Cover via Amazon

Last night, I attended DemoCamp Toronto 24, my first ever DemoCamp event. Shocking, I know, that it took so long for me to attend one. The night started off with an interview of Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.tv about his experiences, as part of the tour for his new book, Crush It! (which, by the way, was being given for free to attendees.) After Gary's interview, we had a break for pizza and networking, after which there were six demos, spanning from GridCentric through to Cadmus.

I'll put down my notes from Gary's interview later on, but let's start off with the demos.

Like I mentioned, GridCentric opened up the demo part of the night. They demonstrated their product, a hypervisor for clusters, which could be summed up as "fork in a cloud". And when I say fork, I mean in the UNIX way; you can quite literally fork new virtual servers/clusters like you can in UNIX with processes. Very interesting.

This was followed up by dataTO, a community site where people can suggest new data sources for the City of Toronto to provide as part of its open data initiative. It's kind of a cross between Stack Overflow and Reddit self-posts. The people behind the site aren't just getting things running and building connections with the city, though: they are looking at ways of making the code behind the site usable by groups in other cities as well.

The third demo of the night was 5 Blocks Out. This is a service with a lot of potential, for people who aren't just looking at virtual communities but their own local, physical ones too. You can meet new people, and find out where to go for anything in the city (and your own neighbourhood). Right now, it's mostly restricted to about 200 neighbourhoods in central and west Toronto, but the duo behind it are looking at expanding the service as quality permits.

The next demo was for Datamartist, a great tool for quickly and easily transforming and managing data from various sources. It's a GUI based tool that serves as a "data scratchpad", making life easier for the IT people who have to get the proper data to the proper people, and take other data and stick it in the appropriate slots. It's pretty pricy for individuals, but at $750 per license, it's still a lot less expensive than its 6-figure competitors from Microsoft, SAP, et al.

Following that up was Eqentia. This is a news aggregation service that deals with semantic matches and topic based aggregation, rather than the simple matches and feed/service based aggregation we've been dealing with in the past.

Last but not least was Cadmus. Their service provides a way to find what's trending amongst your friends. They primarily handle Twitter sources, but FriendFeed and RSS are also supported.

My favourite demos were 5 Blocks Out and Cadmus. The 5 Blocks Out service shows an incredible amount of potential, and looks to be a great way of becoming engaged with your neighbourhood. I can't wait for them to expand out into Durham Region so I can make good use of it. As for Cadmus, well, I follow over 600 people on Twitter now, and it can be pretty hectic trying to figure out what the top stories are amongst those people.

Now, for the notes I wrote during Gary's interview:

• We are ahead of the game and don't know it
• What is my motivation?
• Don't read about it -- do it!
• Analytics, SEO, etc. = bullshit. Good feelings = THE GOAL
• We underestimate the ability to appreciate effort
• Always try
• Need to be/own yourself -- don't have to be someone else.
• "The big game is patience."
• Passion is required to have patience
• Problem is people chasing cash, rather than their passions
• Motivation: Desperation trumps innovation
• Always a lot to learn
• Don't be scared of having multiple passions
• "Create tunnels" to connect with others -- share more interests than just the primary
• Cost of entry nowadays is sweat equity, not money
• "The long tail is longer than you think" -- wider space means more winners
• Don't sweat what you can't change, but monitor it anyway
• "Five year plans are impossible" -- things change, you have to be able to adapt immediately
• Key to stickiness: Quality content and great customer/consumer service
• Caring is MORE IMPORTANT than cost
• "We're going back to small-town rules"
• Word-of-mouth drives caring & consumer expectation
• Expectations change, we adapt fast
• Massive culture shift re brands & caring

All in all, it was a great and informative evening. Many thanks to Gary for speaking to us, to David Crow and Saul Colt for organizing the night, and to Rogers Ventures and StartupNorth for sponsoring the event.

The next DemoCamp Toronto happens on January 26, 2010, and you can bet that I'll be there.