brentashley

A great time was had at TorDemoCamp3 last night. Maybe as many as 100 people crowded into the Tucows office and saw demos of some great projects, then progressed to the nearby Liberty Cafe for extended yappage.

Demos:

• DrProject: Wiki / Issue Tracking geared to academic use. This project comes out of University of Toronto. I’m impressed that they are actually teaching students how to use source control and project management tools, something that most people learn only after having entered the workforce. A tool made by academia for academia, tailored to fit.
• OpenBlueNetworks Jewelry Search application. Robin Gambhir has used his family’s 40 years of jewelry business experience and knowledge to build a smart search service that really caters to the retailers.
• Nuvvo: John Green is at the helm of a young dynamic team that is putting a Web 2.0 face on eLearning. Interestingly, this too is a web-facing extension of a successful family’s accumulated knowledge and experience in a particular field, with expert guidance from John’s parents, Norm and Kathy Green.
• thelocalguru.com: Geoff Whittington turned his need to network and share with people of different skills and experience into a portal for knowledgeable and talented resources to share and to find each other.
• BlogChat: I demonstrated the little blog-meets-chat application that I built in 2002 as a means to chat on my own blog, and then developed into a hosted service with my colleague Tim Aiello so like-minded bloggers could join the fun.
• BlogWare: Tucows’ own hosted brandable blogging service is sold by resellers, much like the rest of Tucows Registrar and hosting business. With a dev team including A-list blogger Joey deVilla, this too is a tool built by the experts in the field.

Maybe you can see the trend here – these applications are all being built by people who know their intended audience, because they ARE the intended audience. In that way, they’ve all got a huge advantage, because the untold hours of toil necessary to make a startup work don’t add up to a minute of hard labour in their minds – it’s their passion.

You could see the passion spilling out of them at the Liberty afterwards. I look forward to getting involved again with the BarCamp gang. Thanks mucho to David Crow for organizing and Tucows for hosting.