Make sure to pay attention to Amy Rae’s Canpages video. The Canpages app contest has been extended for entries until April 12th: winmoney.canpages.ca.

Compass Engine

Mack Flavelle from Compass Engine talks location based gaming everywhere.

Drupal Geo with Open Layers

Mack Hardy from Affinity Bridge explains how you can click together some off the shelf Drupal modules and get incredible geo functionality.

Canpages API Contest

Amy Rae from Canpages, talking about their API and their API contest

The Business of Geo

Parveen Kaler from Smartful Studios talking about the Business of Geo.

I think Bruce is still promising the other presentations, so we’ll have those up when they’re done. Thanks, Bruce!

We just pushed publish confirming March 4th as the date for DemoCamp Vancouver 10: Geo Edition – #democampyvr10.

This edition will also be using the theme of “geo”. From the growth of GPS in virtually every phone to location aware applications of all kinds, we’ll be focusing on showcasing demos that connect around space in some way.

Matt Galligan will be coming to town to tell us about his new platform SimpleGeo for easily running your location infrastructure for you rather than building it from scratch.

Interested in doing a 6 minute demo / presentation? Contact us – we’ve got room for about 5 people to present.

Read on for full outline and presenters »

The message we sent out to our Startup Notification List had our offices filled with companies giving 10 minute pitches / talks to Mike Lee. Here are the companies that made it through the door:

• Fundrazr
• Sutus
• Lex Publica
• Mingleverse
• Ayogo
• Scallable
• Blast Ramp
• Mobify
• Layerboom
• Dimerocker

It was a fun afternoon talking with everyone in the waiting area, and I think the companies all made a good impression (even though Mike was pretty tired after his long day). Some videos from DemoCamp Vancouver 09 will be up early next week. Have a great weekend!

Mike Lee, the VP of New Ventures at Rogers, will be presenting at DemoCamp 9. You’ll get an opportunity to hear what Rogers’ plans are to work with and support tech ecosystems across the country, and what their investment plans are. I’m hoping for a lively Q&A as well.

The second featured presentation will be Tim Bray. Tim is a technologist with a long history of being involved in interesting things. Although he’s based in Vancouver, he spends a lot of his time traveling and presenting around the world.

The presenting companies have been selected and are as follows:

• Recotype – Recotype is an open framework for requesting and receiving recommendations on Twitter
• Yummy Republic – a wireless platform to link take-out restaurants with internet to enable them receive online orders and send back confirmation to customer instantly. YummyRepublic includes bespoke GPRS terminals, and several servers to control those terminals.
• Troovy – a web and mobile-based local discovery platform. Users find recommended places and people based on their own travel and feedback patterns.
• Deets.me – cloudy contacts
• Layerboom – Layerboom provides hosting companies with a comprehensive software
  platform which gives them the ability to turn their dedicated servers into virtual private server clouds.

In other news, after we made the call for people to help with DemoCamp, Vince Hodges of Sourdough Labs / Chipped.In / Pennyminder stepped up and said that he is going to help. Thanks, Vince!

Anyone else want to help plan / produce / source startups for DemoCamp? Leave a comment, we’ll do the next one in late November.

Connect 09 is the aiming to be the biggest gathering of the technology industry, and is being hosted by the BC Innovation Council on October 19th. They’ve just opened up a CrowdVine-powered networking site so you can connect with attendees ahead of time. We’ve found it a useful tool in the past when we’ve used it at Launch Party. If you’ve signed up for one of the previous Launch Party networks, you can sign in with the same email/password to join the Connect 09 Network. You can register and buy tickets here: http://connect09.eventbrite.com/

DemoCamp Vancouver is coming up later the same week on October 22nd. We’re going to hold it at our old favourite standby, the atrium space next to the private Steamworks lounge at 375 Water Street. There will be a handful of featured presentations, and we’re looking for a few more 6 minute presentations to round out the evening. There is no charge for the event, but please register to indicate attendance. In particular, if you want to give a presentation, sign up for a “Pitch Presenter” ticket with a description of the pitch you want to give.

