Tungle receives DEMO award

Tungle receives DEMO award | Montreal Tech Watch Here you, Hip Hip Hurray for Marc and his team. Great work, great demo. I've been following since its beginnings and lately we've been working with them. The concept is sound - and it's going to go places - give it a whirl!

Distributed development

Everyday I realize how powerful distributed software development is, or as some may call it Global Delivery Model. Why? 1)it allows us to be even more flexible, I liken it to having several nodes in a network all autonomous and collaborating at the delivery of a project. 2) Ramp up is quick, you find the talent where it is available, we pick from several sites, increasing our odds of finding the right people faster, we're all about jumping right in after all. 3)we get to leverage regional strengths - region X is stronger in embedded, region Y is stronger in something else, go where the talent is, making our team stronger and delivering faster and better for our customers. Last week we held an event in Ottawa on Outsourcing with Fidus, we had a great turnout. The event was about informing people on what Outsourcing is good for, and why do it. My take away is that more and more companies are considering that doing things internally is no longer enough. Meeting a market window can be done with outside help, and just like us we couldn't meet our customer demand without our distributed model, I believe our clients have the same reality, they can't meet the demand without going outside their walls - and this is a good thing, it makes them more agile, flexible and meeting their own customer's needs and makes them more successful, by making them more money!

Autumn things

September and October are two of my favorite months of the year. The weather is cooling down, no more humidity, and it's enjoyable to be outside. This year is especially special, as September has been amazing weather wise. Autumn is also those sun rays so bright. The contrast are crisp, the water is darker, the light is brighter, the leaves are turning color the gatineau hills are just spectacular. I was biking this early this morning and the scenery was out of this world. I bike in those trails all summer long, and it's amazing how fall can turn things in a way that I felt I had been there before, but it was all different, the valley from the champlain lookout and the ridge trail was a the scene of harvest time. It brings me to the second thing that is so great about fall, all the vegetables ready for harvest, the food we get to cook at this time of the year is unreal. There are so much things to cook so little time! It's time for "canning" things - I got to get this pressure cooker thing for the non acid stuff. Fred enjoying Fall in Ottawa

Macadamian 10years!

As part of the build toward the 10th year anniversary, Gilles, a fellow Macadamians has had the brilliant idea to ask us what were were doing 10years ago. Here is my answer:

"For me I had left Corel a few weeks back - the plan was to take 3months off, then think about what I was going to do. A few days after I had set out to take it easy for a while, Bill Tidd who was still working at Corel dropped me an e-mail - hey way back when I was using hotmail, this crazy free email service people would say - Bill:"Fred I have this project gaining huge momentum, can you come and work for me" - I didn't think for one minute he was serious, I had just spent several hours on the phone with him literally a few days ago, to talk about why I was leaving etc. Bill Tidd is one of the best guy to work with, smart as hell, and straight shooter. I couldn't believe he was asking me to go work with him again, didn't he get it I was done with Corel and the corel craziness. Next thing you know I bring up the idea to Claude Montpetit, "Claude it could be a way to get started on developing a product", Claude was out or almost out of Corel at the time. So I started making a few phone calls, Francis, then Stéphane, it was just like putting the school ban back together! For the next month or so I was traveling between New-Hampshire and Ottawa on a weekly basis. We finally settled in our existing space in October - a huge 500sq/ft - we're now more than 10,000sq/ft as a reference. So we settle in in our nice space, and the third week we get broken into - the thieves took just about everything, luckily we still hadn't received our brand spanking new dell machines yet. So our home machines got stolen. BTW at the time for connectivity we had an ISDN line 64kbs, our laptops were great machines Eurocom with 64MB of ram, with the random page fault because the two mem sticks weren't the same brand... Great souvenirs..."

Palm dumps its hyped-up Foleo

When I read that news - I was pretty bumped, I would have like to give it a shot. I understand though that it's better to kill it now, cut your loss early they say. So i didn't think of the angle Matt decided to take on it. Does it have to cost 10M to figure it's not going to work, absolutely not, read Matt's thoughts, and this is where our strategy comes in, I wrote about it in the past, but I think his point much better articulated.

Basically looking we have to look at innovation as a betting game, or better go with the times - a poker game - raise the stakes as the game progresses, once you have a better idea of the cards you've been dealt, as that time only should one start drooping big bucks on the table. In our jargon - it would mean once you know the prototype rocks from all angles, users, business, technology - you go into the "productization" phase and the winner takes all.

Science again - what it means

From the globe this morning, another article about the need for more engineers. It's important to note now that the choices you make in high-school are influenced by ... Television and yes counselors who are not informed, and parents.

"For example, most school career counsellors are woefully uninformed on what engineers and scientists actually do and the amazing variety of career opportunities. Students tend to gravitate toward careers that they see and hear a lot about. That's why law and medicine are so popular. Television hits such as Law & Order and ER actually have a career choice impact. Perhaps what we need is a suspense drama featuring engineers dealing with a collapsing dam, stress cracking in a jumbo jet wing, a medical equipment crisis or a plot to destroy the Internet."

I heard through a conversation the other day that CSI - the tv show - is causing a spike in enrollment for this type of program at school. People will say this is good, I say I'm not sure, for starter in real life they don't have all the time in the world to find/prove who the killer is, things are much more superficial. The science they go to apply in real life is no where near the same. I agree with the writer we need a kind of MCGiver show on technology, or the A-Team!

"While all scientific professions are important to Canada's future, the most often quoted measure of technical competitiveness is new engineering graduates. By this measure, Asian countries are beating the West hands down, and quality is generally very high."

Chances are that China is going to zap a lot of jobs, and if they are the ones who understand the products we use every day we're in trouble - we need to have the capability to innovate, on top of using. As a kid what I liked most was fiddling with things, and taking things apart - we need to bring this to school. We're putting a Robot building competition together for Ottawa schools, we're also putting a take that computer apart class this fall for a few select schools in Ottawa - if you can, or you are willing to help, drop me a note.