Tickets – http://launchparty2.eventbrite.com/
Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=165957523423993&index=1
Email – info@startupedmonton.com

Startup Edmonton is holding its’ second Launch Party at the Enterprise Square Art Gallery (10230 Jasper Avenue) next Wednesday, November 17. We had the opportunity to get a sneak peak at the companies that will be launching next week at the event. We asked each company to give their “elevator pitch”. Here is what they had to say.

Parade

Photography and visual art are amazing mediums. They immediately communicate stories, share emotions and inspire ideas. But sometimes it’s hard to get your work out to an audience, especially online. The internet is a big place, and building a website can be a daunting task.

That’s where Parade comes in. We wanted to help spread the great stories and inspiring ideas, so we created an affordable product with great designs that allows you to instantly get your work online and easily manage your website, anytime anywhere… so your can spend your time doing what you do best: creating more for us to see.

Fluik

Fluik Entertainment is an Edmonton-based game developer focused on iPad and iPhone projects with broad appeal. Fluik’s games have been downloaded more than 750,000 times in the iTunes App Store in the past six months, and its recent title, Will it Fly?, reached the top 5 games in the UK, Canada, Germany and Taiwan. The company is gearing up for the launch of Airport Madness Challenge Free and has several other development projects in the pipeline.

Tooq

myTooq.com offers online invoicing that helps the zero to ten employee business track their income while issuing professional looking invoices using a no-contract monthly subscription, removing the hassles and complications of using installed DIY accounting packages.

TestFlight

TestFlight helps app developers run a better beta campaign. Developers upload their betas, testers are notified, they install the app on the fly with out connecting to iTunes. Developers can track their testers feedback and activity. Developers can spend less time helping their testers and more time building great apps.

Appboy

Appboy is a social discovery platform for mobile applications. With over 350,000 apps available for mobile devices, finding the next one you’ll use is becoming increasingly difficult. Appboy provides a platform for discovery new applications through connections with other mobile users in the community.

Visimonde

Visimonde is a virtual world designer, developer, and service provider. We specialize in the creation of online games and virtual worlds for the purposes of engaging, entertaining, and educating our players and delivering value to our partners. Our mandate is to leverage the power of online communities to connect people with people, companies with customers, teams with players, and organizations with members.

Robot Rythmn

Robot Rhythm targets restaurants/bars/shops with the aim of providing them a better selection of music and allows the customer to interact with their music. It could be thought of as a Jukebox 2.0 allowing customers to vote on music they would like to hear. We provide this information to the locations so they can better tailor their musical brand to fit the demands of their customers and staff. Music also has a heavy influence on the way a brand is perceived. With experience in both music and the hospitality industry we can help clients realize this potential.

About Launch Party:

Founded by local entrepreneurs, Launch Party Edmonton 2 isn’t your typical networking or tech event. No formal presentations, no panels. It’s all about giving you the opportunity to meet our city’s brightest entrepreneurs and developers, demo their products, and celebrate everything that our startup community has to offer. And do it in a way that’s creative and interesting, celebrating with drinks, demos, and DJs to set the mood. Creatives, entrepreneurs, investors, bloggers, consumers – all are welcome to Launch Party Edmonton!

This post originally appeared on TechVibes.

At the end of September we held our twelfth DemoCamp in Edmonton. We changed up the venue this time but decided to stay on the University of Alberta campus, so instead of the familiar ETLC we found ourselves at the Telus Centre. To me the vibe in the room felt different, like there was less energy, and it actually seemed like there were less people because it was a bigger room. It’s amazing how the layout of the room can have such an impact.

We had four short demos tonight, from some of the winners of the Apps4Edmonton competition:

• Eugene showed us Statistics Edmonton, which lets you easily look at demographics and other information on a map.
• Ben showed us Alertzy, which can send you a text or email notification when it is time for garbage pickup where you live!
• Mitch showed us Diner Inspect, which lets you look at health inspects for restaurants in your neighbourhood.
• Chris showed us YEG Live, which aggregates music events in Edmonton and does e-ticketing as well.

We also had five regular demos:

• Chad Smith from Hybrid Forge kicked things off by demoing TRACpac for iPhone, an iPhone application that lets users search the combined catalogue of more than 150 libraries. He also demoed an iPad app that offers the same functionality but with a different interface. The apps looked great, and I love that they use a variety of 3rd party APIs to pull in data.
• Jas Panesar showed us an app he had built for clients to deal with managing warranties. We didn’t get to see too much of it, but it seemed to have some solid workflow behind it. And certainly as a customer, making my interactions with warranties better is a good thing.
• Next up was David Nedohin and Kieron Quigley from Statusfirm. They demoed Core Catalyst, a CMS tool targeted at government, enterprise, and other large organizations. It’s actually the platform that is powering the City of Edmonton’s election webcasts.
• Fourth tonight was Joel Adria and Yuri Delanghe, university students who built Bearbook which is a Facebook app that makes it easy for students to share their timetables with other students, and to find common breaks. Joel said they were inspired by Bearscat and currently have 3700 students using the app (half of which have uploaded their schedules).
• Last but not least was Trystan Kosmynka and Colin Humber. They showed TestFlight, a beta testing management platform for developers targeting the iOS platform. It fills a big gap that Apple developers face, and does it without iTunes, cables, or jailbreaking.

You can see all the presenters on Twitter here.

Overall, I’d say my favorite demo was probably Bearbook (though I also really liked the TRACpac app that Chad showed). I think a lot of other people in the room enjoyed Bearbook as well, feeling that Joel and Yuri brought some of the old-school-DemoCamp back. And I love that Joel was more than happy to respond to questions about new features with “we wanted to keep it simple.”

I think the most popular demo was without a doubt TestFlight. I’m not an iOS developer, but a lot of people in the room were, and they seemed to be salivating at the solution that Trystan and Colin showed. I also love that they tackled a real problem, and solved a major pain point. TestFlight isn’t just cool tech, it will actually have a really positive impact on the lives of iOS app developers and their testers.

We definitely had some issues tonight. Internet connectivity was a problem, due in part to us being on the U of A campus I think. We need to get that figured out. A lot of our demos tonight used iPhones or iPads, so we made use of the camera display. It worked well enough but the constant switching of video cables did get somewhat annoying.

The after-party tonight was awesome! The entire top floor of Original Joes was packed. I’m sure some people skipped or couldn’t make the demos and just came for beer, which is fine! It was a good time.

There were a few announcements tonight:

• The next BarCamp is tentatively scheduled for October 23.
• The next Launch Party is tentatively scheduled for November 17.
• There are a bunch of other tech events coming up! I’ve got them listed at ShareEdmonton.

Stay tuned to Startup Edmonton for updates. You can see a few more photos from the evening here.

Thanks to everyone who came out tonight. See you at DemoCampEdmonton13!

This post originally appeared at MasterMaq’s Blog.

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!