We’ll be having some out of town guests give presentations on a variety of things, including an announcement of some new funding sources for startups in Canada.

As always, if you want to be notified of major events and applications, subscribe to the Startup Events notification list, or check the list on Upcoming at http://events.bootuplabs.com. Want your event shared? Add it to Upcoming!

It’s more than a week after DemoIgniteCamp that we had at the Vancouver Convention Center thanks to Microsoft Canada and Joey deVilla. You can find his wrap up post on the Microsoft Canadian Developer Connection blog. My excuse is that I was involved in 6 events in 5 days and am just surfacing again

I really enjoyed the opportunity to get really really techie. As Avi said, “Surprised that the demos (including mine) are all of tools vs. products”. We purposefully kept the list very developer / programming / cool tools focused, and I’m pleased with the result.

We had 7 presentations, none of them really in Ignite style aside from Joey’s. I think it would be fun to do “real” Ignite style presentations at some point, but in Vancouver, the original Pecha Kucha does a good job of that.

The 6 presentations aside from Joye’s were as follows:

1. Clamato — Hot Smalltalk on JavaScript action by Avi Bryant
2. TransitDB – Carson Lam’s online guide for Vancouver Transit users that won the PHP FTW contest earlier this year
3. RestfulX Framework – Dima Berastau’s framework for bringing Rails-esque goodness and RESTfulness to Adobe Flex and AIR development
4. PhoneGap and Ayogo’s use of it for iPhone Game Development
5. Joyent’s Smart – Joyent’s server-side Javascript cloud platform
6. Walruz — Ruby framework for managing complex authorization policies

My sincere apologies to Mobify for not having time to fit their presentation in at the end. It just goes to show that I really do need a gong for timed presentations (/me looks at DaveO).

Thanks again to Joey and the rest of the Microsoft Canada / TechDays crew for making the space available AND for buying a round of truly “Free beer” at the Lion’s Pub afterwards, and to everyone for attending and presenting.

So, this wasn’t really a DemoCamp event, and it wasn’t really an Ignite event. It was a lot of fun, and I’d like to do more like this. As I said at the event, I need help in programming and organizing these events – get in touch or leave a comment if you have some ideas.

We’re also announcing another DemoCamp Vancouver event on October 22nd. If all goes as planned, we’ll be announced some startup funding related news at the event. If you want to present, please follow the link and sign up for a “Pitch Presenter” ticket.

Last night was DemoCamp 7, the Social Platform Edition and the event was definitely a success. There was a total of 12 different ideas brought to the table and each one had some real merit to it.

Two of those businesses were guests of honour (Anahita and BuddyPress) with prepared presentations and most of the others were just people with an idea they wanted to share. There were some who just dropped in and some people who had clearly been planning their 30 second spiel for quite a while, but everybody was excited to be sharing their vision.

The Format

1. Each contestant got to pitch their concept for 30 seconds. (10 people total)
2. The two guest of honour companies made their presentations.
3. The top five 30 second pitches got expanded into six minute pitches. (Everybody watching got to vote.)

As usual Boris was the master of ceremonies and did a tremendous job of keeping the train on the tracks. I’ve only been to a couple of Bootup Labs events so far but everyone has worked out really well. I suspect it’s because they have found a way to perfectly maintain the tension between structured order and organic chaos that allows for maximum creativity, interactivity and entertainment.

Certainly the event wasn’t perfect but for the most part the presentations were highly informative and sometimes down right fun. Some of the ideas didn’t seem overly connected to the theme of Social Platforms but none the less they were all worth listening to.

Apparently this was the reboot of the DemoCamp nights here in Vancouver and I have no doubt the next one will be equally as interesting and possibly even more focused. I’m not sure why there was a hiatus but for all of our sake I hope the next event is soon. DemoCamp 7 was absolutely incredible from a networking perspective; I met a couple of people who I was deeply grateful for being introduced to and already have a lunch date with one.

If you are involved in tech, business or the web here in Vancouver there really is no excuse to miss the next one.