Lots of speakers will be there and it seems very well done for an "anti-conference".

The word anti-conference actually makes me smile. "Unconference" I could understand as it’s a trendy word but anti-conference is a bit strong for my own taste. Let’s face it, it’s got speakers and sponsors: it IS a conference and that’s fine :)

As of today, more that 200 people and 15 speakers registrered. I think this will be the biggest event for september. Do not miss it!

StartupDrinks will be tomorrow (Wed. 30th, 6pm) at Café des Éclusiers. Here’s the map as it’s tricky to find if you don’t know where it is.

View Larger Map

The site is in a very early stage (so early that I haven’t uploaded many images yet) but I’m working a lot on finding interesting images. Since the site is going to allow user generated content, I’d like to get the ball rolling.

So if you have any interesting pictures, please visit www.vuamontreal.ca and submit your pictures. Don’t forget to pass this around, it’s going to be pretty interesting I think..!

Of course, this is a totally free service to benefit the community! :) Just visit the advertising page for more details.

Things will get back to normal shortly so hang in there.

UPDATE: Everything is back to normal..!

Manual monitoring of spam has greatly been reduced and I can now do other things like live a normal life. There are however some cases where I wonder if the plugin was asleep as some very obvious comments made it through all the way to my email inbox. Today for example, I received two emails that contained so many adult words that I stopped counting after 100.

I know that the plugin is a “machine” using some artificial intelligence to decide whether a comment is spam or not.  I just find it odd that it works so flawlessly most of the times but it sometimes lets those obvious comments go through the cracks.

All in all, Defensio does the job pretty well and considering the price (free), I’m quite happy. I encourage you to use it!

One last advise to the Defensio coders; if a word is repeated over 50 times or if a comment has more than 10 URLs, it’s probably spam :)

So here it is:

iNovia is recently well know for investing 2 million dollars in StandoutJobs so the BlitzWeekend committee is very excited to have them on board.

Just as a reminder for people who don’t know what BlitzWeekend is: it is going to be an event where teams will work on a project. Projects can be web-based applications, desktop software, widgets, mobile apps, games, hardware etc. This is however a very limited list and we welcome teams with fresh ideas. If you solve a current problem, if your idea is innovative, if it involves building new tools, then it’s probably a right fit for Blitzweekend.

Please pre-register ASAP as space is limited.

It is also a big day for StandoutJob’s team as they announced a $2M funding from iNovia. Talk about double punch..! iNovia is a great company always willing to help out the community and it’s great to see that they put their dollars where their mouth is.

There’s a lot of coverage on very big sites like TechCrunch, GigaOM and Mashable so that’s amazing. Local sites are also covering everything. You can read more on these sites: A frog in the valley, StandoutJob’s blog, Instigator, I never nu, Web1979, MontrealTechWatch, TechCFO, Mikel.org and Guillaume Thoreau.

Anyone got pictures? Good luck to the StandoutJob team!