Montreal Tech Watch

Montreal Technology News in May

2007-06-02T07:42:00.000-05:00

If you missed what happenned in Montreal in May, here's a recap of Tech News in Montreal:

wikitravel wins webby award (May 1st)
standoutjobs has their first job ad (May 3rd)
Helvetica movie in montreal (May 5th)
Telephony survey shows the differences between Quebec and other provinces (May 7th)
new version of myspace for quebec (May 8th)
Tungle gets 1.5M$ of VC (May 8th)
4th Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast at Etc, Bistro (May 8th)
new Quebec version of Yahoo Q&A (May 9th)
Webcom conference attended by many "pro" bloggers in Montreal. (May 10th)
the CRTC wants to police Internet TV (May 11th)
Mobivox, a VOIP startup, launches (May 12th)
Eidos Montreal to develop Deus Ex, a star franchise (May 15th)
ClixConnect, a startup that outsources your web customer support, launches (May 18th)
Day 1 of RococoCamp/RecentChangesCamp (May 19th)
Day 2 of RococoCamp/RecentChangesCamp (May 20th)
My own view of the RococoCamp and the open space format for a conference (May 21st)
The marketing agency Hue publishes a "Quebec blogosphere" ranking (May 22nd). People are arguing, but I believe Patrick Tanguay had the last word on this one.
Immervision makes a 360 camera (May 23rd)
PixProjector makes a mobile projector for marketing purposes (May 23rd)
yulstart, a wiki about startups in Montreal, opens (May 24th)
AbsoluteSky is about to install item-level rfid tagging (May 25th)
Artere, a new portal for la relève, opens (May 25th)
The alarm:clock publishes a list of top web2.0 canadian startups (May 26th)
Another video portal opens in Quebec (May 29th)
A study of the video games industry in Quebec (May 29th)
Standoutjobs gets 1.5M$ VC from GarageCanada (May 30th)

If I had to choose a top post, it would be the one about entrepreneurship in Montreal. Not much about what I wrote, but because it received a lot of feedback, from "new" entrepreneurs and "experienced" entrepreneurs, and from Eric Kucharsky and Lyne Bouchard, CEO of TechnoMontreal. Ben continues to push entrepreneurship on his blog, and Sylvain Carle built upon the momentum to open yulstart.

A2M in the spotlight ... for obscure reasons

2007-06-04T20:08:00.000-05:00

Recently, Artifical Mind&Movement, aka A2M, a video games company based in Montreal, was nominated for the Canadian new media awards, and the winners were announced last week in Toronto. I didn't write about it though because MyThum Interactive, an ontarian company, won the award for the category.

Now, FiQ, an association for IT professionals, nominated this week A2M for their OCTAS 2007 award, and Rémi Racine, the A2M CEO, as the personalité de l'année 2006.

I have no idea why A2M was chosen. FiQ refers to The Suite Life of Zack&Cody, which is a Nintendo DS game. But it's not even listed on the A2M website. IGN describes the game as totally uncreative and ridiculous.

I am thinking that the A2M CEO is a great networker, and has lots of friends at FiQ. It's clearly not because of A2M's achievements (because they would have picked Ubisoft Montréal then) or because they are innovating in new media (the A2M website was last updated 9 months ago).

Quebec and web entrepreneurship

2007-06-04T06:34:00.000-05:00

Samuel Bouchard is a blogger from Quebec City, where he writes about technology, robotics and environment. He wrote a significant post on the province's future place on the web, from his experience at the Mesh Conference last week.

The post is in french, so I will sum it up here. Cons for Quebec:

so far, lots of clones from companies like canoe or from monavis or ~~digg~~ nuouz, and not enough breakthrough innovation
small market in Quebec

I also think that there are not enough "role models" in Quebec, i.e. web entrepreneurs who succeeded so that more young people get inspired too.

Pros:

french and lots of bilingual people. Instead of targeting the US market, which is a huge challenge, it is actually easier and faster to have french-speaking customers.
affordable cost of living
education
a link between Europe and North America, so it might be easier to gain market shares in Europe
expertise in video games and in telecom hardware

I also see another advantage from Quebec, which the creativity we see here in Quebec, like in Le cirque du soleil or in video games. This creativity can also be used to imagine hugely innovative products or services.

Like in Montreal, there seems to be a growing community of web entrepreneurs in Quebec city right now. I hope they go to the next BarcampCanada which is scheduled in Montreal this summer.

