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  • Praized is Now Live!

    Yes! Praized Media, our Hub, Facebook application and other current integration options (API, plugins, etc) are now all live to the public and in full production gears. 🙂

    Now Web publishers can easily write about local places while growing traffic and ad revenue. Praized is the first free local search platform designed specifically for social media sites like blogs, social networks and other online communities.

    I said, back in January, how happy I was about joining the Praized team, and how much potential I was seeing in the company. Suffice to say, I’m just as ecstatic as I was back then, kicked up a notch or two.

    Hey, maybe now I can reach inbox zero and start blogging again. 😉

    Edit: we’re getting some pretty good reviews so far. Crossing our fingers. Still work to do.

  • SSH Setup for EC2 UI on Mac OS X

    If you are using Amazon’s EC2 as a cloud hosting solution, you owe it to yourself to install the most excellent EC2 UI Firefox extension (source) to manage your server instances (note: not yet compatible with Firefox 3).

    Now, if you also happen to be on Mac OS X, one annoying thing is that EC2 UI is configured by default to be used on Linux (and GNOME). Looking online, all I could find were questions on how to set EC2 UI on OS X to use the proper terminal and ssh, but no answer.

    Fear not! Yours truly spent a few minutes on the case, and ended up finding a solution that is at least viable for myself, and will hopefully be for you as well. The trick is that I have X11 installed on my OS X box anyway, so I just use the binaries intended for this package.

    EC2 UI setup for OSX

    There you have it. Now, I can right click on any instance listed in EC2 UI and select “SSH to Public DNS Name”. X11 and xterm are both seamlessly launched and proceed to log me into the desired instance.

  • WordPress 2.5 is officially out!

    From the WordPress Blog:

    WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

    Not taking the time to post much these days (too busy), but I couldn’t miss this one, being in the middle of developing stuff for the platform (among other things). 🙂

  • 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.