Startup Weekend Edmonton is ready to fly June 25-27th in the Art Gallery in Enterprise Square.  Startup Weekend brings together developers, designers, marketers, inventors, and anyone else interested in ideas and startups to see what they can build in 54 hours. It’s an awesome opportunity to meet and work with people on new ideas and technologies and to turn a thought into reality.  Startup Weekends have been run all over the world (from San Francisco to Sydney to Paris) and have been an amazing way to connect people in their own communities, as well as to other Startup Weekend alumni around the world.  Hosted by Startup Edmonton, Startup Weekend is going to be an amazing time bringing the startup community together to see what can be built in a weekend.

You can find out more about Startup Weekend here, tickets are $99 and include food and beverages for the weekend and a Startup Weekend t-shirt – register for Startup Weekend here.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone out and excited about the cool things that we going to be able to build and show the world.  See you on the 25th!

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

Tonight was our tenth DemoCamp here in Edmonton if you can believe it, and we’re still going strong! Our last DemoCamp was a little over two months ago, so it was definitely time for the community to once again get together. Cam asked the audience for a show of hands to find out who was new to DemoCamp, and a surprising number had never attended before. It’s fantastic that more and more people are finding out about the event, and are coming to support local entrepreneurs. Thanks everyone – keep it up!

Before and after tonight’s demos.

We had five demos this evening:

• Dave Bodnarchuk from EventIQ started things off by showing us InviteRight. He spent most of the demo showing the slick table organization features of the tool. Event organizers or venue managers can arrange registrations by table visually, using a simple drag & drop interface, kind of like seat selection on the airlines. They’re currently working with McNally and Spruce Grove high schools to test.
• Our next presenter was Kent Tong from eQube. He started by explaining that eQube plays in the gaming sector – gambling, bingo, etc., not video games! Kent focused on something called Lil’ Gecko, which is a mobile gaming device rented to casinos and other customers, but they also offer a complete end-to-end solution. They’re trying to come up with games (casual things like Bejeweled) that get the average person visiting casinos again.
• Next up was Brian MacKay from Tooq, a tool focused on the contractor and small business sector. Currently a few weeks away from beta, Tooq right now helps you create and manage invoices. Eventually Brian and his team hope to create a job market based around the people using Tooq for invoices, estimates, and other tasks.
• Fourth tonight was Dave Chan from pureLIGHT. He demonstrated preLIGHT and pureLIGHT, applications his team has written to help designers light scenes. The key difference is efficiency – pureLIGHT produces the same kind of quality as similar solutions, but with significantly improved workflow and on-the-fly tweaking (not to mention a far lower cost). I wrote about the other side of the company, 3DI, back in December.
• Our final presenter of the evening was David Quail, who showed us Attassa. Reminiscent of Xobni, Attassa is focused on improving organization and context in email. You can view messages by conversation, and can see a list of related people for any given thread. You can also find attachments really easily. Attassa works with Outlook and the iPhone, and was developed in just two months!

All of the demos were quite well done tonight, with only minor hiccups along the way. Having said that, I’m not sure that people were buzzing as much about the demos at RATT as at past events. I think my demo of the night goes to Dave Bodnarchuk. Though he ran out of time, the app looks good and he’s already got customers signed up, so that’s always a positive! I also really liked Attassa, and I think it has great potential.

Here are some upcoming tech events to watch for:

• Social Web Meetup on February 1
• Lightning Thoughts on February 2
• MediaCamp Meeting on February 3
• Pecha Kucha Night 6 on February 4

Stay tuned to Startup Edmonton and GameCamp Edmonton for updates on their events too! You can always see the latest tech events at ShareEdmonton.

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight. See you at DemoCampEdmonton11!

Welcome to Startup Edmonton and our new website! We’re an experienced and connected team of young entrepreneurs passionate about growing a world-class tech startup community in our hometown. We’ve been involved in a number of other next gen initiatives in town including DemoCamp and artsScene Edmonton, so we’re pulling together our expertise and networks to put on great events aimed at connecting entrepreneurs, investors and developers. We believe that Edmonton possesses many of the key elements for a great startup ecosystem. But we think we need better ways to harness our collective intellectual capital and transform it into successful and sustainable next gen companies. That’s where we hope Startup Edmonton will come in. Stay tuned over the coming months for more details! In the meantime, be sure to sign up to our mailing list, follow us on Twitter, and friend us on Facebook!

