Well DemoCampToronto18 was a lot of fun. It was great to be back in a social setting. There were some challenges with the new venue. But the team at Supermarket has agreed to work with us to solve them going forward. They even made a number of suggestions for improvement without any commentary or input from DemoCampers.

Big thanks to everyone that attended, DemoCamp is about connecting you with each other. And the event wouldn’t happen without the presenters and sponsors.

Rather than just put the names of the companies for the sponsors, I’m going to put the faces of the individuals. Next time I’ll ask sponsors for a photograph along with a company logo.

• Derek Smyth, Edgestone Capital Partners
  
• Rob Hyndman, Hyndman | Law
  
• Sarah Baird & Hilary Krupa, Interactive Ontario
   
• John MacRitchie, OCE
  
• Ryan McKegney & Derek Szeto, Redflagdeals.com
   

The DemoCampToronto18 schedule is shaping up to be another awesome event. I’m always blown away by how much cool and inspiring stuff is going on in Toronto. I’ll be juggling the actual order to help balance the 2 sessions, but here are the additional presenters.

The Schedule – Part 2

1. Jesse Brown, Bitstrips
   BITSTRIPS 1.2: why everyone should make comics
2. Jason Wieler
   The Mighty Icon
3. Michael Glenn, Zerofootprint
   Help cure my OCD
4. Dave Coleman, SpreedNews
   Spreed News: A Better Way of Reading your News on the Go
5. Jevon MacDonald, Firestoker/StartupNorth
   VC Rant
6. David George-Cosh, National Post
   How to engage the media aka Media 101

The Schedule – Part 1

1. Roy Pereira, Refresh Partners
   Refresh Analytics: Social Networking Engagement Metrics
2. Chris Gurney
   Blueprint Requirements Center
3. Ali Asaria, Well.ca
   Web -> Jabber Chat for your Site That’s better than Meebo and GTalk
4. Kosta Zabashta, Dr. Project, University of Toronto
   Integrating IRC With Software Development Portals

DemoCampToronto18 is just around the corner. Over the next few days, I’ll publish the full list of submissions.

The Schedule – Part 1

1. Roy Pereira, Refresh Partners
   Refresh Analytics: Social Networking Engagement Metrics
2. Chris Gurney
   Blueprint Requirements Center
3. Ali Asaria, Well.ca
   Web -> Jabber Chat for your Site That’s better than Meebo and GTalk
4. Kosta Zabashta, Dr. Project, University of Toronto
   Integrating IRC With Software Development Portals

The Schedule – Part 2

We’re hoping to have an additional 4 demonstrations or Ignite style presentations. If you already submitted at talk, please DO NOT resubmit it.

Submit your demo, fund raising pitch, Ignite at http://democamp.wufoo.com/forms/democamptoronto-application/

Talk about why others care. Show some empathy for the audience. It’s only 5 minutes but your job is to convey why this is an important experience for people in the audience. Tell us why you deserve the spotlight at the big top!

Yay! It looks like after much delay, we’re going to have another DemoCampToronto. It is hard to believe that this is the 18th edition of DemoCamp in Toronto. As the event has grown, finding a great venue has become more difficult. We’ve found a fantastic venue, Supermarket, in Kensington Market.

Supermarket will be serving dinner from 5pm onwards. I suggest that you plan on heading to DemoCampToronto18 a little early, grab a quick bite at Supermarket, and then buy a beer and join us for a fantastic night of demos and presentations. 

Presenting at DemoCamp

The rules are pretty simple. Demos are 5 minutes. There is generally no PowerPoint for Demos, if there is to be PowerPoint it must be approved by the stewards. Ignite presentations are 5 minutes. They are 20 slides x 15 seconds/slide and the presenter does not have control over the slide advancement. All Ignite decks must be submitted to the stewards before the event.

Demos are not a product sales pitch. Read Value to the Audience; Tips for Presenting at DemoCamp and What Makes a Great Demo. We are looking for companies and individuals to celebrate and inspire the community.

