Paul Dowman

There’s going to be a great Ruby conference in Toronto this summer: RubyFringe. Actually, maybe it’s not a Ruby conference, it’s “an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture”.

RubyFringe is a single-track indie conference with no paid technical sponsors and a target attendance of 150.

It will run for two days (plus an opening night), with roughly 10 speakers or panels each day.

There’s a kick-ass list of speakers, including out-of-towners like Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Zed Shaw (now’s your chance to fight him! ;-), Obie Fernandez, and local Torontonians like Reg Braithwaite and Leila Boujnane.

Registration opens tomorrow.

See you there!

GigPark is a Toronto-based web startup. We’re just a couple of weeks out of beta, growing fast and looking for a great developer to join us.

The site is built with Ruby on Rails and hosted on EC2.

If this sounds exciting to you, or if you know someone who might be a good fit, please see our jobs page for details.

UPDATE January 2008: we’ve hired two kick-ass developers!

Thomas Purves has written about how badly we’re being screwed for data access by our three mobile operators in Canada, and many people agree. He’s completely right, mobile data access is way too expensive to be generally useful. Even SMS is expensive at $0.15 (increased from $0.10 after our five carriers consolidated down to three).

I make do with a wi-fi-enabled mobile phone, but unfortunately wi-fi is not really a viable mobile alternative. Open hot-spots are few and far between (or offered by the same three amigos and priced so as not to compete with their mobile data). I’d happily pay the flat $29/month for Toronto Hydro’s OneZone, but I’m rarely inside the coverage area and it’s (by many accounts and in my own personal experience) barely usable anyway.

Canada is a great place to live for many reasons, most of which are more important than wireless data access. But the rest of the world is at the beginning of a mobile internet boom that Canadians are generally not taking part in. Who knows how many more would-be entrepreneurs from our flourishing local tech scene might be developing innovative mobile apps if they only had the opportunity to be inspired? It’s no wonder all the innovation in the mobile space comes from elsewhere.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined a new venture, I’ll be leading the development for GigPark!

GigPark is a new service that will help you recommend your favorite service providers to friends and family, instantly get service recommendations from people you trust, and build your service business through word-of-mouth. Excited yet?! Me too!!

Please check out the GigPark blog for more information.

Ian Stevens has created a really nice Google Maps-based TTC Map. There are a lot of good Toronto-oriented Google Maps mashups, but for me this is one of the most useful. That and beerhunter.ca of course!