I missed tonight’s DemoCampUofT sponsored by the cool kids at Web Startup Society. They had a kickass keynote speaker, my friend and startup lawyer, Rob Hyndman.

1. Sidra Mahmood, “Typography and Design” for WebDevelopers
2. James Cash, Building a Social Writing Site in Rails
3. Alexander Synaptic, Online Music Portal
4. James An, Social Network for LGBT
5. Rafal Dittwald, Skule online voting app
6. Kirk Williams, Facebook App: Garrison
7. Andrew Trusty, Language Learning in Browser – firefox extension
8. Danial Jameel, Location Based Mobile Startup

Love this team for pulling together a great event.

Random rantings of a grouchy old man: I wish I could take all students out and tell them job titles in a student organization are pretty much irrelevant. Vice president, technical director, consultant. Yes they are industry titles, but they only demonstrate that you are worth of buzzword bingo. My recommendation, stop with the bullshit titles, start with 140 characters describing what you did.

Keep up the great work at UofT. Details about DemoCamp Toronto 26 in the next day or so.

Donation Matching

We have raised $2930 ($2330 + $600), that Gurbaksh has generously agreed to match. There are 2 options for making a donation.

1. Make a donation directly to MSF and publish your receipt tagging #democamphaiti (it’s also really helpful if you send me the link, but this is the easiest option)
2. donation matching closed

Demos (in no particular order)

• Gurbaksh Chahal, gWallet
• Albert Lai, Kontagent
• Oz Solomon, Social Gaming Studios
• Greg Thomson, Tall Tree Games
• Joel Auge, HitGrab
• Mark Zohar, Scenecaster
• Roy Pereira, ShinyAds.com

I also managed to offer Greg Balajewicz, Realm of Empires a spot, thinking that I had invited him after sending email to the also invited Greg Thomson of Tall Tree Games. Realm of Empires team has been fantastic in cutting me some slack on a mistake and will present at the next DemoCamp.

Just to make sure there are the appropriate checks and balances, I will publish the donation receipt on Jan 27, 2010 on DemoCamp.com. This is not a cash grab, I am happy to make as much information available to make sure that everyone understands all moneys will be donated. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have concerns at david at davidcrow dot ca or using my contact page.

It’s the 25th DemoCamp special edition in Toronto. We’ve been very lucky to have Yossi Vardi, Gary Vaynerchuk and now Gurbaksh Chahal join us for DemoCamp. Don’t know who “G” is?  Check out the Request for Help for details.

For the Chahal family, as for many immigrants, education was paramount, but G left high school at sixteen to form Click Agents, an Internet advertising company, which he sold two years later for $40 million. In January 2004, he launched a second company, BlueLithium – the next generation in Internet advertising. The company was focused on data, optimization, and analytics and became a pioneer of behavioral targeting. BlueLithium was named one of the top 100 private companies in America three years in a row by AlwaysOn, and in 2006, it received highest honor as Top Innovator of the Year. (Previous winners included Google, Skype, and Salesforce.com.) On September 4th, 2007, Yahoo! announced that it was acquiring BlueLithium for $300 million in cash.

How do I present?

Preference given to social gaming and virtual world companies (think Facebook, Myspace, Zynga, Playfish, etc.). We will not be excluding other companies, but G will be apart of the selection process and he has indicated this is his personal area of interest for both gWallet and angel investing.

Demos are 5 minutes long. There is an opportunity for a question and answer period after the demo. The recommendation, it’s a very strong recommendation, is that you present functioning software, i.e., no slide ware. The goal is for entrepreneurs, startups, developers to get on stage and show what you’ve been working on. It’s okay to have a couple of slides to explain your market opportunity, the stage of corporate development, identify your competitors, but it’s really key that you show us working software, hardware, network services, etc.

• Apply to present and make sure you separately register to attend.

