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Author: Stephane Daury

  • UN Data: the Ultimate Research Tool

    From “UN Data: the Ultimate Research Tool – ReadWriteWeb“:

    The new site at UN Data allows anyone to access the United Nations Data Access System. This online, easy-to-use database was created by the UN in order to provide current, relevant, and reliable statistics to the whole world, for free. Using UN Data, you can access statistical information on populations, demographics, trade, commodities, agriculture, employment, the environment, industry, education, tourism, and much more.

    That’s awesome. CIA World Factbook 2.0 anyone?

  • Blitzweekend 2008 Demos and Extras

    The Blitzweekend was a success! You’ll soon be able to read more on their blog and Montreal Tech Watch, but in the meantime, here are the videos I shot of the demos that were given on day three (March 2nd).

    1. Introduction
    2. Noogl: WINNERS: Panel’s Choice
    3. A2B
    4. SneakSend
    5. BlitzDirectory: WINNERS: People’s Choice
    6. Reverse Payment system
    7. Heron
    8. Mandelbrot: 2nd most popular choice; my vote.
    9. GoalR
    10. Microfinancing for Macrolenders

    And a few extra presentations, outside of the competition.

    1. TikiWiki 1.10b
    2. Digest (in French)
    3. Business and Open Source Software

    Congratulations to all the teams!

  • Blitzweekend 2008 Kickstart Videos

    I went to film the Blitzweekend Kickstart event tonight (well, yesterday, technically). It’s now 4:15 AM and I am done cutting, converting and uploading the footage for your geeky and entrepreneurial viewing pleasure.

    Blitzweekend is an unique experience where designers, developers, and entrepreneurs are challenged to create a working product in 48 hours […] Find a solution to a current problem, meet and innovate with bright creatives, work in an environment built for rapid development, and get feedback from experienced entrepreneurs.

    1. Introduction (EN/FR)
      Introduction and last minute match ups.
    2. Team Introduction (EN/FR)
      Organizers and Sponsors.
    3. Rules and Principles (EN/FR)
      Question and Answers.
    4. Presentation – Ben Yoskovitz (EN)
      Starting and raising money for a startup.
    5. Presentation – David Fugère (FR)
      Utiliser Ruby on Rails pour programmer des applications Facebook.
    6. Presentation – Matthew Harrison (EN)
      Financial and administrative pointers for startups.
    7. Presentation – Arach Tchoupani (EN)
      The benefits of Python for rapid web applications development.
    8. Presentation – Yann Rousselot-Pailley (FR)
      Aides et subventions gouvernementales pour entrepreneurs Québécois et Canadiens.
    9. Presentation – Vincent Guyaux (EN)
      Panelist tips for the contestants.
    10. Presentation – Alistair Croll (EN/FR)
      “Making it Viral” (English starts 3 min. in)

    Mainly being on the techy side of things, I particularly enjoyed the more business oriented presentations given by Ben, Matthew, Yann and Alistair.

    Good luck to all the participants! See you on Sunday, when I come to film the demos and the event’s conclusion.

  • Google Announces Lunar X Prize

    From: “Google Shoots For The Moon – Forbes.com“:

    The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy.

    More info is available on the Google Lunar X Prize web site.

    Google. Space. Clean Energy. $30M. What’s not to like?

    Via Digg.

  • SXSW 2008, [DRM-]Free Music and BitTorrent

    From “SXSW 2008 on BitTorrent: 3.5 GB of Free Music“:

    The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that – thanks to Greg Hewgill – can now be downloaded for free via BitTorrent.

    A little consolation for not being able to attend this year. 🙂

  • Great Article on XFN Manipulation

    From Brian Suda’s “XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations“:

    In this article I will take a good look at XFN – the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways. Extracting the data is easier than you think – there is probably a library for your favorite language already! If not, there are also some web services that could do the job that I’ll show you below.

    Via a Microformat tweet.

  • How Not to End Up as an Anachronism

    From “GigaOM: How Not to End Up as an Anachronism“:

    There are always seemingly good reasons to continue doing things the way they were done in the past, and transition always presents challenges. As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves. They are two basic reasons for this situation: Change of existing operational services is hard. So is changing people behavior.

    One of the advantages of working for a startup is that there is no baggage to deal with, leaving you with great freedom of innovation.

    On the other hand, vendor and infrastructure lock-in is something that we, as technologists, have all had to deal with in one form or another. The challenge is to develop an ability to spot nascent trends and innovations early on, so as to gage and potentially leverage them as they emerge, rather than miss the boat and be left behind.

    I think I’m not too bad at what I do, but then again, there are people like Sylvain, Joe and Chris (to only name a few) who always help keeping me modest on this front.

  • Change o' Plans. Joining the Praized Team!

    Funny the pace plans can change at, isn’t it? I was all organized and looking forward to formally announce my return to the world of independent consulting when things started to take an even more interesting turn instead.

    I am in fact very happy to announce that I have now officially joined the ranks of the Praized Media team.

    Praized Media is a startup company working on a web-based application that will enable you to find and discover local places and merchants with help from people you can trust. It’s also a tool that will structure local conversations within blogs and a new platform for local search providers to generate leads from the untapped social media market.

    I’ve been following Praized since mid-2007, when they really started to show up on my radar as a serious[ly fun] and innovative venture, oozing with potential, and backed by a winning trio of entrepreneurs: Sebastien Provencher, Sylvain Carle and Harry Wakefield. A fact which was only reinforced when Garage Technology Ventures decided to fund the company last September.

    I’ve been given the opportunity to increasingly involve myself in the company as a consultant since last December. The way things were evolving, I could not longer deny the clear fact that this is a project I want to be an integral part of. Something I can unequivocally see myself focusing on, even providing segues into some of involvements in the web and open source communities.

    Luckily for me, the feeling seemed to be mutual and today marked my first day on staff. Suffice to say, I’m sporting a mile long smile about it all.

    Praized is currently in stealth-mode, so although I can’t say much more, I can definitely hint that great things are coming! And with the people already on board, I’m in for a fun ride, striving to keep up with and help them in their efforts.

    Thanks for the opportunity, team! But shame on you though. Now I’ll have to can that site I worked on for my consulting biz’… ;-p

  • Engineers Say the Darndest Things

    From: “Kodak: A Thousand Nerds – TechTalk”

    Compressed-graphite field plotter:
    This example of inscriptive technology is a dactylically manipulated lignin/cellulose-encased crystalline carbon allotrope allowing shear force deposition for semiotic and representational modification of planar compressed-cellulose substrates.

    I dare you to think of what the device might be before checking the answer out.

  • Corey Martinez: Federal Session

    See “BMX Corey Martinez Session Federal“.

    Note: The whole video is great, but the amazing stuff starts about half-way into it (~2 min.).

    I’ve been stopping myself from buying another BMX for years, thinking “bald dude + trick bike = not so cool”, but seeing stuff like this just makes me think “Hey, I’ve got kids, don’t I?”.

    Gotta show them how to not get hurt, right? Right? Riiiight!

    Worked for skateboarding and snowboarding, after all. :p