The Montreal Tech League

Standout Jobs - Changing the face of recruiting

Standout Jobs is a new startup born within a well-known trio from the Montreal Tech community, namely Austin Hill, Fred Ngo and Benjamin Yoskovitz. They are hiring.

From their site:

We believe:

* The job market is broken.
* Online job sites don’t work.
* Hiring people should be an ongoing process.
* Hiring people is about having conversations not bureaucracy.

Standout Jobs will change the face of recruiting.

But first, we need to build a core team of entrepreneurial-minded people, ready to change the game.

To bring their mission to fruition, the existing team is looking to hire somebody with expertise in Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

If you have met the team, you know they are a great trio of people, and no doubt it will be exciting to join them.

Here is some feedback about working with Austin Hill from the Ruby Montreal User Group:

I’ve worked for Austin (and his bro) during the Totalnet days though I doubt he would remember this web code monkey. :) The Hills are awesome people to work for. If wasn’t happy where I am now, and my Rails was ‘guru’ status I’d be applying myself.

You can be assured anything the Hills touch are gold or “at worse” one hell of a cool place to work.

Later.

- John Bateman

As from tomorrow 9:00 am, Friday the 18th of May, the S.A.T. will be the venue for the three-day event RoCoCoCamp in Montreal. This unconference promises to have an even wider audience and reach than previous BarCamps in Montreal. The agenda is open and will be organized on the spot.

Location: S.A.T. 1195 St-Laurent, Montréal (Métro St-Laurent)

Aspects of RoCoCoCamp are varied. There are sociological and political emergent phenomena linked to it. The technological mainstay of RoCoCoCamp seems to be Wiki software which lower the barrier of entry for open participatory communities.

BarCampMontreal2 was a whole day event and was full of Montreal’s Tech and not-so Tech communities. The diversity is especially important and interesting here in Montreal. There was even a panel about why there were so few women in Tech.

Some of the reports about the event are:

1. Laurent Maisonnave - ZeCanada - Vidéo d’un BarCamp à Montréal
2. Evan Prodromou
3. Patrick Tangay
4. Ben Yoskovitz
5. Heri Rakotomalala - Montreal Tech Watch - Post 1 - Post 2
6. Josh Nursing - YashLabs - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 (additional videos and pictures are forthcoming)
7. Fred Ngo
8. Shawna Nelles
9. Vero.b
10. Nicolas Ritoux
11. Martine Pagé. Another text which was used within her presentation about the lack of women in Tech.

Where: Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent
When: Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 9:30 a.m.

There are more than 25 presentations planned for this second edition of BarCamp in Montreal. Montreal’s Tech community and non-Tech community alike will gather at the SAT on boulevard St. Laurent for the whole day tomorrow.

It’s a free and open event. Anyone can attend, but all are expected to participate, either by presenting, by helping present, giving a hand at the organization of later blogging about the event.

Some of the Tech presentations will be:

1. EvanProdromou - How I learned to stop worrying and love the Semantic Web

2. www.mycarpoolstation.com - We supply web-based carpool stations to schools, workplaces, and regions in the U.S. and Canada.

3. Angel Anduaga - Podtattoo Laser Labs permanently laser etches any iPod/laptop/cellphone with any pic/logo/font you provide http://podtattoo.com

4. Sylvain Carle - Parralel Entrepreneurship and a few peeks a two of my startups…

5. Francois Lane - Cake Mail - Fully customizable white label email marketing platform http://www.servecake.com/

6. HughMcGuire - Starting-Up: mistakes I’ve made so far

7. Paul Wouters - DNSSEC 101: Or “How the Department of Homeland Security is NOT going to control your domains” http://www.xelerance.com/

8. Sylvain Carle - Ce que j’ai appris à San Franciso durant le Web 2.0 Expo (avec les développeurs, les marketeurs et les VCs)

9. Avery Pennarun - Versabox or Schedulator or Designing a Company Culture, depending on interest

10. Dave Coombs - Digital Security on Airplanes, and Why You Care (There’s no way I can make it tomorrow. I’m too doomed. Sorry.)

11. Michele Ann Jenkins - Wikis, Web 2.0 and Information Architecture: Wikitravel Extra

12. Martine Pagé - “Présence féminine/where are the girls” — a question based, panel like session about the lack of women’s representation at tech conferences. Is a “women in tech” list, like the one created in the U.S., a solution? Do we even need a solution? Is that a real problem? Une session bilingue (qui se veut davantage un panel) sur la faible présence des femmes dans les conférences reliées à la technologie.

