Bangladesh is quickly becoming a major service exporting country, with a growing number of citizens working for overseas clients, especially in the Information Technology (IT) sector. According to the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS), there are over 25,000 IT engineers in Bangladesh working for over 600 software and IT companies. At least 150 of these companies specialize in serving overseas clients – and the number is growing. As the IT sector is becoming an increasingly vital part of the country’s developing economy, the Government of Bangladesh has declared the Software and IT Services sector a ‘High Priority’ export. The AlertPay-Casada partnership will play a vital role in the development of this sector.

Individual service exporters in the country have faced a major roadblock which has stunted the sector’s growth and development. Until today, there has been no secure, cost-effective and efficient system for accepting international payments. AlertPay is now able to provide the solution of a localized service to Bangladeshis needing to transfer money from international accounts into their local bank accounts.

“Our global online payment platform will allow Bangladeshis with an AlertPay account to receive payments from employers abroad into their AlertPay E-Wallet. The funds can then be withdrawn from their AlertPay E-Wallet and deposited directly into their local bank accounts,” explains Firoz Patel, CEO of AlertPay. “Our platform will result in instant savings for our Bangladeshi members, who now have an alternative method to avoid costly payment receiving options such as bank wires and debit cards.”

AlertPay will begin processing bank transfer withdrawals into Bangladeshi accounts at the end of February, according to Patel. Individual service exporters working in the IT sector will be introduced to this new service at the BASIS Soft Expo 2012, the largest information and communications technology exposition in Bangladesh. The event, held at the Bangabandhu International Conference Centre, February 22-26, will provide IT professionals in Bangladesh the opportunity to learn more about AlertPay and its services.

Bangladeshis will be able to take advantage of this new service by signing up for a free AlertPay account at www.alertpay.com. This new service will be instrumental in allowing freelance workers to increase their earnings by enabling them to receive payments from across the globe and transfer their funds into their local bank accounts. AlertPay will bolster growth in Bangladesh’s outsourcing market by providing Bangladeshi freelancers with a simple and convenient way to receive payments globally and to transfer funds locally, for the lowest fees ever offered in Bangladesh.

Inerjys is targeting to raise approximately $370 million from governments around the world; $300 million from strategic investors (including multi-national corporations and banks) and the balance from sovereign wealth funds, angel investors and other wealthy individuals (including partners in the fund). The fund plans on making $5 to $40 million dollar investments into companies focused on clean energy – wind, solar, biofuels, energy storage, distribution and related markets.

In a recent interview (from PEHub / Buyouts magazine) Ouaknine notes that despite all the ads and publicity surrounding solar power, wind and biofuels, only 3% of the energy produced around the world actually comes from renewable sources. “How do we make the hype turn into reality?” said Ouaknine in an interview with Buyouts. His inspiration for the fund stemmed from his seeing a number of problems holding back development of the renewable energy market, and his belief that, with a little luck, he could solve them.

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The company behind Echoer started about a year ago by Daniel Cowen (CEO) and Davin Sufer (CTO). (We interviewed Davin about his job at WowWee back in October 2010.) Daniel’s already got one app under his belt (Last Night Never Happened), although his background is in international law. Davin is the tech guy behind Echoer, and is also the CTO at WowWee. They worked together on Last Night Never Happened as well.

Here’s Daniel’s elevator pitch for Echoer:

Have you ever wondered what the people in the same place or event as you were thinking, or whether they are sharing the same experience as you? Maybe it’s the below-par service at the local diner, or that wonderful new band playing at your favourite bar. Built on a highly interactive visual platform, Echoer lets you leave your thoughts in different locations, explore what others around you are saying, and see what’s echoing loudest in a given place or area.

Echoer is a full-time project for Daniel and Davin, although Davin remains CTO of WowWee. Daniel says that WowWee is a “key stakeholder in Echoer” and they’ve leveraged a lot of the expertise at WowWee already.

