DemoCamp Edmonton (DCE) 2 was tonight. Unfortunately I didn’t get to attend DCE 1. It was a great time with a lot of very interesting people. Most of the software demoed was in the true spirit of DemoCamp but there were a few glitches. All in all I was happy to meet some new people and chat with old friends. I can’t wait until the next DemoCamp Edmonton.
Here are some of the notes that I jotted into my Nokia N95 while watching. I will do individual posts on the demoers later tonight. I decided not to bring in my laptop because of no wifi, which I regret. I’ll remedy that for next time 
Our demoers tonight were:
- Boris Djordjevic from Frontier Solutions
- Jack Newton from Clio
- Bruce Johnson and Scott Montgomerie from Zigtag
- Scott Winder and Sean Healy from Boreal Systems
- Toby Spendiff from nForm
- Patrick Lor (the founder of iStockPhoto) showed us a.viary.com
Yes, Mack, I jacked your list 
For a more concise post and more personal information on the night please read Mack D. Male’s post on DCE2.
Frontier Solutions was the first to go. I’m not really sure why this was at DCE because the owner is from Europe where his development team is and his sales team is in Hong Kong and their clients are in California.
Frontier essentially is a supply chain management solution provider. They have web based software for large companies bringing products to market. Their main clients right now are large shoe manufacturers like Etnies and Converse. Frontier’s software integrates everything from the manufacturing components to packaging to distribution.
It’s not really a startup and it’s already doing well. It’s also not located anywhere near Edmonton and when asked why he was here, Boris replied “Because I like Alberta.” Tsk.
Clio was the second product demoed. It’s specifically designed for lawyers to manage their law practices. They’ve taken the smart road and used AWS and S3 for hosting, and the entire thing is written with Ruby on Rails. Because of this it’s a pretty slick product.
I was skeptical upon the first introduction because it looked like a suped up BaseCamp. Well, it essentially is, except with tighter integration for legal professionals. I think it has a lot of potential and I’ll be recommending it to my lawyer friends.
One of the suggestions I have for Clio is to get in good with the Law faculties at universities. If you can reach new lawyers right as they leave school you’ll have a good base to grow. Also, if you were able to convince the alumni associations in different universities to send an ad out for you, you’d be solid gold.
Zigtag also demoed their social bookmarking software. I wasn’t impressed how they started the presentation stating that they would be the future of search engines. However their presentation was well done but I’m skeptical about their product.
Essentially Zigtag uses semantic searches to give meaning to common bookmark tags. The example they used was “cars” versus “the cars”, with the latter being a band. Their datamining allows bookmarks to be specific to the context their used in and apparently searches are too. So you aren’t just looking up keywords, you’re looking for what you “mean” to find.
Their UI was a little bloated and I think overly flashy. I’m a del.icio.us fan myself. I like to hotkey everything and just hit CTRL+D, select the recommended tags and move on. From Zigtag’s demo they had to click on everything and type in each individual tag. It’s just too much work in my opinion. I’m sure they’ll refine the process as they go forward.
After the presentation I posed the question of how they’re going to make money. They basically said they don’t need to make money right now-which is a dumb answer-but they will introduce keyword targetted ads. The hope is that with their great semantic search technology they’ll be able to target incredibly well. It’s looking good.
A neat thing about Zigtag is one of their investors used to be the CEO of Intuit Canada.
The Boreal Systems Inc. was presented and one of my friends Sean Healy is a founder. Boreal is essentially a complete company and service management system for huge energy corporations like those in Alberta’s tarsands (or “oilands” if you’re the government ).
Boreal, like many other products out there is a content management system. However they have a plethora of features that energy corps. will love. Boreal handles everything from dispatching trucks and GPS, to safety management, to tracking company cell phones and garnishing employee wages for personal calls from payroll attached to the employee management system.
During the demo, Boreal said that their market was niche enough that software as a service wasn’t justifiable. They’re going to do a bulk sale with paid support subscriptions.
Sean Healy is also involved in a sweet marketing startup called ToyBox, check them out.
nForm demoed next. They created a module for Windows SharePoint Services named Midori. Unfortunately for nForm, the virtual Windows session he was using crashed off the bat and the internet connection itself was shady. That aside he managed to present the product and we got a pretty good idea of what they are offering.
From what I got, Midori is a better way for project managers to collaborate using SharePoint. It’s essentially a plugin that allows project managers to come together and keep each other up to date. I guess SharePoint isn’t really built for this already. Personally I don’t know a lot about SharePoint and a show of hands in the room didn’t show a lot of people who actually use it.
Aviary was the last project demoed. The presenter was Pat, the founder of iStockPhoto which sold for millions a few years ago. Pat advises for a nifty site named Worth1000 which is a collaborative design site where people bid their designs contest style for cash.
Worth1000 has been looking to expand and they realized their customers are all amazing PhotoShop users, however they realistically realize that few of them have probably paid for PhotoShop because it’s ridiculously expensive. So over the past year they’ve developed their own online version of PhotoShop completely in Flash and Flex. I was floored.
The psuo-community they built is called Aviary. Within Aviary you have community tools like sharing designs and cool features like versioning for different products. One of their editors is named Pheonix and it’s completely Flash based. I haven’t seen anything quite like this before, it’s probably the most powerful implementation of Flash I’ve seen. It’s smooth and quick but you can still tell you’re in a browser. They have essentially all the features you’d want out of PhotoShop including layers and filters.
Pheonix has their own proprietary file extension (.egg) but it will also open PhotoShop files. No word on Illustrator yet but I assume it will. With these .egg files any users in the community can see what original images you’re working with and then take them to use on their own projects, they can also see the versions you’ve gone through and mashup their own creations. This is basically what Worth1000 was built around.
Beside Pheonix they have a tool that does complete 3D modelling and texture mapping, ALL IN FLASH. One commenter mentioned it’s a lot like the Second Life modelling tools. This stuff has some amazing potential.
Similar to Yahoo! Tubes, Aviary has a tool called Peacock which allows users to create do-it-yourself filters with multiple levels and facets. Other users can then grab these filters and apply them to whatever images they want.
Aviary is most likely going to run with a $10 subscription fee. I assume it’s one-time but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s monthly. Needless to say I can’t wait to try out the beta.
These summaries went a bit longer than I anticipated but I’ll still try to write individual posts on each company later. I told most of the demoers that I was going to make this post tomorrow with any official information they send me to appologies to anyone I lied to. I will still do my best to correct any errors and I’ll incorporate you’re official statements into the individual posts.
See you at DemoCamp Edmonton 3.
The reason I’m switching to Open-Mesh from Meraki is pretty clear cut. First the price of a Meraki router is like three times more than an Open-Mesh one. The gain isn’t that much smaller and I can easily stick a bigger antenna on them.