13. François Proulx - iFIND : a location-based social software. Un système que j’ai conçu et développé au SENSEable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

14. Josh Nursing Hacking Thought - Systems Thinking and the Myth of Exclusive Or

15. Alok Mohindra - Making phones do funny things, proof-of-concept for FonoMe global inbound telephone service. Will demo plain old telephone to GoogleTalk voice integration using SIP, Jabber, and Jingle.

16. Marcella Lorenzi - Art, science, technologies ESG research group in Italy. http://galileo.cincom.unical.it. Looking for partners for common projects in art and science and/or communication of science. Presentation of some of the activities and products of the group (E=mc2; superstring installation; music from cellular automata, etc.)

17. Paul Farnell - Introduction to my company (SiteVista), and a demo of my Pecha Kucha presentation tool, delicious.salted.com

I will see you at BarCampMontreal2

Friday the 13th was actually a good date for Montreal and the Montreal Technology community. TechnoMontreal, the ICT cluster of greater Montreal, was formally launched at Ex-Centris. TechnoMontreal was born to help develop the economy through the promotion of Montreal as an ICT hub. Montreal’s Tech scene is constituted of 2700 companies in 7 sectors, and account for 1 in 10 jobs in Greater Montreal.

The web site itself has been online for a few months and has as its main goal the promotion of Montreal’s diverse ICT stakeholders.

My friend Laurent Maisonnave interviewed Lyne Bouchard, TechnoMontreal’s president and director about the vision of TechnoMontreal, for YULbuzz.

The interview is really interesting and Laurent asked a very good question concerning the financing of new companies.

Lyne Bouchard also mentioned that searching for Montreal in Google should bring results related to ICT and the economy and that it would be one of the future indicators of TechnoMontreal’s success as for the moment results are about cultural things in Montreal but not ICT. I noticed something similar about two months ago and wrote about it in the Montreal Tech League Forum which you can access from the link in the sidebar.

Another video to look at is TechnoMontréal en action.

“TechnoMontréal will help strengthen the position of Greater Montréal among world leaders in the field of Information and Communications Technology.” -Jean-Jacques Bourgeault, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Montréal International.

To do this, the ICT Cluster will develop initiatives to encourage networking among stakeholders in the sector and to create partnerships with scientific and university milieus, and sectoral associations. TechnoMontréal will also put in place strategies to further promote the industry and its successes.

There’s more about the launch in this article on Montreal International’s site.

“Montréal International will continue to work actively with TechnoMontréal and the other high-tech clusters. This will help increase the appeal of our advanced sectors and promote them worldwide. This productive complementarity of players in development is what characterizes the most prosperous urban areas and is a source of their strength,” Bourgeault said.

Well done Laurent for your first outing as an interviewer for YulBuzz, and congratulations to TechnoMontreal for its launch. It’s directory is big and helps bring more visibility to Montreal’s Tech Scene.

Stéphane Hamel m’a envoyé une invitation au Web Analytics Wednesday de Montréal.

La dernière rencontre, qui fut fantastique, eut lieu au Commensal et était dirigée par Stéphane.

Cette fois, les passionnés se retrouveront au restaurant Le Cartet, 106 rue McGill, Montreal, Quebec ce Mercredi 11 Avril 2007 à 5h pm et c’est Jacques Warren qui animera la soirée.

Il est possible que Sean Power de Coradiant fasse une présentation.

It’s Web Analytics Wednesday time again. Stéphane Hamel sent me an invitation and this time around his friend Jacques Warren will be hosting the meeting for Web Analytics fans at Le Cartet, 106 rue McGill, Montreal, Quebec.

The last meeting was fantastic. This time, Sean Power of Coradiant may do a presentation.

You can convert PDF’s to Word files using our PDF converter software. Our PDF server technology takes the hassles out of using PDF files at Investintech.com.

DemoCampMontreal2 rocked with 5 amazing demonstrations.

The Montreal Tech community has some reports about the events in the case you have missed it or if you want to fondly reminisce about the event or show others why it’s a great night to attend.

Other DemoCampMontreal2 reports

1. Josh of YashLabs. Previous DemoCamp reports by Josh seem to have played an ever so slight role in the launching of BarCampCalgary, with most of the heavy lifting done by Austin Hill.