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

I feel like a broken record, but I really think tonight was our largest crowd ever for DemoCamp! It’s just amazing to see so many people who care about the technology industry and local entrepreneurs come out to show their support, learn something, and connect with one another. Kudos to everyone who continues to help make DemoCamp the fantastic event it has become by showing up and spreading the word! Special shout out tonight to NAIT’s Digital and Interactive Media Design (DIMD) group – I understand there were a couple dozen students in attendance!

As usual, we had six demos:

• Victor Rubba from CrazedCoders got things started by demoing a side project – an iPhone game called Pik’s Revenge. It’ll appear in the App Store soon for $1.99, and is the first in a series of roughly four chapters. It includes 4 movies, 8 comics, and 2-5 hours of gameplay. I loved Victor’s demo because there was no talking for the first half, just gameplay being demoed.
• Next up was Reg Cheramy and Scott Montgomerie who demoed their new Facebook app called Book That Bet. Built simply to “scratch an itch”, the app lets you track wagers with your friends, making use of the social graph on Facebook. It’s written in Ruby on Rails and is intentionally simple to start. Reg and Scott had a good demo, but actually received more love for their other app, OneClap.
• Third tonight was Logan Foster who demoed a Kongregate game called Team Battle. It’s a Flash-based, real-time fighting game with some interesting graphics creation (3D models to 2D sprites). The intent is not to create a World of Warcraft competitor, but rather a game to play in your spare time.
• Next up was Andrew Czarnietzki from 3D Interactive Inc. or 3DI. He demoed a really interesting simulation built for Caterpillar. Powered by the Unreal engine, Andrew described the simulator as a “serious game” – basically they bring game technology to the business world. The level of detail in the simulator was just incredible. Andrew did a good job of balancing the demo part with the talking part.
• Fifth tonight was Colin Bramm who demoed SelfChecker, an online quiz authoring tool. The idea is to make it easy for teachers to create questions that can be shared with students via a simple link. Students take the test and see feedback immediately.
• Last but not least was Ken Bautista who demoed his 2009 Venture Prize award winning solution called CIE: See Your Own Proof. An online community for kids, CIE hosts missions and other activities, and includes a whole social networking element as well. Interestingly, CIE combines the online and offline world with “field missions” in which kids visit real museums to learn and explore. The beta starts next week!

Most of the demos tonight were for projects that have been in the works for quite some time. I think it’s safe to say that the game demos did not go as well as expected. It turns out that demoing a game is harder than it sounds, particularly because you only get ten minutes! I think it was Graham who said something like “if you can’t play the game, then it had better be entertaining to watch with explosions or something!” I think I agree – the game demos just weren’t as exciting as everyone hoped. The fact that we had multiple game demos probably didn’t help.

Photos taken as folks were still coming in. It filled up even more!

I think Ken’s demo was definitely a favorite, as people seemed really excited about CIE. The demo of the night has to go to Andrew though, for offering us a peek at some really awesome technology and for keeping the demo entertaining, informative, and on time.

There were a few announcements made this evening:

• In case you missed it, the City is running a pilot called Leveraging Technical Expertise Locally. You can read my previous coverage here.
• On Saturday the City is hosting an Open Data Workshop. Come learn about open data and help the concept move forward in Edmonton! Register here.
• Coming up next Friday and Saturday is the iPhone Dev School.
• And coming soon – Startup Edmonton. Look for an early 2010 launch and some really cool stuff for the local community.
• Also coming soon – GamesCamp Edmonton, a much better venue for game demos!
• You can stay up-to-date on the latest local technology events at ShareEdmonton.

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight. Thanks also to Eric and the Free-Wifi project for getting everyone connected.

See you at DemoCampEdmonton10!

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

I almost can’t believe our last DemoCamp was so long ago! I think it’s safe to say that DemoCampEdmonton8 was worth the wait, however. We had probably our largest crowd ever – the entire room at ETLC was packed. I’m not sure the pictures do it justice! We also had a great set of demos – well done to all the presenters this evening, everyone really brought their ‘A’ game.

