Bootup Labs Blog

Kudos to Mark Lise for organizing a succesful first DemoCampVictoria. Lots of excited post coverage of the evening: Mark, Yule, Tris, TechVibes – I think this was a great spring board for future meetups. My favourite quote from the evening was from Gels Saby, who said at the beginning of her talk “I wasn’t going to present, but I got excited about my project, so I wanted to share it with you”. Great stuff, this is exactly the kind of reaction that DemoCamps are meant to engender.

I haven’t been back over to Victoria in quite some time, so I was amazed by all the activity. Sure, the University of Victoria is my alma mater, and I know that it spreads co-op students everywhere – much like Waterloo – but after leaving, I certainly wasn’t in touch with the technology industry there. It turns out that tech is the #1 / #2 industry in Victoria, along with tourism.

The Juliet Presentation Center, where the event was hosted, definitely also deserves mention. This is for a new “Vancouver style” condo development in downtown Victoria. In general, there seemed to be consensus that holding the event downtown was a critical factor. Hmmm…a link between property developers and technology workers? Definitely something to explore.

I felt like it was a really successful trip for me: I got to meet a bunch of people doing cool things in Victoria, and then ended up in a couple of longer discussions – one with the crew from Flock (thoughts on the social graph for every website on my personal site) and Yule on Placeblogger-like functionality for Victoria.

Photos of the event can be seen in Tris Hussey’s photostream, and I did a live interview using Utterz.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on the scene in Victoria, and encouraging cross pollination in both directions with Vancouver. For that matter, Seattle is pretty close as well…

P.S. The next event in Vancouver is this Thursday, April 10th – DemoCampVancouver06: Gaming Edition.

I’m finally getting around to do the official posting of the date and topic of DemoCampVancouver06. As I had previously announced, we’re going to do things a little differently this time: the evening will have a theme, which is Gaming.

We’ve always said that we want to unite and mix the different “tribes” that we have around technology in Vancouver with our DemoCamp events, so I’m looking forward to seeing more of the gaming tribe. I know a bit about gaming, but I also know that I have much more to learn about this industry.

I’ve already got two speakers signed up:

• Indie Game Development with Dustin Sacks of SillySoft
• iPhone Game Development with Parveen Kaler (Parveen already beat me to the punch and posted about DemoCampVancouver06 as well as linking his presentation on the wiki page.

I’ve got an email contact in to someone with knowledge about developing for XBox Live Arcade (aka XBLA), so theoretically I have one slot left available. Anyone that wants to present on a topic / idea/ demo / whatever related to gaming, please contact me directly at democampvancouver@bootuplabs.com.

Update: that was quick! Jamie Cheng from Klei Entertainment is in. You may know Klei from their games Eets or N+. Jamie also happens to be an expert in AI. Woo hoo…I bet we could fill multiple DemoCamps just with some of the questions that I have for these guys…

As Parveen mentions on his post, I had originally been thinking that we could get a presenter about Sun’s Project Darkstar, but the timing actually overlaps with the Sun Labs Open House (which I’ll be attending at least one day of as well) – as of now, I’m not sure if I can get someone in on short notice.

Lastly, Megan Cole is going to help with BattleDecks. Have decks to submit? Send them along!

So, thanks again to our venue sponsors WorkSpace for the space at Suite 400, 21 Water Street. We’ll see you on April 10th, 2008, at 5:30pm, and please spread the word most especially to anyone in the gaming community so they can see what DemoCampVancouver is all about. See also: Upcoming, Facebook event.

P.S. don’t forget, April 3rd is the first DemoCampVictoria. I’m going to try and make it over for the first event and meet some more Victoria-based entreprenuers.

Tech Investing 2.0: DemoCamps, Incubators, and Launch Parties