DemoCampToronto16 took place on Monday night and was back at the Board of Trade. The BOT is a great venue but seems to bring out a lot of people in suits and create an overall
more formal atmosphere. I was again surprised at the number of new DemoCamp attendees. I’m not really sure why DemoCamp always seems to always have about 50% new people…
The demo line-up was as follows
I’ve been working with SlashID for about the past year on their business model and marketing strategy. The technology is very cool and it really empowers the user with their identity information but it doesn’t make for the most interesting Demo. Ross and Zeev did a good job of covering the advantages of SlashID.
Utest
Igor presented the Utest software to teachers that want to students to solve a programming assignment. Igor’s demo was very slick and it looked like he had an eclipse pluggin setup for the assignments. I’m not a huge fan of eclipse or IDE’s in general but I thought it was pretty cool that Utest pluggin worked within the IDE.
I got to present on the Facebook Weekend BETA that just
finished and specifically the Pet Food Testing project. I hope I was able to represent all the different people and activities that took place over the weekend effectively. One comment I got afterwards I didn’t spend enough time on the business processes around the testing. I also got a lot of questions about my Firefox bling and the 3D tab switching, for anyone that wants to add their own its called Tab Effect and it’s a Firefox plugin.I had a hard time following this demo because a lot of people were still talking to me about Facebook Weekend. From what I saw it looked pretty slick, after listening to the discussion at the end I’m a little concerned about the privacy.
I met Ryan briefly at DemoCamp15 and I was blown away by the ShapeShop software. He did a great job demoing his software and the capabilities that are possible with a gesture driven interface. He quickly created a variety of 3D shapes with the software and I think anyone in the 3D creation space would benefit from his software.
All of the demo’s went smooth and I was really impressed by the quality of them. I’m not certain but I think the time for the demo’s was more flexible too, I didn’t really see anyone have any problems with getting cut off.
The Ignite sessions were as follows:
Co-creating the Creative City
I’ve never seen Mark present but I’ve met him many times and been impressed with the projects he’s involved with. I really like the concept that he presented of a community using technology to help improve itself. He talked about Fixmystreet.com and how it’s a site not run by the city but my citizen and they are organized to follow up with local government. He did a great job and presented one of the best ignite presentations I’ve seen.
Fraser presented on some of his learning from the AdaptiveBlue start-up, which is a Firefox plugin. His presentation was good in providing information about how AdaptiveBlue has evolved. I don’t think he did a job of explaining some basics though, like how/what AdaptiveBlue is or how they were able to execute the different components.
Patrick did a great job of re-counting how iStockphoto has been able to succeed as a stock photography site. He provide some great examples of how iStockphoto was able to develop their business model differently and use crowdsourcing instead of expensive in house staff. I really enjoyed his presentation I thought he shared a lot of information the iStockphoto culture and approach that separated it from other stock photo companies.
Overall it was great night and I met a bunch of new people afterwards. One area I think needs some tweaking is the sponsorship support. As a sponsor I’m not really sure its necessary to have 2-5 min presentation/messages.