Last night was StartupCampWaterloo and I made my first trip out to the Waterloo Acceleration Center. Having gone to a lot of events around Toronto the Waterloo Acceleration Center is awesome, with an open lobby area for presentations. I think there was about 80 people in attendance but it was still an intimate environment for the Q&A.

Stefanus Du Toit provided the first presentation as an overview of this experience with RapidMind. I haven’t heard of RapidMind before and seems they provide tools for rapid development of 3D environments. They’ve done work with the IBM cell processor and a variety other GPUs.

In keeping with the Barcamp theme, everyone that wanted to present needed to pitch the crowd with a 60s overview of the presentation. I think there were about 8 companies/groups that wanted to present and in the end 5 presentations went forward.
The presentations were:

SlashID by Ross Bennett

I’ve worked with Ross before and I’ve been involved with SlashID for awhile. For disclosure, I am also an investor in SlashID. I think the original plans was for a 15 min presentation and it ended up being 5 mins, with 10 min Q&A. Ross did a good overview of SlashID and I think the feedback from the crowd was great. Key improvements for the pitch would be to address the differences between SlashID and OpenID earlier, and place less emphasis on the revenue from users.

Tagiton.com by Adam Joncas

I really like the initial pitch from Adam, about the goals of Tagiton.com in terms of moving a lot of emal discussions out of email. When they demo’d their product though didn’t find the filtering options or the ability to follow conversations to be too great. I think Gmail probably provides better tools today. Tagiton also seemed to be trying to introduce a different definition of the term “Tag”. I think the key take away would be to really look a how they can improve the email flow without launching new browser windows and creating new terms around their “Tagging” engine.

Garageentrepreneurs.com by Natalie McNeil

Garage Entrepreneurs are planning to develop a social network to let entrepreneurs to connect. I found there assertion about competitive sites like Facebook and Linkedin to be very weak. David Crow has some great feedback when Garage Entrepreneurs suggested charging entrepreneurs for access to the network. I think the key takeway for Garage Entrepreneurs is to focus on how to create some unique value for entrepreneurs ( outside of Facebook, or other social networks ) and a better business model that’s not based on users paying.

SmartPatterns.com

The pitch for the SmartPatterns.com presentation was really weak but I thought they made up for it with your demo and discussion afterwards. The company is in the process of moving their software from a desktop package to an online service. They provide the ability to quickly create custom knitting patterns online. While knitting is probably a fairly small market there are a number of opportunities to grow the business. I think the key take away was to get the service online fast and think about opportunities to work expand beyond just the knitting patterns.

Ghoti Studios by Majid Mirza

I don’t think the Ghoti Studios pitch and presentation were in alignment. I was excited initially about the possibility of more efficiently with graphic designers. It wasn’t clear from the presentation how Ghoti Studios planned to make working with graphic designers easier. There are a number of online tools designed to make working with designers easier, like ConceptShare, Octopz, and Kuzimo. I wasn’t certain where Ghoti Studios planned to fit into this process. I think the key take away would be to define the business plan a bit more and try to include the various feedback/suggestions.

Austin Hill wrapped up the night with a presentation of his experiences and recommendations for startups. I thought some of this experiences were one sided, for example his experience with service businesses. I think a lot of business can self-fund through services . I did really like his line about “Code talks” when dealing with financing. I thought this was a great summary of why startups need to get a working prototype.
Overall it was a good line up of companies and I think the interaction with the crowd was great. Jesse and Simon did a great job of trying to get discussions going. Simon was one the best MC’s I’ve ever seen and he should definitely continue with the MC duties.

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.

StartupCampToronto was last night and it was awesome. A much more business focused crowd than DemoCamp, the crowd was a mix of startups and funding options. It was a No Regrets, which is a more intimate environment to have a drink and watch the presentations.

The presentation line last night was as follows:

Freshbooks

I’ve seen Freshbooks present many times and even tried using their software. I didn’t really liked the direction they chose in their pitch as a more service oriented, high touch, service offering. In using their service it does work quite well and eliminates a number of problems for small businesses. Their Q&A session also focused around how to grow the business while maintaining
the same level of service. I think there are some great opportunities for them to grow their business through partnerships and channel sales.

Defensio

Defensio is a tough situation in that they are competing with a free service from wordpress to prevent comment spam. Their algorithm focuses on eliminating spam and false positives through a more detailed analysis of the blog content. I thought it would have been good to high light the accuracy difference between Akismet ( wordpress solution ) and Defensio. I’m also not clear the market
opportunity for the product with many blogs not reaching the level of comment
spam where Defensio would provide a substantial benefit.

CakeMail

CakeMail provides a white label mail delivery system through an API. As someone who has run a number of mass e-mail campaigns ( always opt-in ) I know frustration with sending emails. There are many services available though in this space and its not clear the opportunity for growth.

