#DCT30 Details

Date: October 12th, 2011

Time: 6:30 – 9:00 PM EST

Location: Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University: 55 Dundas St. W, Toronto, ON

Live Stream: Will begin at 6:30 PM at http://startmeupryerson.com/video/democamp.

Register to Attend:

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

Keynote Speaker – Elmer Sotto

Elmer Sotto (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) is the Head of Growth for Facebook Canada, where he is responsible for setting strategy to further grow and engage the Canadian user base. He also helps key strategic partners understand and leverage the Facebook platform.

Prior to this, he was the Vice President of Product and Operations for JumpTV. Mr. Sotto also spent more than five years at eBay Canada as Director of Marketplace Development.

We are very excited to be hosting Elmer as the keynote speaker for DemoCamp 30 and looking forward to another exciting event! Please make sure to register before tickets are sold out.

We are looking for amazing entrepreneurs & demos

The goal at DemoCamp is to provide a platform for local companies to launch, get product or pitch feedback, establish a presence for recruiting as well as help with PR and social media awareness. We aim to gather highly connected and talented entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, investors and others to watch and critique entrepreneurs in a safe environment.

We are looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight. You get market, technology and pitch/presentation advice. The condition here is to actually present and demo your product, not use powerpoint or slide decks!

apply to demo

Sponsors

• KPMG
• BlackBerry
• VMFarms
• OCE
• StartMeUp Ryerson

DemoCampHamilton2 occurred Friday May 27th, 2011 at Mohawk College in conjunction with the AppsForHealth 2011 conference. The event was hosted by Software Hamilton and sponsored and supported by the great folks at Innovation Factory and Mohawk College. The combination of an excellent keynote, demos and audience turned out to be too hot for the fire alarms at Mohawk!

Mic Berman kicked off the event with an excellent keynote focused on sharing her startup expertise. The quality of the discussion the talk generated was one of the highlights of the evening, perhaps given the high level of interest in fostering a startup culture in the Hamilton software community. The talk was described perfectly in a #DCH tweet as “inspiring and grounding at the same time”.

Cristina Calder of FluidMedia started off the demos by showing us Rendering Exchange – a web-based, crowd-sourced platform that connects graphic designers with commercial interior manufacturers, architects and interior designers to provide high-quality, photo-realistic room scene images for use in sales and planning.

DemoCampHamilton audience favourite “mad inventor” Dan Zen took audience interactivity to new heights with his demo of Touchy – a smartphone game where two players, each with mobile devices, try to touch the other player’s screen while protecting their own. When two people play the game it creates a Twister-like physical spectacle that is as fun to watch as it is to play. Dan demoed Touchy by having the entire audience play “Touchy” at once by having us try to touch the business card of the DemoCamp-er sitting next to us while protecting our own!

Adam Caromicoli and Doris Bean of Indellient Inc. were up next to demo Inktronic – a Digital Pen based collaboration tool that simplifies workflow involving graphical content for the architectural, engineering and construction industries.

After a forced break for what was dubbed the “great fire alarm of DemoCampHamilton2″, Joey Coleman of Open Hamilton and Nik Garkusha of Open Halton talked about the Open Data movement occurring across Canada and demoed what software the Open Hamilton branch of the movement has developed thus far.

The final demo was done by two McMaster University computer science students, Gavin Schulz and Zaahir Moolla, who demoed their new service MealDeck which allows restaurants to easily create a cross-platform mobile website. Student entrepreneurism is something we want to see more of in Hamilton and the professionalism and courage these two showed by putting themselves and their service out there for criticism was widely praised – watch out for these guys!

The AppsForHealth 2011 conference itself was a huge success, you can check out the mobile apps that the students devised here. Expect the next DemoCampHamilton at McMaster in September, but in the meantime we will be having the first Software Hamilton Pub Night this June 28th.

#DCT29 – The Dirty Details

Date:

June 9, 2011

Time:

5:00 – 9 PM EST

Location:

Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, 55 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON

Register to attend:

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

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Keynote Speaker – Howard Lindzon

Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits® – a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. StockTwits was recently named “one of the top 10 most innovative companies in web” by FastCompany and one of the “50 best websites” by Time magazine.

Mr. Lindzon has more than twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. With a unique vision for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he is the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses. Howard continues to manage a hedge fund he started in 1998.

He created Wallstrip, and more than 400 original web video shows, which was purchased by CBS Corp. in 2007. He is an active angel with many success angel investments including: Rent.com, (purchased by Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), and Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Mr. Lindzon’s new media and internet business investments also include: Limos.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Buddy Media, Ticketfly, Assistly, Bit.ly and Tweetdeck.

Mr. Lindzon received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management.