NextMontreal: How does Echoer work?

Daniel: Echoer lets users post and experience local thoughts, events and discoveries, leaving them behind in the places you visit. These posts, called ‘echoes’, can be recommended or ‘amped’ up by other users. In turn the Echoer app displays on a map those echoes which are the most local, recent and popular.

Echoer has been designed to be elegant and easy to use. The visual nature of the platform makes it quick and simple to find out relevant, timely, and popular recommendations, news and opinions about local restaurants, bars, gigs and events – wherever people gather.

When exploring your local area, the most popular and up to date content is displayed more frequently and prominently on the screen. When users drill down into a specific location, they can see a striking visualization of the echoes within that place, moving around in real-time as they’re amplified or new echoes are added.

Why start in Canada?

Daniel: We have a large contact base in Canada and Montreal specifically. We have a number of campus initiatives and other events planned around the first month of launch. One of the benefits of doing an initial launch in Canada is the ability to refine the app’s functionality and use cases in a discerning market, ahead of taking it into other countries. We are also pleased to be partnering with well known destinations like the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as we work to integrate Echoer into their overall social media strategy, and the experience of visitors to the museum.

NextMontreal: Why do you think people will willingly submit content into the system?

Daniel: We live in an age of sharing now, with users more and more used to broadcasting their thoughts and bridging the real-world and digital on a daily basis (particularly with the prevalence of smartphones). People love to air their thoughts on events they are at or restaurants they are in (to name a couple of examples). The one thing we have noticed during private beta testing is that users have really embraced our colourful and interactive UI, leading to a higher contribution to consumption ratio than expected.

In addition, users can push their location-based thoughts to their Facebook and Twitter accounts via Echoer, making this a natural tool for them to use when letting both friends/followers know what they are thinking in a particular place at a given point in time.
We have some exciting updates planned which will give users even more reason to come back into the system and see what is being echoed and amped up around them.

NextMontreal: You’ve put a lot of thought into monetization as well (as witness in your Le Web presentation). Can you explain that further?

Echoer will not be monetizing off the bat, but as with most start-ups these days, serious thought has to be given to how to create value. We have some very exciting plans in the works, many of which will enhance the user experience and provide businesses and venues with very novel ways to engage their audience. But I have to emphasize that we don’t want to intrude on the user experience, and this will always be subject to the mechanisms within Echoer that ensure users only see what is timely and relevant to them.

NextMontreal: What’s your biggest challenge at this point?

Daniel: The two largest challenges a platform like ours faces are content generation and user acquisition.

We wanted to ensure that on Day 1 our first users were not faced with an empty map devoid of echoes. With that in mind we have spent a lot of time working out how best to “pre-seed” Echoer to give you as authentic and stimulating an experience as possible. We are constantly seeding content through partnerships and in time the “pre-seeded” echoes will either be amped up by our users, affirming their real-time relevance, or they will deplete (in line with the Echoer relevance algorithm) and ultimately disappear off screen.

As for user generation, we have a number of campus initiatives and other events planned around the first few months of launch, and will be attracting users through social media marketing and PR. I don’t want to let the cat(s) out of the bag, but we have a couple of very cool things planned which gel in a very unique way with Echoer’s strengths and use-cases.

NextMontreal: What are some lessons learned so far?

Daniel: Stealth development is great to a certain extent, but don’t forget to listen to experts and users. Now and then take a step back and sanity check. We are doing something really new with Echoer, but some of its features skirt areas that many smartphone users are well experienced in and have spent many hours poking and prodding. Listen to them, stay true to your core concept, but tweak where necessary, and try to marry great UX with your overall vision where you can.

For example in mid-July, only a few months into development we had gotten too close to our product and had created a visual experience that would have been both impractical to execute and may have left first time users overwhelmed. I’m incredibly grateful to the frank feedback we had from people close to us at the time. It was far less painful to change course at that point in time than it would have been months later.

