Real quick:
1. Startup Drinks Montreal is tonight. Going to be at Brutopia. Show up around 6?
2. Community and open-source friendly free conference Make Web Not War is being held tomorrow (Thursday). You can register here.
3. MTLSEC will be held tomorrow evening. 5:30pm->?. Old Dublin (636 Cathcart).
Posted in Uncategorized
The launch of the Notman House, which was announced at StartupCamp 6, will be held this afternoon. We’re going to be at the Hôtel Opus (10 Sherbrooke O, métro St-Laurent or Sherbrooke), on the terrace. Starts in about 45 minutes, at 3pm (sorry!).
The Notman House is an exciting development. It’s going to be a clubhouse, shared working space, incubator, and generally cool place to hang out – for startup people, independent workers doing creative things + various other squatters. The heritage building, located on Sherbrooke, was purchased using funds privately raised by the OSMO Foundation, a comprised of well-known locals from Montreal Startup, Embrase, Station-C, and other sympathizers/collaborators. The gazette covered it recently here.
You can’t RSVP to it anymore, but the event details are here.
Image ganked from Images Montreal (imtl.org) – merci.
I need to get better at not posting this stuff at the last minute.
The Montreal chapter of OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) is meeting tonight. I’ll be speaking on vulnerabilities in the implementation of cryptography, specifically covering two attacks in detail. I’ll also do a live demonstration of the attack discovered and presented by friends Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong at Black Hat Europe 2010. Come join us, it’s free. It will be held at the ETS downtown, starting at about 6pm.
Details here. Also, MTLSEC May announcement coming soon (as soon as I know if the Habs are playing hockey next week so I can plan it).
Tonight is StartupCamp 6, which is pretty much the Montreal startup scene event of the year. StartupCamp is a general conference for local technology entrepreneurs, investors, experts of all kinds and other interested members of the general public. It’s once again being held at the SAT on St-Laurent.
The attendance is approaching 500, the most ever. It’s going to be an interesting year for startups in Montreal. The government and its partners have injected a large amount of money (for Canada) into venture funds – and it’s all going to startups. For Internet-ish stuff (ICT), it’s going to be managed by Montreal Startup who will probably be making mostly seed-level investments, filling what is generally considered a gap in Canada-based funding opportunities.
This is largely due to the effort put into building a grassroots startup scene and the promotion of entrepreneurship in technology by people like Austin Hill, Sylvain Carle, Raymond Luk, etc, over the past 3 or 4 years. So the stage is set for local entrepreneurs to hustle. Except to see a lot of activity in the next 12 months.
The event starts at about 3 with an informal “unconference”, during which attendees can hold or participate in various sessions. Dave McClure (apparently involved in something like 1000 startups), Sylvain Carle (of Praized/aFrogInTheValley), and Dan Martell (angel, flowtown.com) are on-hand to moderate.
There’s also going to be a “free clinic” for startups, with various experts offering legal, accounting, banking and government advice. Book fast with Tungle. More details on the unconference here.
The major action starts at 6. There will be five startups presenting:
Keynotes will be delivered by Just For Laugh’s founder and technology (Airborne Entertainment) entrepreneur Andy Nulman and the aforementioned Dave McClure of 1001 startups.
Register here, because it’s nearly sold out (if not already). If you can’t get tickets, sneak in.
—
Also – speaking of Montreal Startup, they’ve just invested in Recoset, a very mysterious startup headed by Daniel Haran (and Jeremy Barnes), who is half of the infamous Haran brothers. Rumor has it they’re commercializing reverse-engineered alien technology. Congratulations! Now get back to work.
Calling all bike geeks, activists for sustainable transportation and other velorutionaries – critical mass montreal is happening this evening. The meeting will occur at 17h30, downtown, at Philips Square (Ste-Catherine and Union).
What’s critical mass? It’s direct action with no real point other than to assert the right to ride bicycles on city streets. And, I guess, to protest how badly cyclists are treated by cars, police, municipal governments, other people, etc. But there’s no manifesto, maybe a few home-made flags, and no leadership.