We are looking for amazing entrepreneurs & demos

The goal at DemoCamp has been to provide a platform for local companies to launch, get product or pitch feedback, to establish a presence for recruiting, to help with PR and social media awareness. We try to get a group of highly connected and apparently highly cynical entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, investors and others in a room to watch entrepreneurs in a safe environment. It’s something between a graduate seminar and a show. The goal is to demo your product and get feedback about your demo, your design, your market, etc. You decide. (It’s a work in progress, but it’s a social event).

We’re also looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight from a highly connected cynical crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, pitch/presentation advice.

Startups seeking advice should apply to demo.

apply to demo

Sponsors

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Ping david at davidcrow dot ca for details.

May and June are busy months. There are a few friends and colleagues that continue to leverage the DemoCamp brand to help engage entrepreneurs, developers, code monkeys, hackers, marketers and others. We borrowed the 6 minute format from Demo. Rather than a chinwag about new technology or industry happenings, what better way than to spend 6 minutes and have someone show you want they’ve built. It forces way from the keyboards and out into the real world. It is a strange mix of presentations, improv and being social. It’s about being connected, being proud of what you’ve been working, and having the opportunity to meet others in the community with similar interests.

The focus in Toronto has been on startups. Because this is my interest. Others are free to shape event and the format to their locale. The question of “what is your business model?” is such a silly question. Because some of the coolest presentations – hacking digital cameras – are closer to hobbies or performance art. I love the mix of new businesses, emerging technology explorations, and something closer to Maker Faire demos.

My advice, is if you are interested in seeing the great startups, hackers and makers in your city are doing you should make sure you check out a DemoCamp. And encourage Brydon and Kevin to keep doing this for their own entertainment and connection. Maybe you might want to help out

• May 27, 2011 – DemoCampHamilton2
• June 8, 2011 – DemoCampGuelph17
• June 9, 2011 – DemoCampToronto29 – details pending

Hamilton

DemoCampHamilton2 will feature a keynote presentation by Mic Berman, acting COO at FreshBooks and Founder at Embarkonit, as well as demos by FluidMedia, Dan Zen, Indellient, Open Hamilton and MealDeck. It is happening in conjunction with Apps For Health 2011 conference at Mohawk College. You can show up around 5:00pm for a drink and some additional networking before heading over for DemoCamp at 7:00pm.

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

Guelph

The invited speaker is Mike McDerment, CEO and co-founder ofFreshbooks in Toronto. Mike’s a serial entrepreneur who spends a lot of time giving back to the wider community by speaking at various tech conferences as well as lecturing at Humber College. He is also a founder of Toronto based Mesh Conference. After the keynote there are 4-6 demos followed by a live band. This is a completely open event, however, there is a donation ticket to help out starving musicians and the cost of providing entertainment.

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

Toronto

The invited speaker is Howard Lindzon, CEO and cofounder of StockTwits in San Diego.  He was one of my favourite speakers at StartupEmpire back in 2008. Howard is sharing his love of startups and early stage entrepreneurs across Canada this summer. If you miss him at DemoCamp, make sure you catch him at StartupFestival in Montreal or Grow Conference in Vancouver. The demo lineup and tickets are being finalized this week.

• Count me in on Plancast
• Register Now »

The inaugural DemoCampHamilton took place Wednesday March 2nd, 2011 at Slainte Irish Pub in downtown Hamilton. A packed audience consisting mainly of developers, entrepreneurs and students as well as an excellent keynote presentation by Ali Asaria and demos by CartaNova, AlboDigital, PoolingPeople.ca, FluidMedia and “mad inventor” Dan Zen made the event a success. Sponsors Fluid Media Inc. and Innovation Factory deserve a special thanks for their support and sponsorship of the event.

The night started off with a great keynote speech by Ali Asaria of Well.ca which gave the audience insight into life inside the successful online health and beauty store.

This was followed by 5 demos:

Andrew Holden and Rob Porter of CartaNova showed us Weever – an upcoming service that will quickly grab data from a website to generate HTML5 touch-interface “web apps” of said website for mobile devices on Android, iOS, Blackberry.

Magda Lutcher of AlboDigital showed us their Content Management System for end users and graphic designers.

Hannah McKinnon showed us PoolingPeople.ca, a new online business to business community that brings overstaffed and understaffed companies together, enabling them to directly lend / borrow / permanently transfer employees without an intermediary.

President of Fluid Media Justin Hogeterp showed us CoffeeTablet – an iPad app for creating and sharing “Coffeetable” books from photos and video.

The “mad inventor” Dan Zen showed us Opartica, an online Op Art tool that lets people create and fly through their op art in 3D.

Thanks again to everyone for coming out, we’ll be doing this again, and the tentative plan is to take this to Mohawk College and McMaster University by the end of the year.

The next DemoCamp Toronto is happening on Feb 22, 2011.

Mark Ruddock (@markruddock | LinkedIn | blog) is going to kick off the night. Mark is going to talk about “Important Lessons learned after 10 Years of being at the helm of VC backed Startups”. Every entrepreneur can learn from Mark’s experience pitching to VCs, maximizing the value of a company at sale, and just building, growing and running a successful startup in Toronto.

