DemoCamp8 took place last night at No Regrets. The usual crowd was all there with the addition of Amber Mac and Leo Laporte from the Inside the Net podcast and their TV show Call for Help. The venue was improved by the rental of an audio system to help everyone hear the presentations. One big advantage of the No Regrets venue is that beer is served during the demos. The demos this time were:

1/ WildApricot.com

WildApricot recently launched their product to public and I have been setting it up for a small golf tournament I'm organizing. Its a great tool for organizing informal groups and has a capability to track memberships and special event costs. Its a very slick product and Dmitry did a good job showing off the product. I was surprised that the product is written in .NET as there are alot of features that it could quickly inherit from open-source projects, like forums and web chat. It would be interesting to see if it can evolve at the same pace using the .NET platform.

2/ Jobloft.com

Jobloft is an employment site focused primarily on the retail employment sector with its high transient employment base and location specific needs. Jobloft has integrated an a job list with the Google maps API to provide location specific listings from a variety of retail employers. By targeting retail they hope to avoid Workopolis and some of the bigger employment sites. They have also built the ability for partners and schools to include jobs within a proximity to their location. This makes it easy to partner with schools looking to help their students.

3/FileMobile.com

Filemobile.com provides the ability to upload and host media files from a variety of sources, including your picture/video phone. The service seems to be heavily dependent on flash and has a very good visual interface. The system provides the ability to schedule large files transfers in the background. I thought one of the most impressive parts was the ability to automagically publish to a variety of blog services. Its not really clear what this business model is and how they will be able to scale to the massive amounts of bandwidth required.

4/ Languify

Languify provided a demo on a tool to manage multiple language files. With many languages and sometimes different maintainers it can be difficult to administer all the different language files. Languify provides a defined tool set to provide a web interface for managing these files. The tool has some potential and could be extended to use automated machine translation services or pool from existing translations for the same english phrase. I'm not sure the commercial potential for this sort of application but its very interesting.

5/ How to Measure the Success of Your Web Service

Mike McDerment cheated and did a presentation, using a webpage instead of power point, on web metrics. He focused on explain a conversion funnel which was kinda painful for anyone in marketing but I think was well suited for the developer heavy crowd. It would have been good to see the Google Analytics funnel, even with fake date, though instead of the static webpage.

Overall it was great to see Toronto based start-ups succeeding and the quality of the demos shown was extremely high.

Colin Smillie

Colin Smillie has extensive technical experience gained at several leading Internet, wireless and security providers in Canada and Asia-Pacific. He studied Electrical/Mechanical Engineering at the University of Ottawa and Computer Electronics in Ontario, and has been able to translate this technical expertise into the classified media industry for Trader Media Corporation. His current role as Product Manager of Automotive Products involves product development, competitor analysis and advertising performance tracking and search engine optimization, as well as alliance-building with third parties. He speaks fluent French, good Japanese and enjoys designing computer games in his spare time.