And what's a startup anyway?

There is a debate currently at yulstart, the wiki guide for startupping, about what kind of companies should be included. There is now a long list in the Montreal startups page, and we have now your exotic e-store, a web portal for boucherville, and even a web consulting company who inserted themselves in the list.

I am not worried for yulstart; it's a wiki so things should be straightened up, but here are some clues from a startup from montreal, standoutjobs:

• they get funding - an amount only imaginable for a company that will grow exponentially,
  
• they have a website even before having a physical address,
• they have a blog before even launching and having actually a service to offer,
  
• their first employee is a ruby programmer. Their second employee will be a ruby programmer. Their third employee is a programmer too. Ok i made up that last one, but you can see a pattern here.
  
• they get new macbook pros before even getting office furniture
  

I would bet that what they would buy next would be paper pen to write with wireless routers. We sure know where the priorities are.

Empty table, empty office, just the bare minimum for startups these days: a mac and textmate. and the terminal.

Announcing First Web Dev Meetup

The first Web Development Book Club meetup is planned 25th of June, 7pm, at Zeke's Gallery.

I am inviting everyone interested in web development, programming and web design to come and talk about a book he read recently. We can have a discussion afterwards; such as how the book's principles are applied in current or future web apps, or what you have learned from the book...

As I have said earlier, the goal is to share and learn. I have had emails from people who asked if they could come even if they are not so much into books but still very involved in web development. I would like to think of it as a mashpit or a barcamp around books - an open environment for learning - so the answer should be yes, but i am expecting people to participate, like discussing and bringing your own experience and knowledge. or you could participate by taking notes :-)

I have also created a wiki page at yulstart about the event. If you want to come, one good idea is to add the book you are going to write about.

Note: you can talk in english or/and en français.

Astral Media launches its own ad network

Astral Media, which publishes musiqueplus.com, vrak.tv, radioenergie.com, rockdetente.com, canalvie.com, canald.com, among others, has decided to launch its own web ad network. (official press release in french here) They were previously relying in Branchez-vous to deliver ads for their website and deal with potential advertisers.

Astral Media is one the rare media publishers in Québec who reach more than 30% of the population, with 1.4M unique visitors. They have been consistently improving their online presence and launching social networks and this, for me, was the next logical step for them.

Montreal, first Canadian city to get Wimax coverage

Radioactif, an ISP (which has also web properties), and Nomad, a company specialized in wireless technologies, announced today that they will provide internet and telephony services for montrealers with wimax.

They will be targeting first the Plateau area, then will extend coverage to the greater Montreal area. This is a first for Canada: if Toronto has already city-wide wireless coverage, the city is using the "old" wifi technology. Wimax on the other hand is much more powerful, with bandwidth up to 5mbps, on longer distances. Imagine this as having an ADSL connection but without an ethernet cable, and without relying on a coffee/library's internet connection.

Radioactif will market a voip and internet service at 30 dollars/month, which will undercut all existing internet plans avalaible in Quebec.

I love it when small players play the rebels against the giants - bell and videotron :-)

Ubisoft planning interactive short movies

Yannis Mallat, CEO of Ubisoft Montreal, talked in depth with Gamasutra about what they are planning for the newly created Ubisoft Digital Arts. This was announced 3 months ago, as an animation studio, with a staff of 500 people, making movies from the Ubisoft video games franchises.

In the interview, Yannis Mallat says that they will make short animated movies and that the first one will be based on Assassin's creed, the video game which will be launched in October this year. The biggest suprise for me though is that they want to make their "movies" interactive. Viewers (players?) will be able to change the storyline, and Yannis Mallat seems confident on Ubisoft's ability to still make the experience compelling.


The first short movie will be based on upcoming adventure/action game assassin's creed

Adventure games/movies were very popular at the last decade, with video games companies experimenting with FMV videos. I remember the Wing Commander series who had movie stars and were even featured on imdb when the game launched. We moved since then to strategy games and to FPS games, and then to consoles. It seems that Ubisoft wants to go back to that era, and that they will be (re)creating a new line of product. This is a big bet, as consumers will have to be educated, new distribution means will have to be setup, and I can't even think of the marketing campaings needed to introduce the idea of interactive movies. But if they succeed on bridging the movie/game divide, they would hit the jackpot and get a market video games companies aren't yet competing in.

If you ask my opinion, I am not sure I would buy a PS3 or a XBox just to see a movie. Then of course they would want me to get a HDTV. I thought they would make videos avalaible on Joost or any other distributions platforms, much alike Steam by Valve. It looks like the world begins and finishes with video games, playstations and xboxes with Yannis Mallat.

ISIQ's Internet Privacy Campaign

ISIQ stands for Institut de Securité de l'Information du Québec, and it has launched this week an Internet Privacy Campaign. They have launched a blog, produced videos, and are posting about security and privacy issues on the net. Great initiative, although everything is in french.

It can be summed up by: don't trust everything you read on the net. don't leave personal info. If you don't get this, read this great quote by Douglas Adams in How to stop worrying and Learn to Love the internet

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

Wanted: a web designer to replace my IT staff

I came across a job ad today by Tek Systems, with the title 'web designer job', and I have no idea how this company is going to find their dream candidate. Apart from being good at html/Photoshop/Illustrator/Dreamweaver, they want the web designer to:

• have skills in web marketing
  
• have skills in video and in Director
• have skills in 3D animation
  
• know php/java/asp/mysql
• a windows/linux sysadmin
  
• bilingual, french and english
• know web standards but be also proficient in Flash

I thought a web designer's job was to create the design of a website, which is already a demanding job. It would be great if there was even a web designer in Montreal who is capable of producing good designs for web apps à la flickr or basecamp.

