Before too much time has gone by, I wanted to write something about DemoCamp Toronto, which was held on Monday in the offices of Tucows, a domain registrar and blog software provider run by my friend Elliot Noss. Organized by David Crow, it was a fun event attended by about 100 people as far as I could tell. There were six presentations (including one from Blogware), each of which lasted about 20 minutes with a demo and questions.
Brent Ashley presented a chat application for blogs that he developed a while ago called (what else) BlogChat, a group from the University of Toronto presented a wiki-style software development tool called Dr. Project, OpenBlue presented an online shopping platform for jewellers, and Geoff Whittington demonstrated a local job/social networking site called Local Guru.
But for me the standout of the night was Nuvvo, an online learning platform developed by John Philip Green, his wife Malgosia and a small team. Nuvvo provides everything you need to start offering an online course in something – such as “Hindustanic music for the Western listener.” You can create a course in minutes, send and receive messages, upload files and Nuvvo provides an online payment system as well. There is a free tier, and then for-pay tiers will be coming soon with extra features.
All in all, I had a great time watching the presentations and listening to the questions along with my friends Rob Hyndman and Mike McDerment, and enjoyed the discussions over beers afterwards as well. Nice job, David.