My original title for thist post was: On the run since CUSEC & Democamp where I had a run in with Google but Montreal’s Mojo is Rising and me without my pants on. But while I started to write a general catch up post about what I’ve been seeing in my travels the last couple of weeks, I started to put it together some thoughts about an emerging technology and entrepreneurship community movement occuring around Canada. I see most of it in Montreal, but it’s occuring across the nation.

Things really picked up a few weeks ago with a few projects I’m involved with. Although I’ve been on the run lately I wanted write about a few of the conferences and meetings I’ve had on my travels and talk about some of what is occurring in the Montreal and Canadian tech community.

My whirlwind schedule of late started at CUSEC conference. I spoke at the event and it was a great time. There were tons of good questions from a great group of students. I also met a few really bright engineers.

I love speaking at schools for students. The air is loaded with energy, new thinking and I end up getting more out of it then most students I think. Some of my best hires in my career have been freshly graduated engineers, and I encourage any enterprising graduating student to join a good startup.

Quick side note:

Any graduating engineering student is welcome to contact me anytime to talk about finding you a hot startup job (with any of my various startup companies or with other hot startups run by my friends & other teams I’ve met across Canada). Help me help you find a position with a small startup. Join a small team and consider it your own startup. You will learn more in 2 years with a small startup then 5 years in any other company. There is a reason some great startups are created by students. Students and startups are made for each other in my opinion.

There were a few nice posts about the conference here, here and finally here. There are a bunch of great photo’s of the event up at Flickr.

I want to thank Kalu and the organizers of the conference for a great event.

This is where I ran into a team from Google who was at the career fair looking to hire for their Montreal office. I spoke with some them and welcomed them to town.

Later that day John Kopanas did a great community goodness and pulled together Democamp Cusec. I was amazed at the incredible display of Montreal talent and community involvement. Josh over at Yashlabs has the best wrap up I’ve read. Great job Josh. Looking forward to connecting soon. Did I mention his great post. Go read it now, it’s shows some of the great projects and people in Montreal.

My friend & teammate Sebastien did a great job presenting Sugar and got a lot of positive feedback.

My friend Fred has a great post up about Democamp Cusec as well.

I then spent a couple of days in Toronto doing some business with investors, friends and meeting my friends from Cambrian House who were in town.

I met with my friend and StartupCamp co-organizer David Crow. I always enjoy my conversations with David. I’m learning a lot about how to build community from David.

During our conversation I told him I thought Montreal’s bohemian culture gave us a distinct edge in creating a ground zero for social & web innovation in Canada (web deux.zero for those with a taste for bad buzzwords translated). He of course felt that Toronto had a fair chance at this ground zero role. I would say he has a lot of reasons to be confident. Check out the work he is doing in Toronto and Alec Saunders post on the recent Toronto Democamp which was packed.

David continues to do an incredible job with his community involvement and I would say has a lot to be proud of. His post on Economics of Abundance and the Wealth of Barcamp is required reading in my opinion. David and I had a discussion of the economics of abundance when I told him what Project Ojibwe is cooking up. He’s one of the few people I wanted to share the whole idea with. He’s sworn to a DNH agreement - (Do no Harm) so he can’t disclose recklessly. Only when helping me recruit :)

The only reason I think Montreal has a chance to show our strengths is because we are learning in realtime from the great examples, initiatives such as Democamp, Opencities and sharing he and the community there are doing.

I’m not sure but I believe Toronto has the most active unconference community and it shows. Canada’s version of the Web 2.0 expo the Mesh conference is organized by David, and other great members from the Toronto tech community and not some tech conference company. They worry about how to keep the event affordable and high quality by bringing out the best speakers and showcasing Canadian projects. This is a full year before similar ideas are being discussed by Arrington and Calacanis. Talk about Canadian innovation. That’s shows the power of what is going on in Toronto.

Then we have my friend Tara and our Canadian Citizen Agent who is spreading community lessons while on a peakkeeping mission to Silicon Valley (once again, it takes a Canadian). [Read her recent posts on community building, community diversity and community pt. II]

You can also see fellow Canadian and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield talking communities on CNN.

I hope throughout the year, we’ll be doing some interesting things in Montreal (and Calgary where I’m going to be spending more time) that we can share with other communities. I have a number of projects I’m supporting and sponsoring that I believe will contribute to helping Canada’s technology community grow.

So imagine my surprise when I returned to Montreal and Google was back on my radar. A couple of days after Cusec the news broke in La Presse and was picked up by my friend Seb and the blog community that Google had opened a Montreal office and was hiring.

This is great news for the Montreal technology community. I think there is a change occurring in Montreal, and a little shake up on the local market for talent will be healthy for everyone.

When my friend Julien complained about the need for Montreal to show our brains, lamenting not having a hot startup scene, the community responded loudly (check out all the comments, and the follow up post).

When YULBiz showed up later that week the community show up in force and there were probably 20 local entrepreneurs that came out.

My friend Ben Yoskovitz responded when he posted this great idea for an entrepreneurs networking breakfast and got a great response. I’ll be in attendance and the event is up on Upcoming.org (Subscribe to the Montreal tag for events, I’m going to be listing more community events there shortly.)

Clearly the Montreal community is starting to come together around these events.

Fred has announced the dates for the upcoming Democamp Montreal for February 27th. Register on the wiki to attend and please come out and support the community. The event has already filled up with Montreal projects that will be presenting. Come out and see these five presenters at the great location that Fred arranged with the help of René Barsalo from SAT. It was great to see the schedule fill up so quick, just like it did at Democamp Cusec.

Democamp Montreal2 is scheduled for March 29 and surprise surprise, it has already filled up with presenters as well including what looks like 3 stealth projects being presented.

When I was at Garage Canada’s great Startup Canada event (which deserves it’s own post soon) Bill Reichert and I spoke about how in the Valley there are community events every night where entrepeneurs and engineers meet and interact, practice elevator pitches and get introduced to each other. These interactions help you improve your network, your skills and in many cases your pitches. In fact in the valley because of the density of people working in the technology field you don’t even really need to go anywhere. Everytime I walk down University Ave. in Stanford, or stop by Bucks in Woodside I’ll run into someone I know and have a chance to catch up.

Something similar is occuring in Montreal.

I think there is an incredible void in our city that beginning to be filled with people starting to discover what an incredibly rich technology community we have here. I intend over the coming weeks to begin to post about some interesting people and projects that deserve some attention.

Even the Montreal Gazette is hoping on the bandwagon and starting a local blog to cover the Montreal tech community. I think this is a great move by the Gazette, and frankly something Canadian newspapers have traditionally been very bad at. With some notable exceptions (Mark Evans and Mathew Ingram who are also not surprisingly part of the Mesh crew and active members of the community they cover), I don’t think there has been a lot of focus on discovering some of our made in Canada projects. Unfortunately most Canadian media like to wait until after our projects get some media attention south of the border, and then too often enjoy taking a skeptical view of the Canadian’s projects chance for success against US players.

I hope that this is beginning to change, but it doesn’t really matter since newspapers aren’t exactely the only media source around anymore. There is enough ability for our communities, podcasters and bloggers to promote each others great projects and gain the attention of those who will support made in Canada innovation - which is the users - not the media.

I invite anyone doing something interesting in Montreal that you feel deserves some attention to come out to one of these events. I have a few startups and special projects of my own that I’ll be announcing throughout the next couple of months, but I’m interested in what else is occuring in our community.

I have one closing question for people reading this, what local Canadian technology projects do you feel deserve some attention?

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On Fri 9 Feb 2007.