Now, I would dismiss this job ad as soon as I opened the page, but Tek Systems is actually an IT company who think they are a "high-caliber", "talented" and "expert" company.

Tek Systems, please get back on earth.

Update: Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast

Benjamin Yoskovitz is taking suggestions for the next Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast at his blog. It's scheduled on July 10th, but settings should change. If you have ideas on how to improve the meetup, leave a comment on his post.

5th Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast

Today, the Montréal tech community gathered at Bistro Etc, on the plateau. A comment left on an earlier post mentionned that 9 am might be a little too late, and I thought it might be a sign that the monthly meetup was showing signs of fatigue. However, I met there as many people as - if not more - the previous breakfast, and talked with a lot of people who came there for the first time.

I have contacted the centre d'entrepreneurship, at HEC montréal, and the equivalent one from UQAM, in hope that students entrepreneurs would show up. And yes, the first guy I met was from the HEC Montréal business school. Henri is doing research on interactive marketing. Although he is not active on the web yet, he plans to launch a business soon. Mehdi is another student I met. He is doing a master at Concordia, and I guess he was looking forward for advice and to connect with other tech guys. I hope more students get involved too in the next tech events in Montreal.

I talked with Guillaume Thoreau about user interfaces and the Wii. Seems that you can setup the wii joystick for your mac and pc. He is also interested for the web dev book for montreal. He might present a user interface book for the first meetup.





A set of photos from the tech entrepreneur breakfast

Mitch Cohen, the cofounder for clixconnect, told me how his new company is doing. It seems they already have a core of customers. He also told me that it was already his 2nd company, as the first one he run for 4 years was acquired last year. My overall impression was that he was a very sharp guy - business-wise. We will see how things will fold out in the upcoming months for clixconnect.

I talked to Adrien O'Leary who is going with great enthusiasm into interactive marketing. For instance, he just registered to interlogiq. He tells how 'traditional' marketers and new marketers clashed in the first 5 à 7 he attended. He is going to the yulbiz - that's an idea, I might go the the next yulbiz to take pictures.

Sandy is the new marketing girl for ilovetoplay.com, and Marc Chriqui, the founder, was there too. Although I have yet to see what Sandy will be doing for ilovetoplay, I think she has great opportunities. She knows how to talk about a service and is ready to get out there to talk about ilovetoplay. I talked about facebook apps, and Marc said they could use it as a marketing tool, to get users - and their friends - go to ilovetoplay.

I met Marc-André Cournoyer, the new ruby guru for Standoutjobs. We talked about software developers and startups in Montreal. Typically, most graduate students from ETS or Polytechnique want to go to CGI or IBM Montreal, the big consulting companies I generally compare to factories. Even if they want to take risks, they are generally unaware of what's up in montreal. THINGS HAVE TO CHANGE.

Fred Ngo and Ben Yoskovitz took the time to come too. I didn't have a chance to talk in depth with them though, but it seems things are doing great for standoutjobs.

I had a quick talk with Frederic Brunel too. He has a long experience in low-level programming and video games. But like most tech guys, he does a lot of stuff too. He is working for a montreal company who is launching a product that creates computer-generated movies - ie you control 3d characters on the screen. Should be great for storyboarding and for non-professional directors. The success of the Movies video games proves how users are craving for a product like that.

Phil Chrun from mycarpoolstation.com was brainstorming about a video job ad, with yann, the video guy from standoutjobs. He is looking for a tech guy in Montreal - a bug squasher and a web2.0 programmer - so he will be advertising mycarpoolstation in the video.

I hoped Erwan would be there. He didn't came, but Alok from fonome was. This is a critical moment for fonome, and things are unfolding right now. I am sure though that the right ressources will be found and setup in the next few weeks.

So folks, this is it for the 5th montreal tech entrepreneur breakfast. I couldn't talk to everyone - if you have been there, leave a comment and I will insert it in the post.

More reports:

• Marc-André 's post
• Mitch Cohen's post
• Fred Brunel's post

Old Media loosing the race

Steve Faguy, a local blogger and freelancer for Montreal Gazette, has a great piece about the current problems with newspapers:

• they lose their strenghts by imitating what's done in new media,
• their revenue model is screwed but they are still clueless,
• they save costs by cutting down on foreign bureaus and copy editors - even though that's where they really can differentiate from new media

For instance, I really don't understand what's happenning at La Presse, Journal de Montréal or at the Montreal Gazette. Even though they have bright reporters and all the ressources to back it up, their online properties really pale compared to the print edition. The only newspaper who seem to get things done online is Le Devoir. It's clean, neat, with accessible content.

Steve is focusing on newspapers, but I think this transition can be extended to other media too. There is a mass switch to the web, the younger generation don't watch tv anymore, the radio is left for the baby boom generation and for niche music.

The race is now. Those who weren't aware will loose their audience. Only the most innovative and those who bring value most will survive. And that's what every media publisher in Montreal and in Québec should be aware of.