Think of Demo Ignite Camp as an evening of “show and tell” where the bright lights of Vancouver’s high-tech and startup scene get together to present their projects and ideas. It’ll feature two kinds of presentations:
Demos: By “demo”, we mean a demonstration of your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not give us yet another marketing spiel.
Ignites: An Ignite presentation on a tech-related topic with some constraints to make it interesting: you’re allowed only 20 slides, and they’re set to automatically advance every 15 seconds. It requires you to keep the text on your slides to a minimum and your presentation to be focused. It’s a true test of your presentation-fu.
Demo Ignite Camp will take place at Vancouver Convention Centre on Monday, September 14th at 7:00 p.m., a little bit after the first day of Microsoft’s TechDays Vancouver conference wraps up.
“Very Nice. How Much?”
Admission is free! As in beer, which we’ll be going out for after Demo Ignite Camp.
So far, we’ve got Avi Bryant booked for one of Demo Ignite Camp’s 8 presentation slots. He’ll be doing a demo and we’re incredibly pleased – he works on some really cool projects, and we of the Toronto DemoCamp crew still consider his demo of DabbleDB to be one of the best demos in our 21-event history. We’re looking forward to seeing his presentation, which I suspect will be on Clamato, which is equal parts Smalltalk, JavaScript and the future.
Demo Ignite Camp wouldn’t even exist without the efforts of the Bee Man:
Actually, that’s @bmann, as in Boris Mann, blogger, technologist, entrepreneur and go-to guy for Vancouver’s tech scene:
He’s helping pull this event together in record time and playing the part of co-host, in spite of his very packed schedule.
Microsoft played a part in making Demo Ignite Camp happen: they provided the venue and the AV system free of charge. The Vancouver leg of their conference, TechDays Canada 2009, takes place on Monday, September 14th and Tuesday, September 15th, which means that they had the facility on Monday night, during which nothing was scheduled. The TechDays organizers decided that they’d make the room available for some kind of community event.
I’ll be helping out as well. I’ll be co-hosting, and I was the guy who emailed Boris and said “Hey, dude, if you’ve got the camp, I’ve got the venue.”
Yes, I know that cats live longer, but I think the quip I made at DemoCamp 21 still makes a good point:
Let’s upgrade to compliant up-to-date browsers, shall we? IE8, or even that hippie browser, if you must.
Credit where credit is due: The “cat’s dead now” line is my remix of a line from a review of the Guns ‘N’ Roses concert that took place here in Toronto a couple of years back. The original line went something like “If you got a cat when Appetite for Destruction came out, it’s dead now.”
It’s gonna be a busy week for me — there’s a lot going on!
Monday: Damian Conway and The Missing Link
On Monday evening, I’ll be catching Damian Conway’s presentation, The Missing Link. There’s nothing quite like a Damian Conway presentation – they’re equal parts computer science, mathematical digression, history lesson, physics lecture, pop-culture observation, Perl module code walkthrough and stand-up comedy routine.
If you’re up for an entertaining and enlightening presentation by one of the bright lights of the open source world and you’re going to be in Toronto tonight, you should catch this one. There’s no charge for admission and no registration process – just show up at University of Toronto’s Bahen Centre for Information Technology (40 St. George Street, west side, just north of College) at 7:00 p.m. and head to room 1160 (the big lecture theatre near the back of the first floor).
Tuesday: DemoCamp 21 with Special Guest John Udell
Tuesday evening brings the 21st edition of DemoCamp, which I like to describe as “show and tell for the bright lights of the Toronto-area tech community”. It’s a chance for people, from hobbyists working on a pet project to enterprise software developers building something globe-spanning to show their peers their projects in action or share an idea. It’s put together by my fellow Microsoftie David Crow (who’s also in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group); I cost-host the event with Jay Goldman.
You can’t pick your neighbours, but you can pick your neighbourhood! Saul Colt, Zoocasa
ArtAnywhere : Where Lost artwork meets Empty walls Christine Renaud, ArtAnywhere
Bringing Social Media to Contractors Brian Sharwood, HomeStars
Create a BlackBerry/iPhone Mobile App in 5 Minutes Alan Lysne, Cascada Mobile
Stories Told Together – Introducing Social Cards Shaun, MacDonald, MashupArts
WeGoWeGo.com: semantic search for city events Dan Wood, WeGoWeGo.com
Guestlist – online event management Ben Vinegar, Guestlist
guiGoog: Advanced Visual Power Search Jason Roks, GuiGoog
Alas, this event is sold out. I’ll take notes and post them on this blog.
Wednesday: Science 2.0
The Science 2.0 conference takes place on Wednesday afternoon. Its topic: how the web and computers can radically change and improve science. It takes place at the MaRS Centre and the presentations are:
Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects Titus Brown
A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook Cameron Neylon
Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery Michael Nielsen
Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems David Rich
How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method Victoria Stodden
As with DemoCamp, this event is a popular one and is sold out. I’ll take notes and blog the conference.
Thursday: Windows 7 Blogger Event
I’ll be helping out at a gathering of Toronto bloggers on Thursday, where we’ll be showing them Windows 7.
Friday: Coffee and Code
If it’s Friday, it must be time for Toronto Coffee and Code! It’s the day when I set up shop at a cafe – usually the Dark Horse – and work from there, making myself available to answer questions, hear your opinions and comments and chat. I’ll talk about Microsoft, our tools and tech, the industry in general, whatever!
This Friday’s Toronto Coffee and Code will take place at the Dark Horse Cafe (215 Spadina) from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.. Feel free to drop by!