Workspace

Workspace provides an online IDE ( integrated development environment ) for developers focused on web projects. I like the idea around this in that I’ve always been frustrated with the time required to setup development
environments. The environment also provides some collaboration tools and I really like to see them do a DemoCamp to see more about their product. As a
business I’m a little concerned about competition with free IDE’s and its ability to support commercial software platforms which are more proprietary.

Investmate

I really like the enthusiasm of the Investmate team and they reminded me of the JobLoft team last year with their energy level. They have an interesting solution to target smaller and less experienced investors with investment information. The big problem I see in this model is the licensing and regulation around providing investment advice. There was a number of suggestions around licensing the technology to existing brokerage firms, which is probably a good plan but might not be inline with the brokerage firms goal of landing big
clients.

A great selection of companies and basement of No Regrets was opened for startups that didn’t make the presentation list to run table top demos. The SlashID team and Ogrant were both among the teams running demos and were swamped with questions most of the
night.

Night also featured an announcement of a new venture capital company started in Toronto called Extreme Venture Partners. I met Amar from EVP a few months and have been impressed with his involvement in FacebookWeekend. I think its great to see a few firm forming in Toronto around the technology sector.

The Startupnorth guys did a great job organizing and I’m sure this is just the first of many events.

Flash in TO v65 was on last night, it was my first Flash in TO event and I knew almost nobody there. The event was at Element 156, which is on Augusta St, near Dundas. It’s a pretty neat environment with the front of the store setup as a shop/bar and the
back of the being used as an art gallery. For the event the basement was setup with chairs and a projector.

I don’t know if its typical but the FITO ( Flash in TO ) team had an awesome lined up of sponsors, including free beer from Adobe and free food from Manpower. They also had bunch of swag to give away including T-shirts, Yoyos and mini-Oreilly books on Adobe
AIR. As someone that’s organized a few events and tried to reach out for sponsors they did an awesome job.

The presentations consisted of Pecha Kucha style presentations which are very similar to the Ignite style presentations that they’ve tried a DemoCamp. I’ve already expressed my disappointment with this style of presentation and lack of pace control by the presenter. I don’t really feel it ads any value to audience except to lower the quality of the presentation and create a awkwardness. I did like that the FITO ( Flash in TO ) team was pretty laid back and didn’t hard enforce the slide time limits, just overall presentation time limit. They also had a audience facing clock with slide countered which used the audience to enforce pace on the presenter instead of a hard time per slide time limit.

I could only stay till the break so I missed about half the presentations. Of the presentations I saw I really liked Allan Estabillo presentation and the focus presentation by
someone who’s name I cannot remember.

Allen’s presentation was based on the idea that you could an abstract source, in his case climate change information, and create art something from it. He showed how the climate change data could be developed into various different images.

I thought the focus presentation was kinda cool in that as non-designer I rarely think about using out of focus effects and motion blurs. The presentation showed a variety of different out of focus effects and how they could be used.

I was disappointed I didn’t get to see Ryan Creighton’s presentation which was on in the second half.

Overall a great event and I’d definitely like to check it out again.

Its been awhile since I’ve written about a DemoCamp but DemoCampToronto15 was yesterday afternoon at Hart House in the University of Toronto campus. The University of Toronto did a great job organizing/hosting. DemoCamp was in the grand hall of the Hart House, which is awesome local for presentation and mingling. Unfortunately even with the time shift to late afternoon no University of Toronto demo’s were presented.

The Demo’s consisted of the following:

Jester JS by Pete Forde

Pete presented the Jester JS REST library which provides a lot of the same database abstraction that Ruby offers. I’ve never been a fan of abstracting SQL but that’s probably because I know SQL and I don’t want to invest in learning different abstracted methods. It’s a good demo and you immediately understand what Pete was presenting and trying to describe.

Mobile Currency Exchange Rates by Radu Negulescu

Even after the initial technical difficulties with the demo were solved, it was hard to follow the demo and the mobile device virtual machine was hard to see. Probably the most interesting aspect was the fact that the app runs on mobile but this also made it hard to demo.

OMESH Networks by Liang Song

This demo consisted mainly of power point slides because the actual demo was small wireless devices that search out each other the best available network source. It was a very hard demo to follow and power point slides didn’t really do it justice either. I’m not sure the best method to demo these type of physical/mobile devices, it would be better to use multiple people through out the space and show how the devices find the best network source.

Ogrant.com by Sachin Ghelanil and Saroop Bharwani

I met Sachin a few months ago so I was familiar with the Ogrant concept but I haven’t seen the live site before. I think the concept for Ogrant is great in that it uses social media to help connect people giving grants with qualified students. It also gives students more of a voice in the grant process through a voting system on grant applications. Overall a good demo of the site but it felt too short to cover the site functionality, it would have been good to go through some of the student/applicant videos and content.