Branchez-vous acquires tonclip.com

2007-06-05T07:38:00.000-05:00

Branchez-vous has acquired 51% of tonclip.com and are planning to integrate it into their main portal. You can now see one elegant branchez-vous header and a footer on tonclip.com.

As a sidenote, Branchez-vous had already a technology videoblog at branchez-vous.tv and an "entertainement" video channel at BV2.tv

About tonclip, this youtube clone opened on october last year, and defined itself as a place to find quebec videos, altough I have yet to see a video from Québec in the website. They are also the only video portal I know that displays a video ad, with the sound on, when the other video you asked for is played. sigh... they could have at least copied youtube's best features

I hope now that this acquisition improves dramatically tonclip. They have a lot to do in marketing and in the user interface.

Ranking of web ad publishing companies in Québec and Canada

2007-06-05T09:31:00.000-05:00

Yannick Manuri, who blogs in french about interactive marketing, has made a list of web ad publishing companies if you are a web publisher or if you want to advertise on the Internet. These companies look out for sponsors and advertisers, and then take a significant percentage when an ad is served in one of their customer's network.

He uses reach, quality, quantity of the web network, and also business relationship to rank companies. The result is:

Network Olive Canada gets first place mainly because of tetesaclaques.tv, where every company wants to advertise at. Branchez-vous is 2nd because they are specifically targeting Quebec. 24/7 Canada's strength is that they are implemented throughout Canada, and Quebec is just another province they have a presence in. NetWorldMedia is getting modded down because of the poor reach and quality of the websites they are in business with.

And meanwhile, MC3 Media doesn't even have a website ... even though they are a web marketing company.

text2it introduces call transfer

2007-06-05T16:05:00.000-05:00

text2it, a Montreal VOIP startup, has now a service that allows users to transfer a call to another phone.

text2it allows users to make long-distance calls, by sending an SMS or with a browser. No breaking news here.

Telus extends location based services in Québec

2007-06-07T07:08:00.000-05:00

Telus launched yesterday 2 location services, Telus Navigator and Kid Find. These 2 technologies use GPS, and are avalaible in most major towns in Québec.

Telus Navigator allows a subscriber to get directions with their mobile phone, which will then provide real-time audio and visual cues. Users can also plan their route ahead, with 1.5 millions places in the database.

Kid Find allows family members to track kids. They will get to know the location of a handset, from another mobile phone or through the Telus website. For privacy concerns, the "kid" is notified each time a user requests the handset's location, and the service can also be turned off easily.

I have to say though I didn't test the services. As a subscriber to Telus, I have mixed feelings with the mobile operator. But those 2 additional services are innovative and a very good move. The mobile provider announced also last friday that they would invest $100 million to upgrade their EVDO network in BC, Ontario and Québec. Compare that to Bell who is outsourcing their customer support and whose executives spent their time negotiating with investors during the last 2 months.

Radio-Canada launches new multimedia section

2007-06-07T19:54:00.000-05:00

Radio Canada relaunched this afternoon their audio and video section, with more footage, more avalaible archives, more shows, and more importantly, a central page to view all videos. The killer feature for me though is the ability to watch Radio-Canada live.

For end-users, it means you can watch/listen to RadioCanada 24/7, by leaving one page open. The video you get full-screen is pretty good. Previously, you had to go to the show's page and then start streaming the section you wanted to listen to. This should be great for Montrealers and people from Québec, if they are travelling outside Canada.

To enable this new section, Radio Canada has installed a brand new infrastucture, and ditched ZapMédia.

It's not great news on all fronts though. You can't access the page with Firefox - you have to install an activeX plugin. And this is the last thing I would do with my browser. For me, it's cheap and unprofessional.

Conversational Politics in Quebec

2007-06-09T07:39:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, the Prime Minister's office published questions by citizens and Jean Charest's answers.

Previously, they already had a page about questions and the prime minister's answers, but everyone knew the questions were made up by his staff. Now, it seems we are going to a conversation mode. To proove this, there is a video of Jean Charest talking about the budget and answering to a series of questions, by people from all over Quebec. This is not yet a videoblog, but we are close.

This is a very good move - for transparency and dialogue. However, I would have liked to see more spontaneity. I would love for example to see video bloggers like the guyz from yulbuzz go over there and ask him directly real questions. Or maybe he should get a video crew and start a video blog.

