Recap: DemoCampEdmonton1

By Mack D. Male ·

Last night was Edmonton’s first DemoCamp, and I think it was a major success! I counted about sixty people at one point, with some standing along the back walls. I liveblogged the whole event on Twitter. You can see my tweets at #hashtags and Twemes. I’ll summarize the key info in this post.

We had six demos, though I think we need to aim for more demo and less talk next time. Here’s what we saw:

  1. Greg Campbell of Spieker Point Inc. showed us http://www.spiekerpoint.com
  2. Daniel Boulet of Loa Corp. showed us http://www.loapowertools.com
  3. Dave Bodnarchuck of Event IQ Inc. showed us http://www.inviteright.com
  4. Bob Hesketh of Chinook Multimedia Inc. showed us http://www.chinookmultimedia.com
  5. Peter Urban of Smibs Inc. showed us http://www.smibs.com
  6. David Cree of FunderFish showed us http://www.funderfish.com

I think the demo of the evening was definitely Peter Urban’s. The applications they are building are really slick looking, and could be quite useful (its a CRM type app). He was also a really engaging speaker.

BarCamp coming soon!

The audience was a fairly diverse crowd. We had five women, three or four students, lots of developers, a few investors including Randy Thompson, and Don Iveson who is the city councillor for Ward 5. The two companies with the most representation were Zigtag and Nexopia. There was a serious lack of Microsoft dudes, so we’ll have to make sure EDMUG comes out to the next one!

There were a few announcements about upcoming events:

Mark your calendars! You may also want to join the BarCampEdmonton group on Facebook.

After the demos were done, most people headed over to Windsor pub for a few beers. I know lots of introductions were made, and people seemed to be having a good time. It’s great to see the community growing like this in Edmonton, and I have no doubt that the next DemoCamp will be even better!

Some things we can improve on:

  • Larger room, preferably with lots of power outlets!
  • Open Wi-Fi access (only those with U of A accounts could connect)
  • Reach out to more groups in Edmonton and area
  • Food? Everyone loves free food! Maybe we can find a sponsor

Thanks to Cam, Mark, Kevin, and all the other organizers for a great event.

  • http://www.smibs.com Peter Urban

    The democamp was great and it felt good to show our apps for the first time after more than a year in the ‘dark’. The organizers truly did a great job getting this off the ground. I am looking forward to a growing web dev community in Edmonton and Alberta.

  • http://barcampedmonton.com Mark

    Thanks for the great post Mack! I just put up a traceback on our blog at http://barcampedmonton.com.

    It’s good to see other people are getting as excited about BarCamp as we are, and we’re definately appreciate the feedback!

  • http://blog.smibs.com/?p=173 Smibs Blog » Blog Archive » We’re back

    [...] which drives us to work even harder and meet our launch target for the next couple of month. Here is a good blog post report on the first Democamp event in Edmonton. We really enjoyed it. Trackback to this post. RSS 2.0 [...]

  • http://www.opgenorth.net Tom Opgenorth

    Nice to see that we have these in Edmonton now. I’ll definately see about keeping my calendar clear for the next one.

  • http://blogs.blogosphere.ca/mig14 Megan

    I had no idea you liveblogged on Twitter! I certainly didn’t get over 100 messages from you last night.

    Glad the event was a success!!

  • http://camlinke.typepad.com Cam

    Thanks for the post Mack, now I don’t have to do a recap on my blog :)

  • http://www.davidcree.com Dave Cree

    I love your Blog! Democamp was a lot of fun, I felt totally unready for it but it was great feedback. I’m really looking forward to this month’s edition and Barcamp coming up!

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