Bicycles are considered vehicles, and along with being entitled to share the roads, the riders are expected to follow roughly the same rules as cars. But in practice, cyclists, who are vulnerable travelling in the midst of larger vehicles, are often resented by drivers and treated disrespectfully by pretty much everyone, with traffic law apparently selectively applied, even when they are following the rules.
“We’re not blocking traffic. We are traffic.”
Critical mass started in San Francisco but has become a global phenomenon. On the last friday of every month a bunch of bike-people get together and ride together in the streets, taking over a lane, or even the whole road. This annoys people in automobiles, and cities such as New York have tried various tricks to squash the protest. Montreal police have strong armed cyclists as well.
So come out in solidarity for a bike ride, it’s a beautiful day.
Facebook event here.
Back in March, Soleira Sun presented at MTLNewTech. I didn’t make it, but I looked at the list of startups and this one stood out – because it was so interesting. Simulated sunlight? It clearly wasn’t just a tanning lamp. Could this be for real? I sent an e-mail to founder Eric Pflanzer and we had a chat on the phone. That was over a month ago. Since then, he’s been getting lots of press.
A real appreciation for natural sunlight is what probably drew my attention to this Montreal-based company. At a past job, I used to eat lunch in this gloomy cafeteria that was dead in the center of a large, drab, industrial building in the wasteland between TMR and St-Laurent. I hated being there during my break mostly because there was no natural light at all, not a single window, skylight or other cue about where we were with respect to the surface of the Earth.
Two years ago or so, Eric, a Montrealer who studied chemistry at Columbia University in NYC, was on a beach in Mexico thinking about new business opportunities. Fourteen mojitos later, while flipping through a pile of trashy magazines, he found a small, business-card sized ad for an expo where sunlight-simulation technology was being demonstrated.
Skeptical, Eric cold-called the inventors of the technology, who turned out to be three guys in Sweden. They had built it for automakers, who wanted simulated sunlight for testing. The technology had also been adapted to create indoor beaches. Oh yeah, it generated light that is spectro-radiometrically equivalent to sunlight (i.e it is sunlight).
Eric quickly started working with the developers of the technology to be compliant with Canadian regulations so that it could be brought here and commercialized. His self-funded company of three employees, Soleira Sun, has already won awards: two silver prizes at the IIDEX NeoCon. The technology has been demonstrated in the National Home Show’s “Dream Home” – for the sun deck, the final moment of the tour of the home. Unfortunately it was just for show, the home didn’t come with the Sun installation.
The technology produces light that the brain “knows” is sunlight – a feeling that Eric described as “erotic”. This sensation can be created over very large spaces, for a large number of people – from 5 to 500. It can be tuned for temperature, or to simulate a specific time of day. The UV-A and UV-B levels are reduced so that they are lower than in natural sunlight, making the experience safer as well. And it is designed to be green – the technology recovers as much as 75% of the heat for reutilization. The vision is that the technology will be used in nightclubs, condo projects, hotels – one of the first customers will be a retirement home. Very cool.
Some additional pics:
Today I profiled Montreal-based Soleira Sun, the first of these kinds of posts. I will be covering other startups, individuals, companies, groups, projects that I find interesting in the future.
Posted in Profiles
Tagged montreal, profile, soleira, soleirasun, startup, technology
This is perhaps even too geeky for me, but I’ll probably show up. There’s going to be a party to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 10.04 – “Lucid Lynx”, a long standing tradition with the Ubuntu crowd.
What’s Ubuntu? So a few years ago, Mark Shuttleworth, South African entrepreneur who made millions with Thawte, decided to change the world with a Linux-for-everyone. Nobody really believed him – at least I didn’t – but he pulled it off. He also went to space. Ubuntu is a Linux that works – stick in a CD, it recognizes all your hardware, you don’t need to edit your X11 configuration settings manually, etc. I think Ubuntu is pretty slick – I run it on my testing platform because I don’t need to screw around to make it work. Yeah, I love Ubuntu – I used to think I was too good for it, but I just don’t have time to make things work anymore. I don’t use it where I need security, because it’s just too opaque and I don’t trust it, but that’s my own paranoia – I’m a security person.
The Montreal employees of Canonical, the corporate entity behind Ubuntu, usually show up to join the fun.
The fête is being held at the Saint Sulpice on St-Denis at 17h.
