by davidcrow on November 5, 2009
We’re really lucky to have Saul Colt working his ass off in Toronto. He’s done a great thing. He’s invited his friend Gary Vaynerchuk to come to Toronto and talk to startups about his book, Crush It, and his demand generation (read social media usage) for WineLibrary.
That’s right, Gary Vaynerchuk in Toronto on December 3, 2009 for the next DemoCamp Toronto (which will be number 24 for anyone keeping track).
Sponsors
Zoocasa, Saul Colt, Rogers Ventures, OCE and StartupNorth are working together on this one.
Tickets
Presenting
Demos are 5 minutes long. There is an opportunity for a question and answer period after the demo. The recommendation, it’s a very strong recommendation, is that you present functioning software, i.e., no slide ware. The goal is for entrepreneurs, startups, developers to get on stage and show what you’ve been working on. It’s okay to have a couple of slides to explain your market opportunity, the stage of corporate development, identify your competitors, but it’s really key that you show us working software, hardware, network services, etc.
by davidcrow on October 27, 2009
Republished from Tom Purves.
Introducing Lift@Home Toronto and DemoCamp 2019 [ticket link]
LIFT Conference is an international tech conference based out of Geneva, with events in Switzerland, France and Korea. For the first time this year, Toronto has been invited to participate as part of the Lift@Home. Lift is not your usual tech conference in that it tends to mash up web tech with arts with humanism and futurism. Cool stuff
To give this event a special Toronto flavor we’ve teamed up with the Toronto DemoCamp community. But, there’s a catch! We want to see demos only of things you can’t build today. We want to see demos from the near-medium future of 2019. Predict the future one decade out. This is DemoCamp 2019.
Our presenters have a fairly open ended but challenging design brief. We’ve tasked them with imagining a future state of the world, to make a bet on what might happen to the earth, technology, society in the next decade, and then present to you what will be the killer demo in the year 2019. So unlike normal demos, we don’t want to see working code. We want to see stuff that would be impossible or hopelessly impractical today, but could be the killer app in just a decade more.
Each presenter will have a hard limit 12 minutes to present their visionary design, and you the audience will have several minutes to question, to critique and discuss. (What’s your revenue model!? etc.)
There will be a couple special guest presenters as well as 3-4 open slots. There will also be good prizes for the best demo in the open category.
If you, and/or your handpicked team of future-visionary design all-stars would like to sign up to be a presenter contact me for watch for further instructions (application form coming soon).
LINK: GET YOUR TICKET HERE to LIFT@Home Toronto
by davidcrow on October 16, 2009
Brydon has a great summary of DemoCampGuelph11. Bummed I missed it.
I’d write a summary of the night but luckily it’s done. The quick bits: Mathew Ingram spoke about how the Globe tries to run like a startup. Then we had demos from TribeHR, Declan Whelan, Steve Hanov, Don Walsh, Arni Mikelsons, and the audience favourite this time around Harry Scanlan.
Get your demo ready for #12 coming in December or January. Sign up to our google group linked off DCG site to stay up to date. My tip for demos? Treat them the same as pitches. I believe it was Austin Hill who summed it up best, hearts, minds, wallets.
Hearts: Tell me a story so I feel the pain you’re going to solve. Even in a technical demo you can pull this off. “So you’re up until 2am once again trying to cobble together yet another build by hand”. All you want is to get to the question “ok, I know what you’re talking about, but how are you going to solve that for me?”
Minds: Get into the techie bits of how you’re going to solve the problem you’ve now got me feeling, “my build tool will manage all your builds by…..”. The goal here is to get me to think “ok, I like that solution, how much?”
Wallets: How much, pricing model etc? Or if you’re raising money from me, how much and what are the details?
Mess up that order and you likely won’t get through it all or I’ll tune out. Most demos start with minds, then the crowd pushes them through questions to wallets and they never get to the hearts. Go for the heart first, make me cry first and then you’ll have my attention!!