Ignite: If you had five minutes to talk to Toronto what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Launch a web site? Teach a hack? Talk about recent learnings, sucesses, failures? Fill out the form below to submit your talk. We are looking for talks that will inspire and teach not recruiting or product pitches.

These events are community driven, you know you want to participate.

Apply to present your demo or Ignite talk.

Cam and the gang in Edmonton are hosting DemoCampEdmonton2. The first event was a huge success with 6 presentations and over 70 attendees. The Edmonton crew has done a great job embracing the core tenants of DemoCamp, “[o]ne of the main goals of DemoCamp is to build connections in the Edmonton community”. Events like DemoCamp and the upcoming BarCampEdmonton should help provide events and a call to action for people in the Edmonton area to come together, get excited and share what they’ve been working on.

Wow, another great event. Just a fantastic set of demos and great lineup of Ignite presentations. Thanks go out to all of the sponsors and the Toronto Board of Trade for hosting the event. The goal of these events continues to be to help Toronto’s designers, technologists and entrepreneurs connect with each other. There is an opportunity to create a better environment for participants and attendees to network with each other. The challenges I described about my networking efforts at StartupCampMontreal are present at DemoCampToronto. There are a lot of tools available: Facebook group, blogs, the wiki, the mailing list amongst others. I’m going to spend some time brainstorming about how we can improve the experience of network, i.e., it’s not a business card exchange, how do you seed meaningful relationships and opportunities as part of attendance.

For details about the DemoCampToronto experience check out the feedback from:

• David George-Cosh at the National Post - DemoCamp warms up to Toronto tech crowd
• Colin Smillie at Refresh Partners - DemoCampToronto17

Michele Perras has provided details about how to win tickets to ICE08 for DemoCampToronto participants.

Innovation. Creativity. Enterprise. ICE 2008 is the platform for  showcasing and discussing these themes, bringing together the best in  digital media in Canada and abroad. ICE08 looks across the media and  tech landscape, identifying the trends and issues that will shape our  digital future. We want to know what that future looks like to you - who are the leaders, what are the brightest ideas, and with what tools  will the future in Canada be created? What’s your vision?
Tell us in approximately 300 words (or 2 minutes)! All forms of  bloggable media are accepted, and must be tagged with “ICE08″ to be  eligible. Posts will be juried by members of io and the Democamp community, and the criteria of innovation, creativity and enterprise  must be addressed.

The deadline for submissions is midnight on March 14, 2008. If you  win, and have already registered, your ticket will be refunded 100%. Early Bird registration ends at midnight on February 29, 2008.

Remember there is also a DemoCampICE happening. Jay mentioned it last night. Great opportunity to engage with your audience. Submit your Demo or Ignite presentation to present at DemoCampICE.

The rules are pretty simple. The session runs an hour and 15 minutes.  Demos and Ignite talks are 5 minutes. Demoers don’t get PowerPoint/Keynote/etc. (if you really need slides, please talk to the DemoCamp  Stewards after your session has been accepted). Remember: demos are not a sales pitch! Use your time on stage to inspire the community and  to show off your accomplishments. Ignite presentations are 20 slides x 15 seconds/slide and the presenter does not have control over the slide advancement. All Ignite decks must be submitted to the Stewards before the event in PowerPoint format.
We’re looking for Ontario interactive media and technology companies to celebrate and inspire the community. If you’re interested, fill out the form. Please note that we’re looking for talks that will inspire and teach, not recruiting or product pitches.

Thanks everyone for a great night. Hope to see you at the next one!

There were fantastic submissions. Here is who is presenting for DemoCampToronto17.

• SceneCaster by Alain Chesnais
  We will demo the SceneCaster 3D solution with our recently announced SceneWeaver technology that allows you to view inter linked 3D scenes on *ANY* XHTML ready device. If you have native 3D support available, we will take advantage of it. But you don’t need to be on a high end gaming PC to work with SceneCaster. We will show the solution working on an iPod Touch to demonstrate that we have “3D anywhere” technology available today.
  
