creators were thinking about every music fan having mobile smartphones at hand when going to shows, at least in the near future. The music fan would click through pages to find out about upcoming songs and features, comment & tweet about performances. There’s also a tune downloading feature (which would be the monetization path).

The scenario above can be found easily in barcamps and startup conferences, with digital natives finding out very easily (and on their own) if there is any online information about the current speaker, only if you give them some kind of Internet connection. I am not sure how it plays out for the casual fan. Picture this in a standard Francophofolies show, where GigDoggy would be able to display an url to invite fans. Would fans & casual listeners tune in? Would they spend a few minutes to go through the information online? That’s a lot to ask imho, unless the band asks specifically for it.

That’s where the application seems lacking in polish. One can see the core of the product & the vision, but there’s still a lot to do in terms of presentation and working on edge cases.

I also understand it’s a new service, but I would have expected much more interaction and marketing for the service. I’d love to hear how this plays out vs other music portals and platforms such as myspace. I’d love to see a more dynamic homepage where you would see activity coming from bands. Also read: I’d love to love this service, only if it could give some material to give me the reason to.

At last week’s OSCON conference event, Evan Prodroumou won an award from Google and O’Reilly Media for his work on identi.ca and the laconi.ca platform.

OSCON is by far the conference with the biggest profile in the year; and it’s a statement well-deserved to Evan’s magnificent work on the laconi.ca platform, which has now reached 7.000.000+ “dents” and 60.000 users.

Google and O’Reilly Media, the co-organizers of the conference awarded Evan, as well as other open source/Free Software leaders, such as the people behind Drizzle, PostgreSQL, etc. The award is given to individuals who innovated in open source and lead by excellence

Evan can be proud of himself; he’s in many ways a model for entrepreneurs and hackers alike, proving that all you need is a laptop and a spot in a co-working space somewhere in the world (ok that was maybe stretching it a little bit, but not so far from the truth…)

Ça venait de @jeanlucs lundi.

Oui encore une fois, un article qui n’a rien à avoir avec la technologie, et qui n’a rien à avoir avec Montréal, mais comme je suis en plein dans le marketing ces jours-ci, on a l’impression de se regarder dans un miroir, surtout la séquence dans la salle de contrôle.

Probablement une vidéo qui va être encore plus vrai dans 6 mois, comme je sais que le buzz et le marketing viral peut maintenant être contrôlé et généré.

Felipe Coimbra released last monday twtBizCard, an add-on service which allows twitter users to exchange business contacts with replies, a virtual handshake if you like.

The story is not so much about twtBizCard. Of course, the idea is interesting, since after all, LinkedIn does 15 million uniques a month. But for me, your twitter profile is already your business card in itself, with its quick bio, website, and also features for sending replies and messages. Meet someone, add to twitter, keep in touch, exchange tweets, and you’ve done already so much more than what a simple business card can do.

So why did I write this entry on MontrealTechWatch? Well if you go through twtapps’s history and if you know Felipe Coimbra, you realize that twtBizCard is actually the 10th Twitter application in 5 months, which makes it about 2 new twitter applications every month. And you know that with that speed of development, twtapps is bound to get the jackpot, at one point of another. twtpolls, twtvite, all of those are already well trafficked, but I’m sure there will be one which will get massive traffic.

In comparison, a heavyweight app like TechEntreprise, or any other web app managed by n-person teams, seem to be developed in slow motion. One could argue that those “traditional” apps have more stickiness, user data history, and rich interfaces, etc. but developing twitter applications undeniably has a big advantage in release cycles and as a result, in overall products risks. Felipe Coimbra might not even be optimizing for stickiness: just view the quick description, and click a button to interact with the app, and voilà, you’re back to twitter. Those quick, short burts of interactions might be the future of web applications.

Interestingly, Felipe also makes I-stats, a real-time web analytics software. I’m assuming Felipe relies on those detailed data to do optimization and maximize metrics such as user interactions through split tests for instance.

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.

