Posts filed under 'Montreal startup community'
Upcoming: Co-Founders Monday on April 20th, 2009!
Make sure to mark in your calendar: Co-Founders Monday at Bolidea on April 20th, 2009 starting at 6:30pm.
Whether you have a great project idea and wish to recruit partners or the desire to join an interesting project, come, meet and mingle with like-minded individuals. Looking forward to seeing you!
Register now at Montreal Newtech !
Add comment April 14, 2009
Recap: March YULHackers
by Magda Rocki
Who had time this past Saturday to leisurely enjoy the lovely beginnings of spring? Certainly not this dedicated group of knowledgeable entrepreneurs, creators and programmers present at the freshly minted YULHackers event.
Highlights of the event:
- An unconference format was adopted: Participants were greeted at the door with a giant, blank post-it board and markers and directed toward filling out alloted time slots with their topics of interest.
- Sebastien presented his programming language Sugar: The engaging presentation focused on the origins of Sugar, its practical applications through a journey into its design and syntax, and concluded with a few slides on its admissibility as a good replacement to JavaScript for front-end web development. Presentation slides can be found here.
- A group discussion was initiated about the future format and branding related efforts for YULhackers: So far, thanks to the magical hands of Alok, we have a website, a simple wiki and a tumblr blog.
- Peter of the Navarra Group presented their micro-finance web app which will be used for an online – lending system.
Thanks again to all the participants for attending, especially Alok and Heri for organizing and Sebastien and Peter for presenting their work. I’m certain that with your continuous enthusiasm, input and participation, the event’s dimensions will quickly grow into one of Montreal Tech community’s “ must attend” events. Keep tab on the next event by checking back here or here .
1 comment March 11, 2009
Unconferencing Free Hackers3
by Magda Rocki
After a brief reformatting pause, we are once again delighted to be hosting the Free Hackers event this upcoming Saturday, March 7th 2009 from 1-7 pm. On the hacking menu: a presentation and hands-on workshop on the programming language Sugar– by Sebastien Pierre founder of datalicious– followed by an open hacking session. The full details and the sign-up for the event can be found here , so join us and let’s revel in the new Free Hackers format!
Add comment March 2, 2009
More than founders at Co-Founders Monday
by Olivier Cabanes
This week, I attended Co-Founders Monday, and I was very pleased to meet a crowd that was composed of passionate individuals with a desire to learn, share, and talk about anything related to tech businesses.
Everyone came to the event with different goals in mind, and it made for a very interesting meeting. I met university students looking for work experience within a dynamic startup environment, developers looking for a project that would light up their interest, entrepreneurs looking for a partner in crime, investors looking for promising ventures, etc. I’m glad to see that this event is helping to create new relationships and new business ideas, as this kind of diversity is something we had hoped for originally .
It is great to see that this gathering emphasizes execution behind great ideas (i.e. finding a partner or a person that has a specific skill set, gather advice, etc.) rather than promoting secrecy. It shows that members of the community realize that ideas are important but that efforts also need to be directed toward the development and execution. Otherwise, amazing ideas will never even have a chance of becoming reality.
I’m sure the Co-Founders Monday meeting format will evolve over time, and I hope the positive things I noted above will keep on being part of the event’s formula.
Thanks to everyone for their involvement and I hope to see you next time!
1 comment February 19, 2009
Free Hackers: The January Edition
Participants settling in Bolidea's infamous " nipple lounge"
About 12 hacking aficionados met on Saturday the 10th of January for the second edition of the Free Hacker’s meet up: a monthly gathering for developers, programmers and technology hackers with the goal of facilitating experimentation, discussion and project exploration of new technologies and programming languages. continue reading…
1 comment January 19, 2009
FreeHackers Montreal at Bolidea
by Magda Rocki
Preparations for the event:
A few hours before the first FreeHackers meet was to be held in the offices of Bolidea, the team itself was efficiently scrabbling to provide a welcoming space fitting for big and small hackers alike. So late last night, while other worker bees were nectaring their stressful workweeks away with alcoholic pollen, the Bolidea team was fervently at work, prettifying our offices, and finally installing our company’s name plate.
As I arrived sleepy-eyed at the office on Saturday under the noon sun, I was greeted by the infectious grins of the newly arrived participants of the inaugural edition of the Free Hackers meeting. continue reading…
2 comments December 17, 2008
Got a Problem?
by Martin-Luc Archambault
We’ve always been coming up with cool ideas of products that we like to think people would really need. In the past, we’ve usually been too swamped working on other projects to develop even a fraction of these new ideas. The result is that we missed out on a few amazing business opportunities that others executed on and that became great successes.
It’s commonly said that for a startup to be successful, the stars need to be aligned. In theory, that means a lot of things, including a fantastic team with a great idea and a real market. We think the toughest thing to nail down is what makes an idea “great”. We don’t have the perfect answer to that, but after much reflection, we are now convinced that no idea can be great if it doesn’t really solve a market problem. continue reading…
Add comment December 4, 2008
Bolidea’s First Blog Post
by Martin-Luc Archambault
Hello there! I’m Martin-Luc Archambault and this is my first blog post – ever. I am an entrepreneur based out of Montreal and I’ve been developing and launching technology startups since I was in high school – 13 or so years ago. Obviously some of these companies were complete failures but I was fortunate enough to have a few pretty good successes!
In the past few months I’ve been working hard with my long time partners Olivier Cabanes & Magali Janvier on developing our dream which I am happy to present today!
Our new company is Bolidea. It’s an incubator with the mission of developing technology companies that strive to provide solutions to real market problems.
With this blog, we obviously want to highlight our solutions, products and companies. However, we promise that we’ll do so in a very candid manner because our most important goal is definitely to share and discuss our experiences (both good and bad) with the community.
We know that we can’t be good at everything and we think that the best way for us to get better is to engage and learn from each other’s mistakes and successes.
So we really hope you’ll talk to us either by commenting on this blog or by emailing or calling us. Better yet, if you are in Montreal and you are walking on St-Laurent Boulevard, don’t hesitate to drop by our office and we’ll be happy to take some time to show you around and chat about your projects and our companies. You’ll find our address and complete contact info on the About Us page.
Add comment December 1, 2008
