StartupCampWaterloo and more

StartupCamp Waterloo was last night. I was surprised at the crowd, a number of people came up from Guelph and Toronto, including Mr Toronto DemoCamp.

First up was Ali Asaria (of well.ca), whose honest presentation about his own abilities and knowledge was fantastic. I love when people are real, rather than some fake presentable version of themselves. Ali’s stories of dealing with VCs were great.

This Camp was well-sponsored, which was great. Nothing beats free food. Except maybe the awesome door prize I won, thanks to Tech Capital Partners. I’ve been hearing good things about them (especially their ability to make the right investment choices), and I’m not just saying that because of the prize.

Avery showed us all how easy a Windows app can make installation. I think it made a fool of every single other piece of Windows software. One-click, that was it.

Simon Clark presented on his neighbourhood website (for his and hopefully other neighbourhoods), which was nicely done, and I’m very interested in that sort of thing. Does everyone on a street really need a huge ladder? (hint: the answer is “no”). He also did well by pointing out that it’s not just the technology but needs to be lead by an enthusiastic community member.

I presented to talk about Zimride. Simon was managing the presentations and asked everyone a few things, including what we hope to get out of presenting. My answer of “to turn everyone in the audience into evangelists for Zimride” got a lot of laughs, although that wasn’t really the intention ;-). I was presenting using Jesse’s computer, so there was a mildly embarrassing minute when I went to Facebook and realized Jesse was already logged in. Hopefully I didn’t show anything too sensitive from his or my own 😉 .

The Facebook hype (as we all know, of course) is completely insane. Two people immediately came up to me afterwards asking if I could build them a Facebook application. I’m not going to do that, but I think I can find them someone who will. Thats what’s so great about these events, I definitely made some good connections, and may have convinced one or two people to attend the Web Clinic events I run.

Robert Barlow-Busch (of UX Group) proposed some sort of UX Critique Camp, which I and many others seemed to think was a really good idea, so hopefully that will happen at some point.

Monish (link to his startup since he has no site yet) seems to have decided to start a blog listing Waterloo tech events, which is a good idea. There’s no real centralized place for that now, although there are a variety of obstacles.

Lastly, I finally got around to adding a new feature to Quizify, touching the code for the first time in nine or so months. Yay.