Recap: DemoCamp Edmonton 17

With wind chills reaching well below minus thirty, it’s amazing that anyone at all showed up at the Telus Centre tonight for Edmonton’s seventeenth DemoCamp, but they did! While perhaps not our largest turnout ever, we still had a pretty full house for six demos. You can read more about DemoCamp here and you can check out my recap of our last DemoCamp here.

Tonight’s demos, in order of appearance:

• Zeel – Built by Rocketfuel Games, Zeel is “the topical Twitter app that connects you with your interests.” You can think of it as a layer on top of Twitter that makes it easy to follow conversations on specific topics. You can do that with saved searches of course, but that’s a little more difficult and the experience certainly isn’t as nice!
• Cross Platform Tablet App using Flash – Randy demoed an application that he built using Flash that was then deployed to the iPad and an Android tablet without requiring any changes. I didn’t catch the name of the app, but it was pretty cool to see the same app running on different platforms.
• Accessing US-Only Blocked Content in Canada – Ben showed us a trick he shared with the YEGRB group recently. It’s a bit technical, but with just a few steps, you can get access to Pandora, the US Netflix catalog, and other services that block access from Canada. He’s got a screencast that shows you how to do it here.
• Web Suite Pro – Collin was really nervous, but did a pretty good job of showing off his online invoicing and CRM app. Web Suite Pro seems very feature rich, with lots of built-in functionality and support for a variety of platforms. FreshBooks is the obvious competitor in the space.
• Linelo – Terry demoed his solution for recording and organizing large amounts of text. You capture lines of text, and then you can group lines together, format them, collapse them, and more. He’s got support for Android and additional platforms are on the way.
• Slapshot Heroes – From Visimonde, the folks behind Rinksters, comes this iPad app that is kind of like Angry Birds but with pucks and coins. It started out as a mini-game within Rinksters actually, and was popular enough to stand on its own. Ted was entertaining, just as he was back at DemoCamp Edmonton 15 when he showed off Rinksters itself.

I think Ben’s demo was perhaps the favorite of the night, even though it was a little geekier than the rest. It’s always fun to have demos like that – stuff that isn’t necessarily going to turn into a product or company but which is cool nonetheless. Slapshot Heroes was certainly entertaining, and I’m sure more than a few folks will have already spent the 99 cents to download it. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’m most excited to try Zeel, even though I don’t have an iPhone. I’m always interested in finding new ways to extract value from Twitter!

There were a number of event announcements this evening:

• Startup Hackathon + Global Game Jam is happening January 27 – 29 at the University of Alberta. This is your chance to make an app or a game, to meet some new people, and to learn something new! Monday is the last day to get in at the early-bird price!
• The next Edmonton Girl Geek Dinner is happening tomorrow. Follow them on Twitter so you don’t miss upcoming events!
• MediaCamp Edmonton is taking place on February 4. Aimed at getting storytellers together with coders, it’s going to be a great day of learning how to help one another work together. Get your tickets at YEG Live!

Stay tuned to Startup Edmonton for additional events and announcements!

See you in March for DemoCamp Edmonton 18!