Ignite Toronto 1

The first Ignite Toronto went off on Tue 25-Aug-2009 at the Drake Hotel Underground. I was able to shoot a few photos:


All in all, the ignites were enjoyable, although I do wish the ignites had started sooner. There was ample time to drink and discuss in advance, but I'd like time to see all the ignites, and then talk some more afterwards without wishing I were home, asleep.

I'm getting old, I know.

Of particular amusement was when the Creemore Springs tap decided to fail very publicly with a bit of a Beersplosion:

Mashup Arts - Shaun MacDonald - DemoCamp Toronto 21

Shaun MacDonald presented Mashup Arts at DemoCamp Toronto 21 (July 28th, 2009; Velma Rogers Theatre; 333 Bloor Street East):



If you'd like to see the video larger in HD, feel free to click through to YouTube.

MashupArts is essentially rich media e-cards whereby you load videos and photos from the web into your card and then share it, and get others to collaborate with you on the card before sending it to the victim/recipient.

The concept seems sound, although I think there's still a fair ways to go before this is a polished, fully-featured application. There are features that I'd like to see added, and parts of the interface felt like they needed further work, but as long as it continues to improve, this seems like something that has potential to succeed.

Zoocasa, presented by Saul Colt at DemoCamp Toronto 21

Saul Colt presented Zoocasa at DemoCamp Toronto 21 on Wednesday July 28th, 2009 at the Velma Rogers Theatre. Zoocasa is a site to search for real-estate in Canada. They argue they're complementary to other real-estate sites like Realtor.ca, and differentiate themselves by ways to search for houses:



You can click-through to YouTube to see the video in larger form; it's available in HD.

They get their listings from the public web, which means that they have some listings that MLS doesn't have, and don't have all the listings that MLS does have. This is their achilles heel; if MLS data were publicly available, Zoocasa might well be a better choice than realtor.ca, but since the real estate business keeps their listings under lock and key, there's only so far Zoocasa can go.

There was a spirited question period. In particular, an audience-member who felt that Zoocasa needed to consider alternate forms of profit-model. I wasn't capturing questions in order to save battery life, which is a position this presentation made me want to revise.

On a side note, I shot the video pretty closely cropped, which doesn't give iMovie much image stabilization to work with, so it's very shaky-cam; I'll have to shoot it a little wider in the future. A tripod would help, but would probably get in the way of catching both the slides and the video in concert.

DemoCamp Toronto 21: Introduction

DemoCamp Toronto 21 (July 28th, 2009) took place at the Velma Rogers Theatre at 333 Bloor St. Joey DeVilla (@AccordionGuy), David Crow (@davidcrow) and Jay Goldman (@jaygoldman) kicked it off with the initial introductions:



The sessions for the night were:

• Jon Udell, Microsoft, elmcity
• Saul Colt, Zoocasa
• Christine Renaud, ArtAnywhere
• Brian Sharwood, Homestars.com
• Alan Lynse, Cascada Mobile
• Shaun McDonald, Mashup Arts
• Dan Wood, WeGoWeGo
• Ben Vinegar, Guestlistapp.com
• Jason Roks, guiGOOG
  

As well, there slides showing upcoming events:

• Startup Drinks (July 29th)
• WiredWedTO (Aug 12th)
• #HoHOTo (Aug 18th)
• Ignite Toronto (Aug 25th)
• TEDxTO (Sep 10th)
  

And a few job listings:

• Unsyced - Lead Developer (Waterloo)
• FileMobile - Director, Technology & Operations
• Aoulous - Software Developer
• Sericon Technology - Facebook Application Testing
  

Midway through the presentations, there was a short break for pizza, cookies and drinks:

Although I focused on capturing the presentations, I was able to shoot a few photos:


Videos of the presentations to come.

Metro Toronto Fires All breast Writers

Well, last night I read (twitter, Globe and Mail) that Metro Toronto had fired all its staff writers and was going to be using unpaid interns.

This morning, reading a review of Friday the 13th, I found this paragraph, emphasis mine:

There's no mistaking Friday's intentions -- this is definitely for Jason Voorhees fans.  Not only does it overlap the thirteen killings (very clever!) that occur over the film's 97 minutes, but they're ultimately underwhelming.  breasts.  In fact, with very little suspense to speak of, Friday the 13th isn't scary at all ... unless of course, you're a film critic.

I'm wondering -- is this what happens when unpaid interns write your copy, or is an act of vengance in the last words penned by a departing writer?

Toronto Summer: Agile 2008, RubyFringe

Wow - Summer 2008 is going to be a killer Toronto summer for Conferences. We've got:

• Agile 2008: August 4th-8th, the best-known conference on Agile.
• RubyFringe: July 18th-20th. A new conference dedicated to the fringe of Ruby, everything but Ruby on Rails, really. This presumably covers 'waves' and 'merb' and many other things. Just announced.
  

Toronto: High-Turnout for Tech Events?

I was interested to learn that both Joel Spolsky, on the FogBugz World Tour and Mike Chambers at Adobe's On AIR Bus Tour said that their Toronto stops had one of the highest (if not, in fact, the highest) turnouts.

To be fair, Mike Chambers did check the numbers and said that Toronto wasn't the highest turnout, just close.

Still -- this is good news. It means that Toronto's a good place to have technology events, conferences, and the like. If we're willing to turn out en masse to hear vendors pitch their products, imagine how many people would show up for something actually interesting. Although we've got Agile 2007 headed our way next year, I'd like to see more conferences make a showing here.

And, no, NFJS, out by the airport doesn't really count.

At Work

At Work
Originally uploaded by diathesis

I knew I was going to really like this photo when I took it; I'm glad that I still like it after selection and processing.

This was taken at Doors Open in Toronto, on an upper floor of a building in the Distillery district.

The Feedroom

For those of you who haven't had a chance to come visit me at the new office yet ...



Welcome to The Feedroom Toronto, courtesy of my cellphone.

Why So Few Toronto Software Product Companies?

This morning, while reading a blog entry about Pulse by zutubi (via JavaBlogs), I was once again struck by the fact that there are so few software product companies in Toronto. Now, I'm not on the hunt for a job in Australia, so perhaps my perceptions are skewed, but I know a few interesting product companies in Australia even at this distance (zutubi, atlassian, etc.)

And yet, I know so very little about software product companies in Toronto; I know there are a few, but compared to the waves and waves of business / integration software jobs in the Toronto market, these opportunities are practically invisible.

Why is that? What is it about Toronto (or Canada) that seems to result in so few of these startups? Is it that a successful software product born in Toronto is likely to be purchased by a major American firm, and then vanish again? Is it that our entrepreneurs migrate elsewhere (e.g. Silicon Valley?) Do we just have so darned many of the business/integration jobs that people don't bother to start their own companies?

Don't get me wrong -- Toronto's a great place to live and work, but considering that it's software product jobs that really interest me, I just wish there were a few more to choose from.