Other Stuff Going On This Week
Along with the other people on the team, I’m helping out with the preparatory work on the TechDays conference, which will be taking place in seven cities across Canada this fall.
I’m also working on ongoing series of articles covering stuff like coding fundamentals, ASP.NET MVC, mobile and some other stuff that I have to keep on the down-low for the time being.
And it’s not too late for me to start working on the ASP.NET MVC presentation that I’m doing with ObjectSharp’s Barry Gervin at the Toronto edition of Stack Overflow’s DevDays conference in October.
Jon Udell – the developer, information architect, author who wrote about social software before we started calling it that, blogger and Senior Tech Evangelist at Microsoft – will be in Toronto next week and he’ll be at a couple of events that I’m attending.
DemoCamp Toronto 21
On Tuesday, John will be at the 21st edition of DemoCamp, the show-and-tell event for people in the Toronto tech community, where entrepreneurial developers, designers, marketers and businesspeople get together to talk about what they’re working on, exchange ideas and get to know each other. We’re about using the power of technology and creativity to make Toronto (and the world) a better place to live, work and play. And yes, Yours Truly will help host the event.
Watch this blog for more details about next week’s DemoCamp, including the demos and Ignite presentations that will be featured that night.
Science 2.0
On Wednesday, John will be at Science 2.0, a conference exploring the ways in which computers and the internet are changing the way science is done. Speakers and presentations at Science 2.0 include:
Titus Brown: Choosing Infrastructure and Testing Tools for Scientific Software Projects
Cameron Neylon: A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook
Michael Nielsen: Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery
David Rich: Using “Desktop” Languages for Big Problems
Victoria Stodden: How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method
John will have a talk at Science 2.0 in which he’ll cover the elmcity project, a community calendaring system running on the Azure platform and how it “tackles the challenge of social information management and aims to democratize the computational way of thinking that enables us to wire the web.”
I’ll be taking notes at both events and will post them on this blog.
As David Crow puts it: “It’s time for a DemoCamp Jeffersons-style. That’s right, we’re moving on up! Thanks to Mike Lee from Rogers Communications, DemoCamp 21 will be taking place at Rogers Theatre at One Mount Pleasant.
We’d like to thank everyone who attended, sponsored and survived DemoCamp Toronto 20, which was a great event. We collected your feedback from that DemoCamp, and we’re going to make a few changes that we believe will help improve the event, the hosting and networking opportunities, including:
More food. We’re doubling the food order.
Timing and flow of the presentations. It felt a little long and disjointed.
We’re going to change the questions and reduce the random banter.
We’ll make it easier to submit events, job postings and requests for help from the community.
We’re always working on making DemoCamp better! Keep those cards and letters coming!
The Details
When: Tuesday, July 28, 2009 – 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM
Where: Rogers Theatre (1 Mount Pleasant Road – just south of Bloor and Jarvis — Toronto)
DemoCamp Toronto is a show-and-tell for Toronto’s entrepreneurial developers, designers, and marketers. The goal is to see new technology, meet other interesting in emerging technology, early-stage companies, and making Toronto a better place.
How Do I Present?
Everyone who wants to present must submit an application. We are looking for submissions that :
Inspire us;
Challenge our notions of software, user experience, business models, funding sources;
Aren’t mere derivatives or copies (if you’re thinking "we’re the next YouTube/Facebook/MySpace/TagCloud/TechCrunch," DemoCamp might not be a good fit).
The goal is to find projects, people, applications and companies that will inspire, challenge or educate people who have seen the latest and greatest on the web and around the world.
Presentation Formats
At DemoCamp, presentations are limited to 5 minutes. You get 5 minutes on stage to convey your revolutionary ideas in either a demo or an Ignite presentation.
Demos are limited to 2 slides and showing functional code or a lightning talk that is a presentation with auto-advancing slides. Ignite presentations are 20 slides by 15 seconds per slide (total 5 minutes).
Sponsors, Tickets and Free Tickets
Why do we need sponsors? Where are the free tickets?
All very important questions. Sponsor tickets are available through EventBrite. I don’t know about you, but an event between 6pm-9pm is right during the dining hours for me. We like to provide pizza/food to help offset the beverages (aka social lubricant). Sponsorship dollars will be put towards the event costs.
There are free tickets. However, in an effort to continue to keep these tickets available, they will be announced a few days before the event. What we don’t want is a land grab, we’re trying to encourage a strong sense of community through participation. Read Joe Thornley’s thoughtful piece on why he is charging a registration fee for Third Tuesday.
We also provide corporate sponsorships at a rate of CAD$250 each. With these, you get:
2 tickets
Your logo on event materials including DemoCamp.com web and presentation
Just a small sample of the people that make Toronto’s tech community great.
This week is going to be a week unlike any other in the Toronto technology scene: a week of events created not by municipal groups, large techno-conglomerates or industry think tanks, but by small groups of passionate individuals who enjoys working with both people and technology
These events don’t have the benefit of major sponsorship or media coverage, nor will they be lining their organizers’ wallets. They’re events put together by amateurs in the original sense of the word: people who do it not for profit, but for their love of their craft, in the hope that both the attendees and even the field itself will be advanced from insights, understanding and knowledge gained by gathering together and exchanging ideas.
It’ll be a busy week for me. I’ll not only be attending these events, but I’ll also be MCing two of them as well. I’ll be posting reports from these gatherings here — keep watching this blog!
Demos: By “demo”, we mean a demonstration of your software, web application or project in action. It’s the only thing you’re allowed to show on the big screen — no slides allowed! The idea is for you to show off your technology in action and inspire us, not give us yet another marketing spiel.
