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DemoCampVictoria #3 update

Mark Lise — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:39:13 +0000

So I have a scheduling conflict. I’ll be heading down to SF on May 26th for GoogleIO. It’s Google’s largest developer gathering so it should be pretty exciting! Unfortunately that means I can’t run DemoCamp Victoria #3. I need people to take the reigns! DemoCamp isn’t really *that* rigid or complicated, but to make it easy for people I’ll outline the basics:

Welcome everyone to DC3.
Explain what democamp is in very brief form, take some questions.
Explain the format, get the list up and get those names on the board
30-second intros, vote on the best 4-6, followed by the presentations of such. (again, not a hard rule, let the crowd decide
Let the presentations rip and ask questions, engage.. don’t just sit there and watch!
Enjoy the event, go out for a social afterwards

There should be a photographer going, but in addition we should have someone tweet the event (you #victoriatweetup ppl should come), and lets get more people blogging about it.

I’ll follow the hashtags while I’m in SF, good luck!

DemoCampVictoria #3

Mark Lise — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:39:54 +0000

DemoCampVictoria

Hey everyone, that’s right. We got another democampvictoria coming up May 26th, 2009! We’ve got some really interesting demos in the pipe so I’m really looking forward to this one. It’s at the Canadian Pacific Lawn Bowling club.

Barcamp page here: http://bit.ly/67pHX

Facebook event page here: http://bit.ly/12v7YZ

See you all there!

DemoCamp Vancouver

Mark Lise — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:13:51 +0000

What’s best way to follow up DemoCampVictoria01? Go to DemoCampVancouver06 – Gaming edition. I saw a lot of familiar faces from the last time I was over; Boris, Brendon, Greg, and Roland just to name a few.

Parveen Kaler talked about iPhone game development, specifically the medium and what it means. He mentioned that the iPhone audience is fundamentally different, you can’t just port a game from one platform to it. ie: They are playing games in transit – on the bus to work/school, so developing a 50 hour game probably isn’t a wise choice.

Dustin Sacks from Sillysoft games had a great demo of his product, Lux Delux. It’s a turn-based strategy much like Risk. Being a former Risk player, I found it to be pretty interesting His company cares a lot about the users community and it’s quite apparent they have a solid base of customers. They even contribute back to the company freely with things such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and other downloadable apps. He had a lot of solid ideas and content when doing his demo, so I hope to find the time to post in detail about this later.

One of the main points to come out of DemoCampVancouver06 “gaming edition” was that the future of games seems to be “free to play”. This basically means that anybody can grab the game without paying any fees – (via download or some other distribution channel). This begs the question, how do they make their money if the product value is essentially $0.00? The answer is selling premium services as value-add. For example: Say by default every time you die you lose your items. What if you had the option to add “For $2, keep my items when I get killed” – that I agree would be a great way to monetize the game .

This was a great DemoCamp to be at – I’m on the search to find similar stories in Victoria.

DemoCampVictoria01 – Success!

Mark Lise — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:49:49 +0000

Well, what an amazing lineup of people we had and how well did that turn out! Jessica Pryde, Wendy Pryde and Dave Chard at Juliet did an OUTSTANDING job at making DemoCamp one of the – correction – *the* swankiest get together ever put on in our vibrant not-so-little town of Victoria. Dave’s buildings are something to watch for as the kind of development projects he’s doing definitely fit into DemoCamp’s philosophy of bringing a mix of people and businesses together to create vibrancy.

Here’s a pic from Tris’ photos, credit goes to Yule for doing it first on her blog

The presentations that came out where Songbird, BuyLater, SkyscraperPage.com, Flock, Professional Reading Environment, Person to Person Lending, a sensor platform for athletes, and DB programming. Lots of interest, interaction and buzz was generated from the whole event. I don’t think I could have imagined it kicking off any better than that. The crowd was interested and interactive – it’s like you’re all seasoned veterans now!

Tris Hussey, Boris Mann and Yule Heibel have already blogged about the event, so go check out their blogs too (Tris has some photos up as well).

Thanks again to Yule Heibel and Dave Chard – without you there would be no DemoCamp downtown! Thank you so much! I look forward to seeing you all at the next DemoCamp! woo

Community Platforms & Community Harmonization

Mark Lise — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:23:20 +0000

This morning I read a post from David Crow on “Community Platforms“. It got me thinking about our local community, that being Victoria and Vancouver. I have always been a supporter of community platforms and open source, but I’d like to see that go further into the real world. Vancouver has quite a buzz w.r.t. technology and so does Victoria, however here in Victoria you have to go searching for it to find it.

