Tech Scene

DemoCamp Toronto 25 started with a brief introduction by David Crow and Joey DeVilla.  Photos, tweets, posts should all be tagged by #dct25 or #democamp.  All funds from DemoCamp Toronto 25 will be contributed to Doctors Without Borders (MSF).  The attendees raised ~2,500, matched on a 4:1 basis by Gurbaksh Chahal, for a total of $12,580.

Gurbaksh Chahal
Gurbaksh kicked off the night with a talk about the entrepreneurial and life lessons he’s learned along the way.  Gurbaksh is a serial entrepreneur (ClickAgents, BlueLithium, gWallet) who has managed to do quite well for himself:

A quick summary of Gurbaksh’s lessons could be:

• The idea just a very small start – all the work that goes into developing your idea into a business is the majority of what makes a business succed.
• Be flexible about your business and ideas; be ready and willing to change course as you’re going.
• Hire the best people you can.
• Don’t make yourself vulnerable by running your business with irreplaceable employees.
• Don’t raise money when you need it – investors sense your weakness.
• Spend wisely; people will only be impressed by your performance, not your furniture.
• You might not start with the confidence you need, but it is necessary and can be learned.  They’re not buying the product, they’re buying you.
• Relationships are fundamentally important.  Don’t burn any bridges; time and performance will fix issues.
• Embrace rejection and grow a thick skin.  You aren’t likely to succeed without being rejected several times.
• Make decisions even if they’re wrong.

Based on the feedback on twitter, I think Gurbaksh’s message was well received.  For myself, there was a lot of overlap with advice I’ve heard from other entrepreneurs, which helps to reinforce the message, but much of it wasn’t new for me.  As well, it wasn’t always easy to decide how to apply two pieces of advice together: If you hire only rockstars, they’re much less likely to be replaceable, and that makes you vulnerable.  Still, he had good anecdotes and spoke well, so I enjoyed the presentation.

SIFE Ryerson
SIFE Ryerson was up next to talk about the programs they offer to help start up businesses:

• Start Me Up Ryerson
• Business Plan Competitions
• Ryerson Angel Network
• Ryerson Digital Media Zone

Intermission
The intermission had no food this session; all proceeds were donated to MSF directly.  This meant a few people were hungry, but there was a Tim Horton’s booth outside that solved that problem for those who needed it.  During the break, there was a lot of talking, although a fair number of people fired up their phones and laptops as well:

Kontagent: Albert Lai
Serial entrepreneur of Bubbleshare, Kontagent.  Kontagent does social analytics to help social applications “engineer virality.”  He talked briefly about the social gaming market and where the opportunities are.

There was a Q&A section that followed, and added some interesting points:

• If you have an idea for a social game, compare your idea to the top contenders on AppData.  If your idea is close to one of these, you’re less likely to do well.
• The common development platforms for facebook games are PHP and Ruby on Rails.
• It’s a competitive market with a lot of copying and derivation.

Albert also passed a bucket for further donations for haiti, which he offered to at least triple.  The bucket looked like it was pretty full when it came by, so I’ll be interested to hear how much additional money was raised.

Kontagent is hiring.

Scenecaster: Mark Zohar
Mark  Zohar presented My 3D Cards, which offers e-cards or greeting cards in 3D format.  It’s a flash-based 3D-viewer on the client with a cloud-based back-end using AWS/EC2/S3 and some server-side rendering from Nvidia.

It’s not something I’ve seen anyone else do, and it does offer a more immersive environment for a greeting card, although I’m not certain that people are looking for greater immersion.  I’m curious if this is something that people pick up and start using.

Tall Tree Games: Greg Thomson
Greg Thomson presented FishWorld, their social aquarium game.  Like many social games, this has a chore-based element (feed fish, clean tank) and a decorative element (themed decorations, which you can buy with in-game and real currency), as well as social/viral elements.  My flip batteries died during the Q&A.  Fish World didn’t leap out at me as something I wanted to play or write, but it was interesting to hear from a little more about building facebook games, and this is one of the more common kinds of Facebook games, so it’s fairly representative.

Realm of Empires: Greg Balajewicz
Greg presented Realm of Empires, another Facebook game.   They’re targeting more of male, strategy-oriented market, rather than the more female-dominated casual gaming market.  They grew well when they were listed as facebook-verified, although the growth has slowed and they’re looking for ways to increase growth further.  Facebook seemed to be having technical difficulties, so there wasn’t much of a demo in this case. This was not a very typical facebook game, although I’ve seen this style of game on the web.  At this point, I think some of the audience was starting to tire of the facebook application theme; I started to hear some comments around this presentation.

Social Graph Studios: Oz Solomon
Another company that’s working with facebook-enabled social applications.  These are social applications rather than social games.  They’ve built “My Year in Statuses” and “My Year in Photos”.  I managed to run out of capacity on the flip as this demo was coming up, so I wasn’t able to capture this demo.

They reached 11M users in three weeks, and at peak generated 45 collages per second on Facebook.  ”My Year in Status” was the 3rd-fastest growing facebook app in the week of 21-Dec-2009.  These two applications were launched in about four weeks worth of work.  These are ’seasonal’ applications as opposed to their long-term stable app, Status Shuffle.

Social Graph Studios is hiring.

ShinyAds: Roy Pereira
Roy presented Shiny Ads, a platform for allowing web publishers to automate ad sales on their website using the Shiny Ads platform existing ad servers, custom pricing models.  This offers more control and, he claims, better revenue.  I haven’t spent much time looking at internet ad models, so I’ll have to take his word for it.  If he can make a dent in this market, the revenue for this would be significant.  I heard a few positive comments in person after the session, so I think this was well-received.

Media
As is usual, I recorded the videos on my flip HD.  I’ll be making these available as I have a chance to do the post-processing.  I’m also using a tripod this time around, which is good and bad.  There’s far less camera shake, and it’s easier on my arms, but it’s easier to forget that the subject isn’t in the frame.  ;)

There was a serious video camera being used at various points throughout the night; I don’t know if there’s any chance of its video being made available.  Also, Joey DeVilla was capturing some video at one point:

I also captured the photos seen above; you can see them in larger form on Flickr (set, slideshow).