Here are the six demos we had tonight:

• First up was Dub5, demoing an application they built for the Student Health Initiative for the Needs of Edmonton (SHINE). Essentially it is a scheduling application that solves the common problem of assigning volunteer shifts and dealing with cancellations and other issues. Very slick interface, which was a trend for the evening.
• Next up was Skeptographers, a project of the Edmonton Skeptics. The application is best described as a collaborative podcast. Anyone can submit a segment for inclusion in the next podcast, and the community can comment and vote on each segment. Really cool stuff.
• Third was an iPhone app called MyStops. While Google Maps is great at giving you transit directions from one point to another, it sucks at repeat routes. MyStops lets you save your usual routes, so that you have easy access to bus and LRT schedules. The cool thing about it is that it uses the ETS Google Transit data that was released back in May. The app will work with both iPhones and iPods.
• Fourth was Yardstick Software. The product they demoed is called Yardstick Measure and is an online tool that enables anyone to quickly generate a professional testing site. Very slick UI and focused feature set, whereas its sister products (ProTraining & ProExams) are much more complex and feature-rich.
• Fifth was Digital Media Jobs, a job board for individuals and organizations in the digital media space. Unlike other job boards, the goal with DMJ is to help the local community get connected with one another. Again, DMJ featured a very clean UI.
• Last but not least was one of the most interesting demos we’ve ever had at DemoCamp in Edmonton: ReJoyCE from Rehabtronics. It’s a combination software-hardware solution to help rehabilitate people suffering from neurological impairments. They’ve successfully gone through a number of clinical trials and are looking to commercialize. Patients play a number of “games” that were designed with the help of therapists. Truly amazing stuff.

All of the demos were so great, it’s hard to pick a favorite. I think ReJoyCE is fascinating because of the impact it will have on the lives of so many people (and the fact that it is backed up by real medical research). I’m really happy we got to see some homegrown technology from the health sector. My favorite was probably MyStops, however. It’s something I’d use every day, and for 99 cents, I think plenty of other Edmontonians will as well. It’s also a great example of what can be done with open data. The team behind it plan to add support for the other cities that publish Google Transit data as well.

Fortunately, no one showed us their registration page tonight. I think that contributed to the overall quality of tonight’s demos.

A couple of announcements about upcoming events:

• Twestival is happening Thursday, September 10th! Come help us support the Youth Emergency Shelter Society!
• Next Thursday, September 17th, ENTS is holding their grand opening!
• Edmonton Code Camp is taking place on Saturday, September 19th.
• FITC Edmonton is taking place on October 17th and 18th.

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight. See you at DemoCampEdmonton9!

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

Yesterday was the first really beautiful day of the summer here in Edmonton, with temperatures near 30 degrees and sun all day long. It was also the day we held BarCampEdmonton2, at the World Trade Centre downtown. The weather probably had an impact on the attendance, because we had less people than anticipated (around 80). Despite that however, I’d say the event was still a big success! It was another demonstration of the fantastic tech community we have in Edmonton.

We had three tracks each with 20 minute timeslots for sessions followed by 10 minute breaks. In true unconference-style, we started by having everyone who wanted to lead a discussion or deliver a presentation put their topic and name on a sticky note. Reg then arranged them all on the schedule.

I ended up with two timeslots. First thing in the morning, where I talked for a bit about Foundations for an Open Edmonton and led an interesting discussion about open cities, and second at 2pm, where I talked about Edmonton Transit’s recent Data for Developers announcement. Some of the other sessions included: The Perfect User Experience by Peter, New Interfaces in Visual Search Refinement by Reg, How To Not Raise VC $ by Shaun, VOIP+SIP: A Primer by Slepp, Chocolate Monkey Heads by Chris, and Licensing Tech from Universities by Brant. Of course, lunch time and the many breaks throughout the day provided lots of opportunities for ad hoc discussion, and that’s really what BarCamp is all about!

Perhaps the session I was most looking forward to was the one by Rob Davy and his colleagues from ENTS, the Edmonton New Technology Society. They’re working to create a “collaborative and social technology workspace” here in the city, akin to hackerspaces and collaborative workspaces in other cities. I wrote about Workspace in Vancouver last fall, and wondered why Edmonton didn’t have something similar. Now we will! I’m really excited about it. You can visit ENTS tonight from 6-7pm at 10575 114th Street for an open house.

Maybe we’ll do the next BarCamp in the winter, when it’s cold outside and everyone will want to come inside! Before that however, is a new event called UX Camp, taking place on July 18th from 9am to 5pm at MacEwan.

Thanks again to sponsors TEC Edmonton, iNovia Capital, and Smibs, and to everyone who came out to BarCamp yesterday! You can see the rest of my photos here.