There are lots of user groups here in Vic, but there are little silos here and there and there’s no cohesion or merging of the groups happening. This is where I think DemoCampVictoria can help change. Lets see what happens when we try to bring some of those people together to create new relationships, learn about what others are doing and maybe help contribute to the direction of technology development in Victoria.

Now you’re probably wondering at this point why I mentioned Vancouver as a “local” town. It’s only a 30km trip North of Victoria (that can come with a wide selection of hot and cold entrees), and there are so many human-links between the two cities. Why not try to feed these connections? If you think of it as a platform, it only makes sense if you’re living in Victoria to add the “Vancouver plugin” your ecosystem.

Buzz Buzz around DemoCampVictoria!

Mark Lise — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:04:26 +0000

My appreciation goes out to these folks for helping promote and/or organize DemoCampVictoria – the buzz has been getting louder!

DemoCampVictoria

Mark Lise — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:47:09 +0000

Yay! We have a spot lined up, the date is April 3rd. There is limited seating so sign up as soon as you can. A wait list will be made after we’re set – Add your name to here if you want to attend or become a presenter!

DemoCamp

Mark Lise — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 18:29:11 +0000

So it’s been pretty crazy trying to find a spot downtown – most places have been asking for a lot of $ to rent, flat out “not interested”, or they can’t accommodate enough people (5-10ppl). A lot of businesses seem to concern themselves with things getting stolen/damaged etc. I can see where they’re coming from – yet it’s still frustrating; Victorian businesses should eager to provide venues such as this. It goes towards being more community involved, it’s cheap advertising, it’s being representative of what Victoria is trying to sell itself as – a friendly proactive medium sized town… not to mention, it’s democamp you’re supporting! It makes me want to setup a biz to solely support venues like this!

On the presentation front – lots of interest, a lot of hesitation… there’s nothing to hesitate about people.. it’s new, exciting, and a forum to get some feedback! Remember, even if you’re just in idea phase and can carry on a 3-4 minute conversation about it.. you’re in!

DemoCampVictoria Chapter.

Mark Lise — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:24:55 +0000

I had this idea to bring people together in my town to spice things up a bit – and I found DemoCampVancouver! A few weeks back I decided to go check these guys out and I was pleasantly surprised! It was very cool and I had blogged about it a while back.

Once I saw how interesting their event was I decided to start a chapter in Victoria. I want to bring people together from all different types of industry to make new relationships, new business ideas, new innovation and new everything! It’s time to showcase what Victoria has with respect to tech.

I need to organize space, times, some presenters.. There is lots to be done – If you have an idea you want to share or just want to check out what’s happening in Victoria, come join the group! I’ve set it up on facebook and barcamp so add your name! I will have dates/spaces and all that to figure out in the next few weeks but I will be updating the wiki and group appropriately. Hope to see you there!

Facebook group
Barcamp Wiki

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: democampvictoria democampvancouver democamp

DemocampVancouver05

Mark Lise — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 18:08:53 +0000

Well, my trip to Vancouver for Democamp05 was pretty good I must say. I arrived at Workspace Headquarters fashionably late and piled into the tiny little elevator with 5 other people to head up to the 4th floor. There was some question as to whether we’d make it since the elevator wasn’t really indicating to us that the selection made was accepted (bad UX BAD!). Workspace has a wicked coffee bar as soon as you enter – I think I’ll just sit down here thank you very much!

There was a fair amount of people there, unfortunately all seats were taken so I sat on a desk – which wasn’t too bad, at least I could open up the lappy and twit. The 30 second speeches started and then everyone started voting. Twemes, Localiti (Jason Murphy), Pulse, and Scannerfly were voted in for their talks. Every one of these were interesting:

Twemes: Use global tags in your twits for searching. This was written over a weekend – right on!

Localiti: Facebook Jason for details, but it’s to do with bridging the IM/Voice/Email/TXT/etc gaps into a single UI. He’s looking for a CTO and Biz partner.

Pulse: Cool facebook app that informs you about your latest bands.

Scannerfly: Turn your webcam into a barcode scanner!

Sorry, haven’t got the flickr embedding done yet – head here to check out my camera phone pix. Thank you Boris/Megan for organizing!