2. Alec Saunders of iotum

3. Martin Dufort & Alain Lavoie of Kakiloc

4. Heri Rakotomalala of Montreal Tech Watch

5. John Stokes of A Montreal Startup

6. Simon has the best pictures

7. Hugh McGuire has an extensive write-up on his new site.

8. Alistair has a write-up

9. Roberto from the Gazette has a Report on the Reports on his fun and informative TechnoCité blog. Thanks for the link, Roberto

The last week of March is jam-packed with great events in Montreal’s Tech and Tech-Business Scenes. Here’s a run-down of notable events:

1. IntraCom Montreal 2007

This conference was mentioned by Stéphane Hamel during the Web Analytics Wednesday meeting in Montreal. It’s the 7th International Francophone Conference about Intranet and Web technologies.

2. Financing your Technology Startups

Bilal Kader, (organizer of the Montreal Entrepreneur Meetup group) sent an email about the second workshop of The Entrepreneurship Club of Concordia. Mr. J. Pelland, Business Advisor at the Dobson Center of Concordia University will be the guest speaker. The free workshop he will conduct is Financing your Technology Startups.

3. Yulbiz.

This month’s meeting of business bloggers in Montreal occurs at Café Méliès as usual. Fortunately, this time around, there is no scheduling conflict with DemoCampMontreal so we can happily attend both. It’s Yulbiz’s first anniversary too.

4. DemoCampMontreal2.

Hot on the heels of Yulbiz, there will be five new demos in this free-to-attend and free-to-present un-conference meeting of Montreal’s Tech Scene. Geeks, Tech Entrepreneurs, Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists will all be there.

If you’re an astute geek or tech-oriented business person who reads my personal blog at YashLabs, you are most probably already using FireFox and have installed the Operator plugin, which will enable you to easily add these events into your online calendar. All are open-source and free technologies.

Technology is fun. It’s also an enabler for business and can be used to further humanity’s evolution at an accelerated pace by favoring cultural exchanges and fostering the sharing of ideas.

Today, there are unprecedented ways of connecting like-minded people throughout the world and enabling them to collaborate towards a single vision, or towards a call to action.

I wanted to gather in this post, all the people in Montreal who have been using these technological channels to try and bring about some needed change in the world. So here are the people and projects that I know that have as objective to make a positive social contribution:

1. Gifter.org - Austin Hill and Ben Yoskovitz. A possibly related project is Akoha (previously Project Ojibwe)

Make a wish by dropping a coin in the wishing well and $1 is given to charity. Sponsors provide the funds.

2. Atwater Digital Literacy Project - Miriam Verburg

The Atwater Digital Literacy Project, a project of the Atwater Library, gets kids and community groups using creative web technologies (blogging, audio, video, digital photos) to find new ways to talk about things important to them, and to help them build their communities.

3. île Sans Fil, CivicAccess - Michael Lenczner

ISF provides free wireless hotspots in Montreal and ways for content creators like artists to make their work known online.

CivicAccess:

Welcome to Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data, a group of citizens which believes all levels of government should make civic information and data accessible at no cost in open formats to their citizens. We believe this is necessary to allow citizens to fully participate in the democratic process of an “information society.”

4. Listen To Your Kids - Julien Smith

Listen To Your Kids connects kids that want to share with parents that want to listen.

5. FACIL

FACIL = FACIL pour l’Appropriation Collective de l’Informatique Libre. FACIL educates about and promotes the use of Free computing resources, like free software and open-source software.

6. Homeless Nation - Daniel Cross

The Homeless Nation is Canada’s only website created by and for Homeless Canadians. Through a national network of outreach workers, The Homeless Nation Project is dedicated to providing the tools for homeless Canadians to share their stories, unique philosophies and points of view with other Canadians. As well, this site provides an opportunity for the general public to interact and learn more about Canada’s homeless population. We believe social change is an interactive process, and HomelessNation.org is a means to starting this national dialogue.

7. Yellow Door

The Access Internet Project is three years old! As a now steadily expanding project, we cater to isolated seniors in the downtown area. Our goal is to introduce basic computer and Internet skills to seniors by matching them with a volunteer that meets them directly at their home for one-on-one tutorials.

Thanks to Mat Balez.

If you know of any others or if you are involved, do let us know.

Courageously reporting from the trenches of Montreal’s Tech Scene while simultaneously effecting T-Shirt Distribution Duties, Josh of YashLabs and of The Montreal Tech League, has a recap of DemoCampMontreal1 online.

Feast your eyes on this daring display of amazing multi-tasking powers over at YashLabs for Part 1 and Part 2.