ConceptShare by Bernie Aho, Will Pate and Scott Brooks

Conceptshare blew the doors off DemoCamp9 with the ability for multiple people to comment on different design concepts. I’ve actually used the site on different small projects and found much easier to use than their competition. In the last year Conceptshare has developed a great client list and recently added community guru, Will Pate to the team. The demo felt very rushed and I
again thought it was too short. It looks like Conceptshare has improved the process flow a lot and continues to add new features. I’d like to see an API so that I can bring content into the site easier.

The demos were anything but smooth last nite and David Crow talks about the some of the issues. I’m not really sure what to do to improve the demo process. I think it will be very hard to limit people switching PC, specially for non-web demos.

I think one thing that needs to improve is the time allotment, I’d be in favour of a flex system that guarantees a min of 5 min and allows up to 15 mins depending on the
quality of the demo. I understand this will be hard to enforce/judge but there were some demo’s last night that just needed more time and would have been better given more time.

The Ignite Presentations were as follows:

Little Geeks by Andy Walker

I first saw Andy Walker on Call for Help and was impressed
with his understanding of technology. His presentation was a little too evangelistic and I didn’t feel that he talked enough about the Little Geeks program and how people can get involved.

Shortcuts of OCE Funding by John MacRitchie

I recently met John through an OCE breakfast with Albert Lai and I was impressed with his commitment to involve the Torcamp community. His presentation covered the OCE funding process and how start-ups can into the process. His presentation was very smooth and well timed to the slides, I think
he did a good job of getting his message across.

Testing Tools by Michael Bolton

Not the horrible singer, or the Office Space character, Michael Bolton the testing expert focused on the advantages of using humans in the testing process. I think he has a great point in that most people view testing as a process that can be automated and are surprised when the testing doesn’t improve the software. His presentation was good and worked well with the Ignite process. I would have liked to see more questions with him about how to handle enormous software projects, like websites, and how automated tools could be included.

Raising money from Suits by Rick Segal

I really like Rick’s blog and I was keen to see his
presentation. Unfortunately it was largely a re-hash of his Mesh presentation but probably very appropriate for the UofT crowd. He provided a good
outline of the process of building business and raising funds. He did a good job of keeping to the presentation flow but I think it would have been better to have more Q&A with him.

Bruce Mau Design by Greg Judelman

I have no idea how this presentation applied to DemoCamp except that Bruce Mau appears to design interesting and beautiful things. The presentation focused on different aspects of Bruce Mau design, including buildings, store signs and websites. Greg did a good job but I was still struggling to connect Bruce Mau design with the DemoCamp group.

Community Networks by Alvin

Alvin’s presentation was a last minute addition but might have been the most interesting of the Ignite series. Alvin did a study on the Torcamp network and
how different people connect to each other. His presentation suffered from the lack of control that the Ignite system creates, where he couldn’t accelerate or slow down at different points. This created some problems for
his presentation. I would have loved to see more detail on his algorithm and how the formation of groups of 3 worked. Overall an interesting presentation though, just needed more time and control over his presentation.

When I heard about concept of the Ignite presentations I thought I’d hate them. In reality they aren’t too bad, mainly because they are never more than 5 mins. Unfortunately this means they rarely provided any interesting content or communication and often end-up being a 5 min rant. I think the key is having someone that can carry 5 min presentation with no slides, most of the good presentations would probably be fine without slides.

After the last DemoCampToronto the process to Demo was re-factored and the time for demos generally shortened to 5 mins. In many cases past DemoCamp slots were full months in advance and a limited number of demos could happen in one evening. With the shorter time slot more demos could take place and even if they completed sucked they weren’t on for long…

DemoCampToronto13 also featured the inclusion of Powerpoint. Several demonstrators moved away from live software and into slide ware. I’m not really sure this is a good move but live software did limit the ability to interact with the audience.

The Demo’s were as follows:

1. Mike Beltzner from Mozilla
   Mike was the first presenter in a long time to use Powerpoint and he presented on the Mozilla community interaction process between Mike, the usability guy, the Mozilla in-house developers, the Mozilla open-source contributors, the testers and beta testers and the over 30M regular users. His presentation was well layed out and provided a number of insites for anyone interested in product management. Many of Mike’s approaches would easily scale up or down depending on the community of users that you have as a product manager.
2. Betsey Weber on Camtasia
   Camtasia provides the ability to screen capture everything that happening on your computer screen. Screen capture tools have long been a tool for training and software testing. Camtasia seems to focus on using screen captures for podcasting and other social networking usages. The software can encode in most major video formats and the company has recently started offering high performance hosting services for people that want to share higher quality screen captures that Youtube or Google video can normally handle.
3. Kristan Uccello on Linux based Devices
   Krispy present on a device he found that runs linux and can be easily customized. The interface was pretty basic and felt pretty geeky with the different directories etc.. He had the device playing video, music and emulated games. The device can also be extended with SD Wifi card.
4. ViaVol.com
   Vialcom.com presented their site for creating custom start pages. The demo was a little disjointed but I looks like Viavol can create a start page based on similar websites that you like. You bookmark sites you like and Viavol finds other sites that are similar. The site also works with for shopping, where you bookmark something you like and Viavol tries to find the best price for that item. Its not clear how they make money, I would assume from advertising on site and through “hot leads” for shopping purchases.
5. ProductWiki.com
   ProductWiki provides a Wiki for products and services. Most of the content is user generated and users can review the products through the Wiki. Most of the demo focused on the review engine and its ability to let people thumbs-up/thumbs-down different claim statements. The system seems to provide a good snap show of a product review rather than reading too much text.
6. Hosinux Adhoc Mobile Networks
   A group of Ryerson students have developed a mobile client that allows users to work around expensive long distance charges. The demo was kind of hard to follow but they’ve develop a client that will redirect you’re long distance calls to a local gateway which can use VoIP to connect your mobile call over the internet at a reduced cost. The most impressive part of the Hosinux demo was how transparent the whole process was, to use the system the user just dial the number as normal and the client did all the magic in the background.
7. OpenID Authentication
   OpenID provides the ability to authenticate to multiple websites with a single identity string. Its a technology I’ve been following for my day job so I was interested to see the demo. Walkah started with a very similar present to the Sxip Identity2.0 present a few years ago. He was able to show OpenID authentication working with his WordPress blog and Drupal. Walkah is involved with bringing OpenID support to Drupal.
8. MyHood.ca
   My day job involves Real Estate advertising so I’m very familiar with the online rental sites in Canada. MyHood.ca creates a mashup with Google maps to show rental sites. Most of the content seem to come from Property Management companies and users can write reviews on the different buildings. Its not clear how Myhood.ca is going to manage the conflict between user reviews and professional advertising.
9. TeeVee
   TeeVee by Feedbeat provides the ability to view video through channels. The demo reminded me alot of the Joost system but it didn’t require the application or understanding the Joost application. The channels right now are limited but there leveraging free content for YouTube etc… The demo was well done and I could see this evolving into a serious competitor for the Joost environment without all the overhead.
10. Onyx-VJ
    Anyone who’s been to a rave has probably always wondered how the video was created to match the music. Onyx-VJ is a tool to do exactly that, the interface was design in flash and looked terrifying initially. Once Daniel started to get going you could see how the it worked. Videos could be combined using a number if different filters and their tempos adjusted faster or slower. This allowed the videos to match the tempo of the music. This would have been great demo for sound but it still came off well.
11. Apollo
    My initial reaction to Apollo was similar to David Crowe’s in that Apollo was something I’d hate. I was a little more open after seeing the demo though and could see a space for it. There a lot of times where a desktop application is required and its a painful experience to develop one. Good examples would be Joost or the Camtasia applications, if these could be developed with Apollo it might make the whole process a lot easier. It wasn’t clear what sort of platform support Apollo can enable. I think it will be an interesting technology to watch develop.

I thought it was a great set of demos and great night overall. There’s been some discussions about further changes to format and trying some other approaches ( speed powerpoint etc.. ) but I think we have a pretty format right now. The time delay between demos was minimal but it did allow for some discussion before the next demo.

The date has been set for the next Toronto DemoCamp, its going to be April 24 at No Regrets. The process to demoing has been refactored and the Demo schedule is as follows:

• Invited: Mike Beltzner Mozilla (15 minutes)
• Invited: Betsy Weber TechSmith (15 minutes)
• Break (10 minutes)
• Demos – 5 minutes each (these should not be sales demos)
  • Opensource Game Platforms
  • SneakerPlay
  • NotSoSo
  • ViaVol
  • ProductWiki
  • Bart G

As always be sure to register on the wiki here.

GTALUG and the LinuxCaffe are putting on a MythTV install fest this weekend. If you’ve ever considered setting up a MythTV PVR it should be a good opportunity to get help from some linux experts. More details are available here:

http://www.linuxcaffe.ca/node/731

I out of the city this weekend so I won’t be able to attend but I am a MyThTV user/lover and I’d be happy to help with any problems you might encounter.

The DemoCamp schedule for the fall has been posted to the Torcamp site. If you’re not familiar with DemoCamp is become a great venue to see new products and get some new ideas on whats happening in Toronto. Dates and locations are:

• DemoCampToronto9 on Monday September 25, 2006 at No Regets
• DemoCampToronto10 on Monday October 23, 2006 at Mars
• DemoCampToronto11 on Monday November 20, 2006 at Mars

I hope to see you there.