Last night I live-blogged Victoria’s first DemoCamp and it was a huge success.  The place was packed.  We were in the presentation centre for the new Juliet condos that are going up on Blanchard Street.  The presentation centre is a lovely, lovely venue for event and thanks to Dave Chard, Wendy Pryde, and Jessica Pryde for being amazing hosts.

Mark Lise told me that he expected more than the 48 people there were chairs for and yep, that was true.  It was a packed house.  When this DemoCamp was being planned, Mark had arranged with buddies from Flock and Songbird (I’ve downloaded Songbird, btw) to give presentations, then in the couple days just before last night Mark said people came out of the woodwork to want to present.  This was a great problem to have, more people who wanted to present than there was probably time for.  As it turned out there was time for everyone.

Reflections on DemoCampVictoria01

One of the perils/problems with live blogging is that often you don’t get to synthesize what is going on until much later.  When you’re at a conference and still covering other sessions often this means not getting back to reflect on what you wrote about (and having only vague memories of).  Now a day later I’ve had some  time to reflect a bit.

Sure Flock and Songbird get a lot of attention here, but what about SkyscraperPage?  Oh didn’t know about them?  Have you seen the scale drawings of skyscrapers?  Chances are the drawings came from them.  That was one of my wow moments.  You’ve probably seen a lot of their skyscraper posters around.  I’m told a Vancouver one will be out this spring (it’s at the printers right now).

Joshua McKenty talked about the irony of pushing BountyUp for a long time, then in a few hours made BuyLater and is already making money.  It also helped that Lifehacker and others did some posts about him too.

Gels talked about her new project at UVic the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) where she is working on making a collaboration platform for academics to read and annotate scanned versions of texts.  We’re talking about texts hundreds of years old.  You know how hard it is to even to get to look as those kinds of documents much less discuss the contents in situ with people also interested in that time period?  Pretty darn hard is the quick answer.  There are a lot of cool things that can be done with a platform like that … once it is off the paper-alpha stage.  No matter what Gels thinks, it was great to see such an important project presented at its very earliest stages.

We were even graced with Boris Mann’s presence (here is his chat with Wendy via Utterz) and the Victoria premiere of Darren and Julie in Victoria!  Welcome back to Canada Darren and Julie.

So far Mark and Yule have posted their thoughts about DemoCampVictoria01.  I think since I managed to live blog and get pictures up last night, I’m allowed to have slacked off a bit on this post.

I can’t wait for the next DemoCamp, I have a feeling we’re going to need a bigger place and there are going to be a lot of people wanting to present once they hear how well last night went.

More pictures from the event:

www.flickr.com tris’ DemoCampVictoria01 photoset

Photography by Tris Hussey

Post from: EveryJoe

Success at DemoCampVictoria01–My thoughts from last night

Welp, count me in! The event is free to attend, and it sounds like the round up so far is interesting (demo’s from the Flock guys in Vic, and an interesting new social commerce app called BountyUp). There’s one idea that’s missing that I personally think is really cool, called TeamPages; a social app that facilitates athletes, their coaches, and parents in organizing and scheduling teams (designed by MetaLab). But, that’s already been developed and DemoCamp seems more of a brainstorm-esque event. Source: DemoCampVictoria at Better Web Posse

DemoCampVictoria01 is April 3rd, 5:30 PM at the Juliet Showroom, 834 Johnson St (map).  Sign up on the wiki page to attend or present.  Myself I will be there camera and laptop in hands (it’s about 40 lbs of gear all together folks) to cover the event.  Now, to my beloved peeps over in Vangroovy, come on over!  I have a fold out futon couch, bunk beds (yes they are the kids’), and even a fold out fish bed (don’t ask).

As Gels pointed out, and Aidan posted about recently, the Victoria tech scene is nothing to sneeze at (or even cough at for that matter).  I can’t wait to see what is going to be demo-ed.  Hmm, maybe I should see if I can get some b5media schwag to give out.

Post from: EveryJoe

DemoCampVictoria01 April 3rd–let’s show off the rocking stuff Victoria has to offer