The other big lesson. Pitch, pitch, pitch. As well as helping shake (some) of the nerves, it also helps you become better at explaining things and gives you an understanding of how you are presenting your product through the eyes of others.

Kristina Tomaz-Young is a true supporter of the Montreal tech community, and she does a great job of interviewing people, telling stories, and informing the rest of us on what’s going on. I introduced Kristina to Brent Barrett some time ago before an event (I believe it was a Capital Innovation event) and now that he’s on board, things are even better. It’s hard being a single founder at the best of times, and the two of them make a great team.

Lately they’ve been producing more content, and they’re now doing a weekly show on what’s going on in tech (in Montreal and outside). It’s a fun, short “catch up” that I hope they’ll continue.

With all of that said, I’ve partnered with VC-TV to promote their content on NextMontreal.

You’ll see it in the sidebar where their latest video is playing and on a full VC-TV page available here: nextmontreal.com/venturecaptv_episodes/ (You can also access this page under Resources in the top navigation.)

The page shows the latest video, but also has a great layout for accessing older content as well. I’ve always wanted to have more video content on NextMontreal to mix it up a bit and allow people to enjoy different types of content in different formats. With VC-TV that’s now possible. So thank you to Kristina and Brent for producing great content, and I encourage everyone to check it out.

iNovia Capital participated along with Greycroft, both of which invested in Resonate’s $5M Series A.

Resonate is an advertising technology company focused on values marketing. They’ll be using the new funding to accelerate their business, including the launch of a “breakthrough ‘big data’ tool for political campaigns and corporate marketers.” Ted Leonsis will join Resonate’s board, and help lead the company’s new efforts.

Resonate, founded in 2008, developed a model for reaching online audiences and connecting consumers with advertising that interests them on both politics and products. Resonate’s unique approach goes beyond traditional targeting criteria such as demographics and interests. Political campaigns, advocacy groups, and major corporations will now have expanded offerings from Resonate to target their ad campaigns based on viewers’ otherwise unidentifiable values such as patriotism, environmentalism, taste for luxury, or interest in innovation – and many more such values attributes.

Additionally, with backing from Revolution Growth, Resonate will bring to market a new product that will enable corporate chief marketing officers and campaign managers to employ Resonate’s “Big Data” to understand, for the first time, the values and beliefs that are drawing customers and voters online. These new profiles will allow campaigns and companies to target their advertising and communications efforts with unprecedented precision and insight; they will be able to understand interested consumers and likely supporters with insights currently unavailable to them by existing means.

InstantGeo is a location-aware mobile development platform. Their goal is to offer mobile developers a cloud-hosted platform to easily add location-awareness to their applications without having to develop and maintain a server backend, or at the very least, minimize the development effort required for location-aware features.

Jason and Marco came to the realization that InstantGeo could be worthwhile when working on a different project. “If something like InstantGeo had existed, instead of developing our own backend specific to this project, it would have been very helpful,” said Jason. “We thought that a lot of developers must have similar needs. Backend development is not very glorious. When you have an idea for a mobile app, you really want to develop the app, not the support platform. We decided to fix that.”

InstantGeo also released a mobile iOS application called NaviCone (free, no ads) in November, 2011. The app allows its users to locate roadwork managed by Transport Quebec and the City of Montreal, and give them access to all Transport Quebec cameras. In the latest version of the applicaiton they’ve also added the Champlain and Jacques-Cartier bridge video cameras. Users also receive alerts and messages published by Transport Quebec and the JCCBI federal corporation that manages the Champlain, Jacques-Cartier and Honore-Mercier bridges. According to Jason, the most popular feature is the “Favorites” view, where users can add and sort cameras (or roadwork that they want to remember and monitor), and quickly glance at them in a scrolling list. “It’s pretty useful when you want to quickly decide if you should take the 13 or 15, 20 or 40, the Champlain or another bridge,” says Jason.