DemoCamp Toronto 25 Details

DemoCamp Toronto 25 iCal

DemoCamp Toronto 25
When: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 6:00 PM
Where:
Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University
55 Dundas St West, Room 1067
Toronto, ON Canada

Sponsors

• SIFE Ryerson
  
• Ontario Centre of Excellence
  
• StartupNorth
  

Who is Gurbaksh Chahal?

Gurbaksh is a successful entrepreneur having sold Click Agents for $40M and in 2007 BlueLithium for $300M to Yahoo. He has started his third venture, gWallet, which recently raised $12.5M.

For the Chahal family, as for many immigrants, education was paramount, but G left high school at sixteen to form Click Agents, an Internet advertising company, which he sold two years later for $40 million. In January 2004, he launched a second company, BlueLithium – the next generation in Internet advertising. The company was focused on data, optimization, and analytics and became a pioneer of behavioral targeting. BlueLithium was named one of the top 100 private companies in America three years in a row by AlwaysOn, and in 2006, it received highest honor as Top Innovator of the Year. (Previous winners included Google, Skype, and Salesforce.com.) On September 4th, 2007, Yahoo! announced that it was acquiring BlueLithium for $300 million in cash.

How can I help?

If you’re a social platform developer, this Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial, etc. and you’re interested in learning about gWallet and what Gurbaksh is currently working on, I need you to update your Twitter or Facebook status and @gchahal or Chahal Wow! indicating that you’re interested in hearing him speak at DemoCamp. Just like our friend Mark Zohar did.

Thanks!

James Standen – Datamartist

Datamartist is a piece of Windows software designed to enabled the extraction, transformation and and load (ETL) of data from SQL databases, Access databases, Excel files, and other sources. The goal is to help IT analysts and developers in small and medium sized businesses or departments in larger organizations to access and manipulate data needed to inform their organizations. It’s a great piece of desktop software that is for sale (imagine that!). The best part, James Standen informed me a few days before the demo he was concerned because he was still working on getting the code to work. I love demos of functioning code.

Oshoma Momoh – 5 Blocks Out

Osh and Katrin presented their local community built around enabling neighbourhoods, 5 Blocks Out. The tool is built around helping communities share, discover and engage with their community. It is about those things that make your city great. The schools, the daycares, the restaurants, the spots, the excursions, the places off the beaten path that make a city a great place to live. You should check out 5 Blocks Out.

Geoffrey thanks for capturing the video. Make sure you check out Geoffrey’s Toronto Tech Jobs blog where he examines and breaks down the technology job postings. Whether you agree with it or not, it’s a great way to start to critically think about employers (and their HR departments).

It’s great to see Adam and Mark Kuznicki sharing the great work they have been doing for toronto.ca/open to reach out, engage, educate and inspire Toronto software developers about the opportunities that exist in remixing the city data sets in their applications. The enablement of local businesses like 5BlocksOut, HomeZilla and others will be great.

Gary Vaynerchuk in Toronto @DemoCamp 24 from Satoshi Takano on Vimeo.

And the Q&A with the audience.

One thing I hope Geoffrey is doing, is clearing the publishing of the videos with each of the participants. I’m think it’s great to be able to extend the reach of the event for the participants, however, not every demo goes well. And many demoers are getting feedback and need to feel like they have the freedom to do this without a black mark on their permanent record. That said, I’m glad someone captured the presentations, and is starting to publish them.

DemoCamp24 in Toronto is sold out, for those following at home, some live notes:

First up: Gary Vaynerchuk:

Greatest takeaway: big game is patience, way too many ppl give up right before it’s about to happen. If you don’t have the passion, if you’re not bleeding out the eyeballs for it you won’t make it, if it’s about cash you won’t make it. Patience and passion the pp theory. If you talk to ppl in their 90s they never say I wish I made more cash. The people who wake up in the morning who are pissed are losing.

What you can do is put down the wii, maybe not watch a lost marathon every weekend, you can start a company. That wasn’t true years ago. The fact that the internet, the most underrated thing in our society.

