Came across a post from Alec Saunders about Monday night’s DemoCamp (number 12), and it reminded me that I meant to write about it too. It was at No Regrets in Liberty Village, just down the street from Tucows — where I went to DemoCamp #3 (I think it was) about a year ago on another frigid February night. The place was packed to the rafters, and despite a balky sound system and some cranky Wi-Fi it was a great show.
Alec calls it slam poetry for geeks, and he has a point. He juggled his five BlackBerrys or whatever it was to demo Iotum’s TalkNow, and did a fine job (as befits one of last year’s DEMO gods), and Albert Lai told everyone a bit about how Bubbleshare.com got to where it was and why it decided to be acquired by Toronto’s Kaboose network (and then dropped his laptop on the floor). Will Pate did a demo of Flock, and remained cool as a cucumber even when David Crow’s Mac froze and had to be rebooted, and even when someone asked why Flock didn’t just make Firefox extensions instead of creating a whole new browser.
Dave Humphrey talked about how his students have been helping develop the Mozilla open-source browser code, and we had some updates too — from Scott Brooks and his partner at Conceptshare.com, who risked their lives to drive down from Sudbury, and from my pal Mike McDerment’s Freshbooks.com (which is hiring), as well as from Brent Ashley, who said that he more or less gave up on his Ajax blog-chat app because he realized that “no one really gives a shit about being able to chat on a blog.”
Sacha wandered around taking pictures of everybody so that they could be collected for a DemoCamp index (and because Sacha is terrible with names and faces), Jay told everyone to introduce themselves to someone new, Joey made some bad jokes about David’s heart attack last year and handed out dried mango slices all the way from the Phillipines, and a great time was had by all.