The Montreal tech scene is thriving, especially in 2008 – or maybe I just became more involved and hence notice and participate in more things. Either way, last night was Montreal’s first CelebrateCamp which was held at the newly renovated Radio Lounge on the Main. “Camp” events, for those of you who are not familiar with the term are basically a kind of “open source” unconference. Wikipedia describes it as such:

An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.

So there, it was basically a big meeting of select people who have a marked interest for that specific event. It was organized by Austin Hill and the profits generated from ticket sales were given to Montreal Children’s hospital. We raised around 4000$ so it can’t be considered a bad thing. It was pretty nice actually, we had plenty of room to talk and meet people. I’m guessing that the fact that it was held on a Thursday night kind of slowed things down a bit, but then again people weren’t going clubbing, they were socializing. With that in mind, I have a few deceptions. First of all, most of the attendees were Twitterers. I walked in there with the feeling that I knew everyone, but that I couldn’t identify anyone. Name tags with Twitter usernames would have been great to identify people. I didn’t meet everyone I wanted to meet, mostly because I had no idea who they were. However the whole thing was organized in what, 2 weeks? So I’m considering it a success anyway. Also, people didn’t really hang around. By midnight there were about 50 of the 150 people that were there at 10 that were still there, and when the bar closed I can safely say that we were two left. Are geeks early sleepers? Or was it because it was Thursday? Or because everyone was keeping their party stamina for the Station C party the next day? Well, whatever it was, I met three people, which is disappointing.

But I had fun, and we raised 4k$ for kids. Can’t be bad.

See the Twitter tag and the Flickr tag. For an accurate tweet-recap of the party in two nice animations, head over to Michelle’s blog and have a chuckle on me.

For Montrealers who’ve been living under a rock, Molson has launched a new advertising campaign focusing on a younger target audience using a (fake, but official-looking) sport federation sponsoring of a new sport, the party. They call it “Association des Pros du Party” (APP) which translates to “Association of Party Pros”.

I was invited to one of their party at Montreal’s ToHu last thursday. I took a bunch of pictures (mostly of half-naked paid models, ahem) but I won’t be able to post them until I get my hands on a Windows or Mac machine, since Apple has no support for Linux, and it’s the only platform I use right now. So no pictures for now, but I can manage to write up a quick recap of the party.

First, when you get at the ToHu, they make you sign a waiver basically allowing them to use your drunk ass face in their promotions. That’s fine by me and the friends I had with me. In we went, only to be greeted by an army of pseudo-journalists taking pictures (with obviously empty cameras) of our group as we walked down the red carpet, by the APP cup, by the pseudo-interviewer and into the main room. That was rather fun, and somewhat impressive. Molson is paying a bunch of hot chicks to stand around with empty cameras and flash people. With their cameras, that is… But then, it’s when shit got impressive budget-wise.

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