DemoCampToronto17 was last night at the Board of Trade.  It was a packed house again with tickets selling out a few weeks ago.  About half the crowd was new to DemoCamp again.  It’s a strange trend that so many new people are coming out.
The Demo’s for the night were:

AskItOnline.com by  Kaitlyn McLachlan, Clear Sky Media
AskitOnline.com is an online survey tool, similar to survey monkey and a lot of the other online tools.   The interface and the process for creating the survey is really what sets it apart from competition.  The interface looked really great and I having struggled  with other solutions I can see how it could have an advantage.

GigPark.com by  Pema Hegan and Noah Godfrey
GigPark.com is a recommendation based social network.  You can ask your friends to give you a recommendation on different services or see which services your friends are recommending.   Having tried a few recommendation based services in the past I think it’s a very competitive market.  Services like Yellow Pages can easily add user reviews and start competing, Ziplocal.com for example already has a basic review engine and friend network.

Mono Project .NET by Geoff Norton
The Mono project provides a open source .NET development environment.  I had heard of Mono before but I’ve never really looked into it.  Geoff did a great job of demo a fairly dull topic and didn’t let the hardcore developers in the crowd suck him down and any rat holes, like the licensing situation with Mono.

PlanetEye.com by Butch Langlois
Planeteye.com is a travel related site that lets users upload photos of different geographic locations around the world.  The site is absolutely beautiful and the interface between the photos and the map has really been thought out.  I’m not too clear how they intend to make money though.  The Travel  advertising industry is a tough nut to crack.

SceneCaster by  Alain Chesnais
I saw SceneCaster briefly at FacebookCampToronto a few weeks ago but it was great to see a longer version of their demo.  I think technology is really great and its impressive to see 3D environments coming to life in the browse.  I’m not too clear on their business model and how many businesses will really want to create 3D models to promote their businesses.  It will be interesting to see the product and probably the business strategy evolve.

Overall the demo’s were awesome, one of the best demo line-ups I’ve seen in awhile.   All of them were really well presented and  I think all were trying to solve a problem.
The Ignite presentations were:

The Future Is Simple by Geo Perdis
Geo’s presentation was how the web and the innovation is often about eliminating unnecessary components.  He had a few different examples of how business were more successful once they simplified their business.

Social Services Mashup  by Clara Severino
Clara’s presentation was about creating a mashup of different social services and connecting them using online mapping.  It was a good presentation and I think its really showing there is a huge opportunity at the hyper local level for a variety of services to co-exist.  It would be great to see social services publishing map co-ordinates etc..

How to Rock SXSW by Rannie Turingan
SXSW is a large interactive conference in Austin and Rannie’s presentation was about how to get maximum value.  I haven’t been to SXSW but it looks like a great time and I’d really like attend at some point.

The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks  by Tom Purves
Last year started a flurry of discussion around the state of wireless access in Canada.  His presentation was in a similar line and included a number of highlights about how Canada’s wireless data rates are not competitive with the rest of the world.    With most companies looking very hard for a wireless strategy is disappointing that Canadian wireless provides have been so limiting.

Leveraging Wide Open by Mike Beltzner
Mike Beltzner’s presentation was around how businesses can benefit from being open and using an open source philosophy.   It was an interesting discussion and Mozilla has certainly benefitted from the process.

Tom’s presentation was definitely the highlight of the Ignite presentations.  Oddly the ignite presentations were a lot rougher than the demo’s this time around.  I was really impressed with the quality of the demo’s, I think the Ignite format just presents too make challenges for good communication.