Currently, NaviCone is not connected to the InstantGeo platform, but they have plans for doing that. The inspiration for the application came simply from “two guys stuck in traffic,” says Jason.

Although there are clear comparisons to Trapster and Waze, Jason says they fulfill different needs than NaviCone. “NaviCone is more useful for planning your commute or trip before you go,” says Jason. “Quickly check the cameras for traffic, check bridge messages before leaving to make sure all lanes will be open and you won’t get stuck 30 minutes just trying to leave the island, check for any new roadwork on your way, and so on.”

They would like to expand NaviCone beyond Montreal, and have had plenty of requests from people, but their focus is primarily on InstantGeo, so there’s no word on when expansion might happen. In the meantime, they’re thinking of other ways to keep adding value. One idea is to allow people to develop their own data converters that would take roadwork and/or camera data from the format published by a city, province or state, and create a new data feed on the InstantGeo platform for NaviCone. This would allow any developer that wants to see data from his or her area in NaviCone make that happen. They’re also thinking about open sourcing the app to allow others to contribute.

For now, the guys are focused as much as possible on InstantGeo. They see a lot of potential use cases such as outdoor activities, asset tracking, location-based marketing, location-enabled reminders and location-sharing or enabled social networking apps.

They plan to initially roll out the platform with a complete REST API, Python SDK and iOS SDK, but they hope to support Android not too long after. Interested developers can register on their website at instantgeo.com and get notified of the team’s progress. They hope to have the beta open in a few months. InstantGeo will have a free plan so all developers can easily try it out and use it for smaller projects, but they’ll have paid plans as well.

Whether it’s Bach or Brubeck, a new study shows that composers repeat rhythmic patterns in their works in such a way that the part is a copy of the larger whole. A research team led by neuroscientists Drs. Daniel Levitin and Vinod Menon, from McGill and Stanford Universities, respectively, analyzed the scores of close to 2,000 musical compositions written by more than 40 composers over the last 400 years in a large variety of Western musical genres.

They discovered a mathematical formula governing the rhythmic patterns to which every single piece of music conformed. “One of the things that we’ve known about music for a couple of decades is that the distribution of pitches and loudness in music follow predictable mathematical patterns,” says Levitin. “Rhythm is even more fundamental to our enjoyment of music: it’s rhythm that infants respond to first, it’s rhythm that makes you want to get out of your chair and move, and so it’s not really a surprise to discover that rhythm, too, is governed by a similar mathematical formula.”

The researchers found that all the musical compositions they studied shared the same “fractal” quality, where the part is a more limited repetition of the whole. That is the larger temporal structure of well-formed musical pieces is composed of repeating motifs of their own short-term temporal structure. At the same time, researchers also discovered that each composer had his or her own highly individual rhythmic signature. “This was one of the most unanticipated and exciting findings of our research,” asserts Levitin. “Mozart’s notated rhythms were the least predictable, Beethoven’s were the most, and Monteverdi and Joplin had nearly identical, overlapping rhythm distributions. But they each have their own distinctive rhythmic signature that you can capture. Our findings also suggest that rhythm may play an even greater role than pitch in conveying a composer’s distinctive style.”

From snowflakes to fern fronds and broccoli florets, fractal patterns are to be found throughout the natural world. The discovery that four centuries of musical compositions obey this same mathematical rule strongly suggests that composers’ own brains may have incorporated certain regularities of the physical world, to recreate self-similarity in works of musical art. Indeed, the authors suggest, building on work begun in the 1970s that our sensory and motor systems may have a fundamental propensity to both perceive and produce fractal patterns not just across the three dimensions of space, but also across time.

For Levitin, whose undergraduate supervisor persuaded him to do a PhD in psychology rather than mathematics by telling him he would be able to do math while studying psychology, but not reverse, the study provides a perfect balance between his two interests.

The research was funded by: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

They aim to reinvent the business conference by creating a collaborative and immersive experience, including exhibitions, multimedia presentations, conceptual spaces, projections, collaborative workshops and a creativity boot camp.

