Montreal has a vibrant tech community, most notably in the gaming and multimedia arenas, but also in the world of internet startups. There is also a heavy open-source influence, probably fuelled by the desire of many Montrealers for intellectual freedom and freedom of expression. I’d like to showcase a few of the Montreal based projects I’ve come across:

Identi.ca

Identica is fairly new on the scene, only released by Evan Prodromou for public consumption a couple of weeks ago, but it has received a lot of attention. It is a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter, except it is completely open, both from a code perspective and a data perspective. It is built from the open source Laconi.ca software project which allows anyone to have their own server with complete inter-operability between servers. All the public data at Identica are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. As the FAQ states:

The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

My Identica profile is here.

Librivox

Librivox has been around for a while, since 2005 in fact. It is the brainchild of Hugh McGuire, a Montreal based writer and web developer. Librivox aims to provide all books in the public domain in audio format. Books are read by volunteers and the resulting audio files are published on the Librivox site. Librivox is non-profit and ad-free, and the recordings are all in the public domain.

Praized

I heard about Praized fairly early on in its development because one of the developers used to do the job I’m now doing. Praized is a local search tool with a twist. It allows users to “Praize” or “Raze” businesses as well as comment on them and add them as Favourites. Because it’s a Montreal based project a lot of the top Praized businesses are in Montreal, but the site has listings for all of North America and I expect it to grow and evolve as more people start Praizing. I also hope they add listings for other countries. As well as the main site there is also a Facebook application, plugins for WordPress and Movable Type, and a published API.

My Praized profile is here.

Montreal Tech Watch

Finally, a handy resource for keeping up to date on the Montreal tech scene is the Montreal Tech Watch blog, which is in the process of re-inventing itself but is basically a central hub for all things tech/startup related in Montreal.