Service notice: apart from montrealtechwatch.com, you can also see more of MTW at:

• with the Facebook page (photos, videos, and events etc.)
• on Twitter @mtw (typically highlighting interesting links of what’s done in Montreal and in other geographical areas)
• and on LinkedIn (not sure yet, but most probably jobs and other more professional related networking)
• plus of course TechEntreprise
• There’s also (light) activity on an identi.ca mtw group (thanks to Sarven C for the reminder)

Don’t also forget all the other people around, such as Yves Williams, Austin Hill, Sylvain Carle, StartupNorth, the guys at MSU, Ben Yoskovitz etc.. MontrealTechWatch don’t post enough of all the great things happening in Montreal, especially in the past 3 months, so I’m inviting you to connect, go on Twitter, lend a hand at events, and do what you can do for the community.

There are 6 “big” upcoming tech events in Montreal this upcoming week, one of the busiest weeks in recent times. Either you’re in marketing, in development, in social media, or into startups, there’s an event for you this week to meetup.

A group of programmers and developers from the SAT are doing Code Forum monday 4th. It’s an open event for all Montréalers, with the event format modeled after unconference principles.

Felipe Coimbra, the instigator behind TwtApps, is doing a NewTech meetup this upcoming Tuesday.

NewTech meetups are opportunities for startups and new projects to showcase a new piece of software or a product.

There’s a potential problem with the venue, and Felipe is looking for a space to replace Laika. If someone has a potential solution, do contact him.

Wednesday evening, Yulblog gathers Montreal bloggers in its first wednesdays meetup in may

StartupCampMontreal edition 4 is Thursday at the SAT. So far, StartupCamps are the events which gathers the most tech people in Montreal, with an attendance well beyond 300, for an evening of presentations and pitches by 5 startups. Selected startups to pitch the audience are Control Yourself, SiteZoogle, PraizedMedia, Klaxa, Twtapps.

Sylvain Carle is also doing an early session, with a more open format.

In the same day, php Québec is also holding a very interesting evening for php programmers: Rencontre php Québec at ETS. 1 presentation about the Facebook API, and 1 presentation about Atomik, an easy framework.

Also, of interest: Charles Sirois (TeleSystem, Enablis) and Robert Calderisi (World Bank) will present their views on entrepreneurship & africa at a Fraser Institute event, on May 7th.

Things have been busy, but there’s now a new feature:

Technology Map of Montreal [@techentreprise]

This map is replacing the map found on MontrealTechWatch here. It was a popular feature for MTW, but as a google map, it required manual updating, a time-consuming and opaque process. John Beales helped by providing a more interactive map, but I always wished companies, venture funds, consultants, and anyone else would add themselves to the map, and change details.

All of this is now possible at TechEntreprise. If you want to be on the map, and want to be seen by entrepreneurs, startups, developers, designers, angel investors, VCs, incubators, add your project / company / organization to the map.

And as a sidenote, it also allows me to know about new ventures, such as David Usher’s deqq or challengeyourworld which were discovered somehow weeks [unfortunately] after their launch.

Is it due to spring? Is it due to the new budgets? Or is it because we’ve got to fight recession? There has been definetely a series of interesting posts lately:

• $5 Billion to end up in the hands of Canadian Entrepreneurs, Nothing Less by @chrisarsenault
• The Farm Team Problem by Rick Segal @jlaventures 
• Incubators, accelerators, and Ignition by @davidcrow
• Calling All Connectors, by @jacquimurphi 

All of those posts, especially the last 3, address the topic of technology entrepreneurs and the means needed to accelerate it in Canada. Chris Arsenault’s post focuses on “thinking big” and the upcoming opportunities, Rick Segal over at JLA and the Blackberry Partners fund wants a pool of VCs and angels to setup a special fund for proven entrepreneurs, David Crow lists all known entrepreneurs programs and ways on how to emulate it in Canada, and Jacqui Murphy, from Tech Capital Partners, wants VCs and successful entrepreneurs to ease connections.

As far as I recall, this is the first time that so many VCs write about this topic and bounce back the subject of accelerating tech entrepreneurship. From time to time, there were posts (like: A plan for digital Creativity in Quebec), by me, Austin Hill, Sylvain Carle, Montreal Startup, Jevon MacDonald or others mentioning the problem sporadically, and we’ve had then events, or blogs, or initiatives setup.

If there’s a post that I believe hits the right spot, it’s David Crow’s write-up. As Rick Segal points, TechStars or the YCombinator Startup School are proven programs to support and jumpstart a pool of emerging companies, with many of those companies now funded, profitable, with a handful already acquired. They’ve also put Boulder, CO and Boston on the map, so to speak, with the media, tech analysts, and investors flocking in during demo days and for the end of the program.