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

Another successful DemoCamp is in the books! Tonight was our seventh here in Edmonton. I didn’t actually count the attendance this time, but I’d say it was a bit less than DCE6. Still a strong turnout and some great demos. Tonight we did something new as well – a “hack” demo. The idea is to show one really rough project at each event. Reg and Sean started things off with TwitClipper, a bookmarklet service to tweet highlighted text via Twitter’s OAuth API. Impressively, it was built on the 3-hour drive down to Calgary for their last DemoCamp!

We had five demos tonight:

• Chris Olsen showed us LeagueSmart, a recreational sports league management application. It’s unique in that it attempts to get team admins and players involved in addition to the league organizers.
• James Matsuba showed us IdleTime, a service that aims to help you make money with your spare time. It’s like Monster.com for part-time and one-off jobs. You can both search for and post jobs.
• Shawn Abbott showed us one of his portfolio companies, Tynt. They have demoed before, but now have a new direction and app called Tracer. It lets you see what people are copying and pasting from your site.
• Andre Prefontaine showed us MapKat, a map-based service that lets you create a diary and slideshow of your trips and adventures.
• Sean Healy and Joel Jackson showed us SnackPanda, or tried to. They had a bunch of technical issues, but essentially it’s an online ordering system for restaurants that do delivery.

The general feeling I got from talking to people afterward was that all the demos were fairly impressive. The favorite seemed to be Tynt, probably because of their slick “copy/paste heat map” which shows you the sections of text on your website that were copied the most. I thought IdleTime looked great too, a very polished UI.

Tweet of the night definitely goes to Graham Batty, who said:

Why does everyone always want to show us their signup page? They’re all the same. #democampyeg

So true. Perhaps we’ll have to incorporate that into the unofficial DemoCamp rules!

Two event announcements tonight: TransitCampEdmonton, taking place on May 30th, and BarCampEdmonton2, taking place on June 13th. Stay tuned for details on both of those!

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight. See you at the next event!

UPDATE: Rob Davy posted some videos of the evening here. Thanks Rob!

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

Last night was our sixth DemoCamp here in Edmonton, and I think it was probably our best yet. We had around 140 people in attendance, which isn’t much different than DCE4 but it somehow seemed bigger. Maybe it was all the cameras and video cameras? We had Peter Urban and the Smibs TV team record all the demos – watch for the video there soon. I was also really surprised that so many people had never been to DemoCamp before. We’re definitely reaching new people, and I think that’s great!

We had five demos:

• I showed the first little bit of ShareEdmonton, and EdmontonTechScene. It wasn’t the best demo in the world, but it wasn’t bad for having just two days :)
• Graham Batty showed us bittablog, an interesting microblogging service that he recently cooked up.
• Ryan Leland showed his unique take on social networking – you-vs-me. It was a definite crowd pleaser thanks to the humorous topics like Cougar-vs-Bear. You can use the democamp invite code to check it out.
• Mark Matichuk showed us Clinitrust, a secure messaging platform for medical professionals.
• Our final demo was Peter Urban and Paul Bellows, who showed us their new joint venture (between Smibs and Yellow Pencil). It’s a tool to help move content from one CMS to another.

The general consensus afterward was that Peter & Paul’s was the demo of the night. Though they did a little too much talking in my opinion, the product is definitely intriguing. It’s not hard to see that there’s a big market for what they are doing. It’ll be a time saver, indeed. Hopefully we’ll get to see more of it soon.

See what I mean about the tripods and cameras? After the demos almost everyone wandered over to RATT (Room At The Top) in the Students’ Union Building. A little too much drinking and karaoke ensued, but it was a fun time!

Twitter featured more prominently this time at DemoCamp. We had TwitterFall up on the big screen before we got started, and that encouraged lots of people to start tweeting. Soon after the demos started, we broke into the top ten trending topics at Twitter Search, and eventually rose as high as #7. Very cool!

Don’t miss Walter & Alain’s great list, 10 things I liked about DemoCamp Edmonton 6. Brittney also has a funny post of fun facts about DemoCamp Edmonton 6. Also, Cam and I did an interview with The Gateway, who wrote about DemoCamp and IDEAfest today.