Question: How do you find your passion? Really hard. People roll up to me and say Gary what’s my passion? What am I fucking Yoda? What I can say you can’t be afraid of having more than one passion. Don’t limit yourself just skiing or rockclimbing, by doing that you limit your audience. We are in the personal brand business now, there are no editors to control who you are.

I never want to hear from people a 5 year plan? 5 years? 5 years ago there was no twitter, 5 years ago you needed a .edu to get into facebook. I react to what’s out there, I worry about what I can control.

Stickiness is important. You could get a trillion hits and it wouldn’t matter two foundations: quality content and customer service. Zappos is massively underrated. Zappos was the only competitor Amazon really worried about. Because Zappos wasn’t competing on price with Amazon. People cared more about Zappos. How many of you out there personally email to thank anyone who posts a comment on your blog?

First pizza, now on to the Demos:

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Jason Roks – founder of guigoog now called zero.in thanking the DemoCamp Community and announcing his Angel funding which he closed thanks to his demo at DemoCamp22. PROTIP: close Angel faster with convertible debentures and avoiding the challenge of valuing your company.

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GridCentric.ca – cluster computing demo. Virtual cluster. Normally when you scale out your cluster, you need to scale out the same machines, with virtual clusters you can add anything, you can even move the virtual machines while running from machine to machine. With GridCentric you can grow the scale the datacenter by instantly cloning running machines. Demo’s drawing a purple elephant on a paint app on one virtual machine, cloning that virtual machine and we see the same drawing app running on the new virtual machine. Idea: if you need a hundred machines you can scale them out to hundred virtual machines then throw them away when done. How does this compare to EC2? This is an EC2 on steroids for people who have their own clusters. Q: It is based on Zen hypervisor, modified with their control stack. Moneyquote: “I don’t want this to sound super nerdy.”

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DataTO. Helps the city of Toronto prioritize and release data. Have a site like a dell ideastorm with digg-like interface for people to submit and vote on requests for the city to open data. Now that the city has opened data, they really need help because they don’t have resources to open everything at once. The whole site was built in a week (wow) with developer time (@thody’s) donated by his employer Architech Solutions. This is a great cause. Since the launch of this service many other cities Paris, London, Ottawa, Victoria have expressed interest. Intention is to open source the project, contact @remarkk if you want to contribute to the project.

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5BlocksOut solves the “lost in a big city problem”. It’s an online community where you ask questions or create missions like “where do you like going out for a drink?”. So far, looks like a gigpark crossed with digg for super local places and events. It also has a rather cute little hedgehog in the graphics. Other missions: I’m a hairy beast can you suggest a good esthetician? Indoor winter fun for little kidlets? site also let’s you drill down on hundreds of very local neighbourhoods, follow them and follow other “locals” twitter style. Request an invite, and metion DemoCamp to get a beta invite.

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Datamartist is (another) excel killer for desktop data analysis. Let’s you build db queries using a combination of visual drag and drop blocks and excel-like formula expressions. It’s a scratch pad for data, merge sets, cut paste columns from various source, with quick visualizations like distribution or ven diagrams of what data from one set that can join to another. Pretty neat, $750 a license, if you need this, we guess you probably know who you are. Moneyquote “we’re very oldschool (we’re a windows desktop app and,) it has business model: you buy it from us”. bonus points: for non-profits, it’s free.

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Eqentia. is a news and, um, tag cloud aggregator of vertical news. Here’s an Eqentia portal for Canada Tech News.

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Cadmus is a neat idea. It answers the question: “what has been talked about on twitter, on rss etc. since the last time I was online”. What it will do is aggregate, crunch down and thread conversations for you. Algorithm works by looking at how important is the source and how important is the content. Moneyquote: “yes you can filter out foursquare updates from twitter”

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That’s all folks. Congrats and thanks to all the brave demoers. Time for beer.