in Events, Ontario, Waterloo

DemocampGuelph 5 – 4 New Companies!

Jonas and I went to Guelph yesterday for DemoCamp Guelph 5. When we arrived in Guelph we stopped by the Well.ca offices and picked up some Roti (try the Doubles, delicious!).

We had a great time and the venue was cozy. We didn’t find out the beer was free until the end though!

The demoing companies were:

Doctopus
Doctopus is a hosted content management solution. So far they have built a nice looking platform that can manage and deploy a large number of sites. The CMS market is big, but also saturated to say the least. I think they will need to focus on a more defined target market/vertical. That said, it really did look nice.

Liveoffcamp.us
LiveOffCamp.us is a site that connects students with off campus housing. Right now the interface is a little disconnected. You enter a query and it emails you the results. The crowd thought that they should provide the results right on the site, and I agree, but getting an email should be kept as a second option.

MyVine
Myvine.ca was the best looking site of the night. Their tagline “Simple referral management” is confusing. They don’t manage your referral system, they help you manage a list of recommendations for your business. MyVine is sort of a GigPark turned on its head, where instead of putting all of the control in the hands of the users, the merchant gets to control what recommendations get posted and which ones don’t.

FOSSFactory
FossFactory is a site that helps manage bounties that are put on features in Open Source Software. For example: If you use a piece of open source software and you want to have a feature added to it, then you can put a value on it, deposit the money, and then developers can claim the money if they develop the feature. Other people who also want to see the feature developed can add to the bounty.