DemoCamp 12: Slam Poetry for Geeks
DemoCamp is coooool. It’s slam poetry for geeks. 10 minutes to show your product, no props, no powerpoint… just you and the product. At the end, questions and critique from your peers. Yee ha! I think I like it even better than the original BarCamp format.
At DemoCamp 12 in Toronto last night, there were short presentations from:
- Dave Humphrey, who talked about open source and education. Really, what Dave did was to show off a whole bunch of his students great work extending Mozilla.  He’s proud of their work, and deservedly so.
- Albert Lai, who gave a short Bubbleshare demo, and then answered questions about the acquisition of Bubbleshare by Kaboose.
- Me, and I gave a speedy demo of Talk-Now. Hearty applause, and questions about business model. “How are you going to make money”, people asked, when I told them it was free. Our model is going to be to attach other premium services, but Talk-Now will be free to use, and people will get tons of value from it.
- Will Pate, who demoed (or attempted, anyway) to demo Flock, the browser being built on Mozilla with extra blogging and search tools built-in. Lesson #1: Browsers are hard to demo when you have a flaky internet connection
And then there were numerous updates from previous demoers, as well as a lot of people simple standing up to say “Hey, we’re hiring”. Oh, and did I mention beer? Yeah… geeks, beer, and demoes. It’s a rippin’ combination.
Kudos to David Crow, Jay Goldman, and Joey Devilla. DemoCamp 12 drew a capacity crowd, and no doubt these three instigators played a key role.
February 6th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
[...] Came across a post from Alec Saunders about Monday night’s DemoCamp (number 12), and it reminded me that I meant to write about it too. It was at No Regrets in Liberty Village, just down the street from Tucows — where I went to DemoCamp #3 (I think it was) about a year ago on another frigid February night. The place was packed to the rafters, and despite a balky sound system and some cranky Wi-Fi it was a great show. [...]
February 9th, 2007 at 4:46 am
[...] During our conversation I told him I thought Montreal’s bohemian culture gave us a distinct edge in creating a ground zero for social & web innovation in Canada (web deux.zero for those with a taste for bad buzzwords translated). He of course felt that Toronto had a fair chance at this ground zero role. I would say he has a lot of reasons to be confident. Check out the work he is doing in Toronto and Alec Saunders post on the recent Toronto Democamp which was packed. [...]
August 12th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
[...] you can read about the DemoCamp 12 event I attended Monday evening in posts from Alec Saunders, Matthew Ingram and Jon Arnold (who has video’s of Alec’s presentation). Two key rules [...]