Upcoming: Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast, June 12th

2007-06-11T06:10:00.000-05:00

The 5th edition of the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast is tomorrow, June 12th, a monthly informal meetup where entrepreneurs, investors, bloggers, designers, people involved in marketing and new media are gathering to talk about their projects. It will be at Bistro, Etc, 1291 av. Mont-Royal Est, at 9am.

My personal opinion is that this meeting is a great opportunity, even if for example, you haven't wrote yet a line in a business plan. Diversity is also great,and women are welcomed.

If you want to know what it is about, here are reports about the earlier editions: last month, two months ago, 3 months ago. Of course, those are not exhaustive reports, and as usual, they are quite subjective.

If you are going tomorrow, I am running a poll: I would like to know what are the top Canadian web apps.

Old Media loosing the race

2007-06-11T20:00:00.000-05:00

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.

5th Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast

2007-06-12T12:44:00.000-05:00

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:

Update: Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast

2007-06-13T05:45:00.000-05:00

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.

ISIQ's Internet Privacy Campaign

2007-06-13T10:14:00.000-05:00

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’.

Ubisoft planning interactive short movies

2007-06-14T06:03:00.000-05:00

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.

Montreal, first Canadian city to get Wimax coverage

2007-06-14T10:01:00.000-05:00

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 :-)

And what's a startup anyway?

2007-06-15T15:57:00.000-05:00

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.

Astral Media launches its own ad network

2007-06-15T06:18:00.000-05:00

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.

Announcing First Web Dev Meetup

2007-06-15T10:13:00.000-05:00

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.

Atrion International expands

2007-02-18T16:51:00.000-05:00

Atrion International, opened an office in Australia, which will serve the Pacific Ring.

Atrion International produces software that facilitates regulatory compliance. Their customers are mainly heavy industries which must deal with hazardous chemicals.

News: Ubisoft, VC Funding, Vantrix, Kakiloc, Université de Montréal

2007-02-18T08:47:00.000-05:00

WellingtonFund reports that Montreal is #3 in VC funding The first city is Toronto, the second is Ottawa. However, Vancouver is close behind Montreal, and 14 start-ups didn’t announce their raise. Draw your own conclusions…

Ubisoft expands its Québec operations. Ubisoft CEO believed Montréal has an “immense creative potential”, and apparently, the city has still lots of untapped talent. Jobs will be created by hundreds, and they are multiplying initiatives to get the best talent

Vantrix Corporation has named Manish Jha as CEO Vantrix is a solution provider for the cell phone industry, and solves interoperability problems when dealing with multimedia.

Benjamin Yoskovitz organized a successful Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast, Tuesday 13th

Kakiloc, a mobile social network for Montreal, is entering beta version soon

Université de Montreal is proud to have the most powerful shared-memory supercomputer in Canada. The altix 4700, from SGI Canada, has 384 processors, 1534 Go of RAM, and can handle 4,9 teraflops.

Wanted: a web designer to replace my IT staff

2007-06-13T05:58:00.000-05:00

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.

Quick Update: mycarpoolstation.com

2007-06-01T16:09:00.000-05:00

mycarpoolstation, a new car sharing website, reports about what they did during the transit strike in Montreal. They contacted the press, with a note about alternative ways of commuting, and got a coverage.

Quote:

I would qualify page A2 of The Gazette as decent coverage. I would also qualify a brief mention at 11:35pm on CKOI's 'Les soirées contactes de Philippe Pépin' as... pretty damn cool. I guess the lesson I learnt from this is that I could spend all the money in the world on Google Ads and what not, but nothing sells your product or service better than its recognition amongst customers as a reliable pain-killer.

I find it very clever marketing.

Note: mycarpoolstartion.com is now in public beta. previous coverage was here

Best Montreal Blog named

2007-06-01T08:09:00.000-05:00

Montreal Mirror readers named DrunkenStepFather.com as the best Montreal blog.

The blogger's reaction:

The second thing I’d like to say is that being outed to the city you live in as a blog or a blogger is fucking embarrassing. Blogs are for losers and are written by losers and usually those losers aren’t my kind of loser. They are virgins, they are techy, they are lonely and feel like they have something to tell the world and that no one around them is listening.

I am not taking the poll seriously, but it was fun seeing the list.

StandoutJobs raises 1.5M$ from GarageCanada

2007-05-31T19:55:00.000-05:00

StandoutJobs has raised 1.5 million $ of venture capital from Garage Canada.

Congrats then to Benjamin Yoskovitz, Fred Ngo, and Austin Hill.

Note: Standoutjobs shows video for job classifieds. The startup's CEO is Benjamin Yoskovitz.