It’s a 3-day event from May 22-25. And the list of speakers is incredible. I’m not sure an event in Montreal has ever seen this many incredible speakers at the same time. Some of the names include:

• Francis Ford Coppola
• Patrick Pichette, CFO Google
• Bill Damaschke, Chief Creative Officer at Dreamworks
• Michael Eisner, Former CEO Walt Disney Group
• Arianna Huffington, Editor-in-chief AOL Huffington Post Media Group
• Daniel Lamarre, CEO Cirque du Soleil

It really is an unbelievable group of people. This is not an event focused exclusively on tech startups, although technology plays a key role. Tickets for the event are ~$3,000. For most, this isn’t possible.

The Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Family Foundation recognizes that being able to attend C2-MTL would be a fantastic opportunity for many that don’t have the budget. And they also realize how important it is to promote entrepreneurship and provide young entrepreneurs with a chance to experience C2-MTL.

As a result, they’re running a contest for 25 emerging entrepreneurs.

Here are the details: http://c2mtl.com/emerging-entrepreneurs-contest-take-your-business-to-c2-mtl/.

If you’re running a Quebec-based business within the first 3 years of operation, you can apply. There will be a panel of judges reviewing applications and making decisions. You have until March 21st, 2012 to apply. For those that are chosen it’s going to be a fantastic experience.

Apply now

Note: It turns out that the event is sold out for Canadian participants. C2-MTL wants to make sure there’s a global audience participating. So applying to the contest is going to be one of the only ways to get a ticket.

Here’s an interview with Ehab Abouheif (with some pictures of the supersoldiers):

These supersoldier anomalies represent dormant ancestral potential that can be invoked by changes in the environment. They represent, in effect, a source of raw material for natural selection to act upon. The finding, published in the most recent edition of Science, is a significant advance in our understanding of evolutionary processes.

“Birds with teeth, snakes with fingers, and humans with ape-like hair – these are ancestral traits that pop up regularly in nature,” Abouheif explains. “But for the longest time in evolutionary theory, these ancestral traits were thought to go nowhere – slips in the developmental system that reveal things from the past, the Barnum and Bailey of evolution. So they’ve been an unappreciated source of evolutionary variation.”

In Pheidole (big-headed) ant colonies, there are millions of individual workers, including minor workers and soldiers. Typically, depending on the food the ants are fed, certain hormones are triggered in the ant larvae and they either develop into soldiers or minor workers. After unexpectedly finding supersoldier-like anomalies in Pheidole species in Long Island, where they aren’t normally seen, Abouheif and his team knew something unusual was going on. “I’ve been collecting samples there for almost 15 years,” said Abouheif. “But when I saw them, I thought, ‘Holy cow! Those are monstrous looking soldiers!’ They look like the ones that are naturally produced in the American southwest.”

So researchers in Abouheif’s lab led by PhD student Rajee Rajakumar and collaborators at the University of Arizona then started trying to artificially induce the production of these supersoldiers. They did so by applying juvenile hormone to the ant larvae at critical stages in their development. And met with immediate success. They were able to produce supersoldier subcastes in at least three species in the genus where they have never been seen before – species that are widely separated in the evolutionary tree of Pheidole.

These findings are groundbreaking for evolutionary theory, according to Abouheif, because they show there is dormant genetic potential that can be locked in place for a very long time. “The kind of environmental stressors that evoke this dormant potential are there all the time – so when the need arises natural selection can take hold of the potential and actualize it,” Abouheif explained. “So what we’re showing is that environmental stress is important for evolution because it can facilitate the development of novel phenotypes. Anytime you have a mismatch between the normal environment of the organism and its genetic potential you can release them – and these things can be locked in place for 30-65 million years.”

The research was funded by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Research Chair in Evolutionary Development Biology, the National Sciences Foundation, Konrad Lorenz Institute Fellowship.