• PlanetEye presented by Butch Langlois
  PlanetEye is a new online travel guide with a difference. We’re combining beautiful travel photographs, mapping technology and advice from locals and travelers to give people a real sense of destinations around the world.
• AskItOnline presented by Kaitlyn MacLachlan
  AskItOnline is a “web 2.0″ online service that allows you to easily create and deploy your surveys online. Using a drag ‘n drop interface along with AJAX and other client-side code, creating a survey has never been easier!
• GigPark presented by Pema Hagen & Noah Godfrey
  GigPark is a way to find services with the help of your friends. TorCampers have already recommended their favourite web designers, blog hosting companies, startup lawyers, commercial real estate agents, office cleaners, accountants, and logo designers. We’re going to show everyone how they can use GigPark to find the service providers they need to help run their startups (and their lives).
• .NET Development on a Mac presented by Geoff Norton
  The Mono project has just released our first version of MonoDevelop running natively on the Mac (no X11). We think its a compelling (and free) alternative to booting up VMWare/Parallels and running Visual Studio.

And we have a few Ignite Presentations to round out the evening, including:

• Social Services Mashup presented by Clara Severino
  he Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) and Partnership Platform, which acts a catalyst between non-profits and the IT sector, have partnered to explore more intuitive and user-friendly approaches to locating services and organizations of interest in Ontario’s neighbourhoods.The main objective for the project is to amalgamate both privately and publicly available data from various online sources, to develop a centralized database of services and organizations of interest to newcomers to Ontario’s neighbourhoods in order to provide users with an interactive visual representation of desired services mapped to a specified region. The potential for expansion of services and customization in the future is huge! A number of non-profit organizations have already expressed interest in using this application for their own audience.Our intention is to get feedback from the tech community to improve our solution and raise awareness of the impact of technology on the non-profit sector.This innovative initiative is a great way of getting both the non-profit sector and the tech community to come together to improve quality of life.
• The Future is Simple presented by Geo Perdis
  I would like to talk about the future of communications and my belief that it is simple. That is to say that simplicity will rule in a world where more and more media come at us faster and faster and compete for our finite attention.This presentation would be an extension of a micromedia riff that I did back in November 2007 for a micromedia meetup. See http://micromediameetup.pbwiki.com/FrontPage and
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/01/answers-are-in-whats-the-future-of-communciations/With respect to selecting this talk, I think that I can provide a balanced perspective on some unique services possibilities and opportunities that the Toronto-area technology and media community can lead in defining, developing and deploying here and around the world.In turn, I would hope that the community would get some additional insights as to what we can do locally that is unique and original to our circumstances, conditions and location.
• Leveraging Things Wide Open presented by Mike Beltzner, Mozilla
• How to Rock presented by Rannie Turigan
• The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks presented by Tom Purves

DemoCampToronto17 (register to attend) is happening. Jay Goldman, that guy from Radiant Core, is taking the leadership role in working to bring this event to fruition.

What is DemoCamp?

• DemoCamp is an evening social event structured around socializing and demonstrations/presentations. The demos are limited to 5 minutes, the presentations are limited to 20 slides x 15 seconds/slide and the presenter does not have control over the slide advancing. The idea is to bring together people doing interesting things in Toronto and give them an opportunity to share with the crowd. The idea is for participants to determine the schedule and to inspire, educate or challenge the audience with the work they have been doing.

When is DemoCampToronto17?

• Monday, February 25, 2007
  Toronto Board of Trade
  1 First Canadian Place, Toronto, ON

How much does it cost?

• DemoCampToronto is free. You can choose to purchase a Community Allstar or Community Superstar ticket. But the

How do I register for DemoCampToronto17?

• Register for a ticket.
• Submit your demo/presentation.

Where can I get additional details?

• DavidCrow.ca: DemoCampToronto17
• RadiantCore: DemoCamp, It’s Alive!!!
• Leila Boujnane’s Hyperbio: DemoCampToronto, Number 17
• Ask the TorCamp community