I can’t wait until DCE7! Thanks to everyone who came out last night. If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

Tonight we held our first DemoCamp of 2009, once again in ETLC at the University of Alberta. Despite some cold weather, slick roads, and an Oilers game (featuring the return of Mats Sundin) we still had at least 75 people in attendance tonight at DemoCampEdmonton5. A great way to start the new year!

We had five demos tonight:

• Randy Troppmann showed us RunningMap.com, an online tool for running enthusiasts to track and share routes. Users can map a route, view elevation, add photos and other points of interest, and more.
• Mark Donovan from Titan Gaming Inc. showed us Titan Strike, a social networking platform for games. It features team and guild management, a built-in awards system, and tournaments. The idea is to have game publishers use Titan to build an online community around their games.
• Timo Ewalds of Nexopia fame showed us one of his side projects – artificial intelligence for the game Pentago. It was without a doubt the most technical demo we’ve ever had, but it was fascinating to hear Timo describe everything he had to do to get it working well.
• Victor Rubba from CrazedCoders showed us the UI they designed for the new Linksys MediaHub, just announced today at CES. It’s a Flash interface unlike anything you’ve ever seen before on a Linksys device.
• Matt Skopyk showed us his Seizure Violin. It’s hard to describe in text, but essentially he’s using instruments and computers together to manipulate electronic music. Very cool stuff.

Just like last time, all of the demos went very well and looked very slick.

I think my “demo of the night” goes to CrazedCoders, with Matt Skopyk very close behind. I’m very impressed that a local company designed the new interface for a mainstream Linksys device (photo here and here), and will be revamping the interface for their line of routers as well. Engadget said in their post about the device, “we’ll see how that interface runs in person later this week.” How cool is it that we got to see the interface directly from the developers tonight here in Edmonton?! More than that, the interface looks amazing. They’ve really done an amazing job. As for Matt’s demo – it was just plain cool. I love seeing the interesting things that people are up to, and the music and lights was definitely a crowd pleaser. You can watch it here (audio is pretty quiet, sorry):

For more on the demos, check out Twitter where I posted live updates from the event. Afterward we again converged at The Windsor Pub to continue chatting, meeting one another, and occasionally watch the hockey game. It was absolutely packed!

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight! If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

Originally posted at MasterMaq’s Blog.

Tonight was without a doubt our best DemoCamp ever here in Edmonton. With six fairly solid demos, nearly 150 people in attendance, and no technical glitches in sight, it’ll be hard to top DemoCampEdmonton4 but we’re certainly going to try! It’s just amazing to see the community grow like this – thanks to everyone who came out.

Tonight we had six demos:

• Sean from Orange Door Idealab showed us Surveyor, a mobile tool for conducting surveys using the iPhone or iPod touch.
• Reg showed us Edistorm, a social brainstorming platform.
• Brady showed us ElectionBuddy, a service that helps you run polls and elections via email.
• Aaron came all the way from Regina to show us The History Books, a sort of social networking site.
• Sam showed us PureInbox, an online email management system.
• Grant Skinner showed us a bunch of Flash projects, including Adobe Kuler.

It wasn’t planned at all, but all of the products that were demoed tonight seemed really polished. The interfaces were all slick and professional looking!

I think my “demo of the night” goes to ODIL’s Surveyor. I really like the interface, and the application itself seems pretty solid for something so early-stage. ElectionBuddy and Edistorm also had great demos, and have lots of potential. I think PureInbox could have been a great demo, but unfortunately we didn’t get to see much of the app itself. The History Books was entertaining, but as I said on Twitter, it seemed like something that came out of a few late night domain name purchases. Grant did a wicked presentation, showing us eight different projects that his Flash design firm has been involved with. He was definitely the most captivating presenter.

Tonight was also the first public announcement for Edmonton Code Camp! It’s going to take place on Saturday, November 29th at the MacEwan campus downtown. You can find more information here, and the domain will be http://www.edmontoncodecamp.com (working through some DNS issues currently). We’ll share more details soon.

The venue worked well again this time, and once again I had Free Wifi going (though it could have been a bit more reliable). I live-twittered the demos, which you can find at Twitter Search along with updates from others in attendance.

I think lots of people like DemoCamp just for the networking opportunity afterward, and again we had a full house at The Windsor Pub. Was great to see a bunch of new faces in the crowd too! Thanks to Smibs for sponsoring tonight’s event.

If you’d like to be notified about future DemoCamp and BarCamp events in Edmonton, sign up for the mailing list here.

See you at DemoCampEdmonton5!