#DCT28 – The Dirty Details

Date:

February 22, 2011

Time:

6:30 – 9 PM EST

Location:

Engineering Lecture Hall @ George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre, Ryerson University, 245 Church Street

Register to attend:

Sold out!

We are looking for amazing entrepreneurs & demos

The goal at DemoCamp has been to provide a platform for local companies to launch, get product or pitch feedback, to establish a presence for recruiting, to help with PR and social media awareness. We try to get a group of highly connected and apparently highly cynical entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, investors and others in a room to watch entrepreneurs in a safe environment. It’s something between a graduate seminar and a show. The goal is to demo your product and get feedback about your demo, your design, your market, etc. You decide. (It’s a work in progress, but it’s a social event).

We’re also looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight from a highly connected cynical crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, pitch/presentation advice.

Startups seeking advice should apply to demo.

apply to demo

Sponsors

Originally from StartupEdmonton and MasterMaq.

We had five demos:

• Scott Montgomerie showed us My Edmonton, an app he originally developed with a few other people at Edmonton’s first Startup Weekend. It started life as a real estate app, but evolved to be more of a local utility, with information on events, news, property info, and nearby services. My Edmonton is available both on the web and as an iPhone app. You can learn more at the blog.
• Our second demo was from Yegor Jbanov, who showed us Deckle, an online print job automation tool. Targeted at the professional printing industry, Deckle integrates with Adobe Creative Suite and supports precision printing, such as for cheques which have strict requirements on layout and positioning. Yegor said that if you can do it with InDesign, you can pretty much do with with Deckle.
• Mo Hamdan was up next, to show us Promptu Manager, a tool for managing fixed assets. Promptu is a Windows application, with a user interface very reminiscent of accounting packages such as Simply Accounting or Quick Books. Unfortunately the demo didn’t go as smoothly as Mo had hoped. It’s difficult to make a series of data entry screens interesting, I guess.
• Our fourth demo was from Trevor MacDonald, who showed us Pluggin.it. The idea is to leverage your social network to help you sell stuff. Let’s say you have a car that you want to get rid of. You can offer a reward and then get your friends to “plug” your listing, and if their assistance leads to an eventual sale, they can claim part of the reward. Pluggin.it is in beta (they are having a launch party tonight) but looks pretty polished and definitely has some potential. You can learn more at Brittney’s blog.
• Our final demo was from Andrew Czarnietzki, who works at 3DI (here’s a profile I did in 2009). He showed us a game he developed in his spare time that makes use of some of the interesting technology available to him at 3DI, such as pureLIGHT. It was really interesting in that it used “weird geography” and light as its unique features. When you fired your weapon, for instance, the light would bend around the geometrical shapes in the game. Looks like it would be a fun game to play on Xbox Live or something like that!

As a fan of open data and local apps, I really enjoyed My Edmonton. If you haven’t seen it before, check it out. I think Pluggin.it is a neat concept as well, and everyone really seemed to enjoy the demo. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of uptake it gets. My favorite demo was probably the game though – I love it when developers experiment with stuff just because they love it. Who knows, maybe one day Andrew’s game will be available on Xbox Live!

A few announcements:

• Global Game Jam Edmonton is taking place from January 28-30.
• Startup Weekend Edmonton is taking place from February 11-13.
• Edmonton is now included in StartupDigest, so sign up to get notifications about events and other cool stuff that is happening.
• Stay tuned to Startup Edmonton for information on all of the exciting things we have planned for 2011!

Thanks to everyone who came out to lucky number 13. See you at DemoCamp Edmonton 14!

I’m heading back to Guelph on February 9, 2011 to speak at DemoCampGuelph. I will be spending the day at Guelph Coworking talking startups, hiring and other things. I am still trying to figure out what to speak about in my 20 minute session at DemoCampGuelph. I had been thinking about the following things:

• Why startups shouldn’t hire a marketer from Microsoft (and I promise not to read April’s brillant post aloud, well at least not word for word)
• Press, PR and story telling – What you can learn from how we pick stories at StartupNorth

I’m happy to regale folks with the story about DemoCamp, or about how I ended up at Microsoft or why I left, or about anything.

Add a comment below with suggestions.

Scott Annan announced that DemoCamp Ottawa will be happening on February 2, 2011.

So… if you’re interested in presenting your project, I urge you to signup on theDemoCamp website.  Next week I’ll send out a poll and ask everyone who’s signed up (and StartupOttawa readers) to select which startups you’d like to see present.

If you’ve never attended a DemoCamp, I highly encourage you to come out and see the presentations and meet some awesome local entrepreneurs.  Check out the details below.

When: Wednesday, February 2nd, 6pm
Where: Mercury Grove HQ (738A Bank St, Suite 205)
Info (or to present): DemoCamp Website
Signup: Here