in Competitions, Ontario, Startups

OCE Discovery + Special DemoCamp + One Day Pass

Editor’s Note: This post is written by Paul Vice. Paul works the OCE team to enable special projects. This includes community outreach with groups like StartupNorth and DemoCamp. OCE has been a proud sponsor of DemoCamp and other StartupNorth events for the last 4 years. We’ve written about OCE Discovery in the past and the support that OCE has offered local startups like Bumptop, Verold, and others is unparalleled. We are excited to be able to offer StartupNorth readers access to OCE Discovery 11 » see below for details about ticketing. – David

The Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) has teamed up with the StartupNorth team to present a special DemoCamp on May 19th at 3:30pm at the Toronto Metro Convention Centre as part of the Discovery 11 conference.  It is a chance to put DemoCamp in front of a different audience, drawing all the Discovery attendees. In 2010 we had a standing room only crowd. We have space for 300+ this year.

Discovery is the annual showcase of the best of innovations in Ontario hosted by OCE. Recently named Canada’s Best Trade Show 2010, Discovery has become the premier innovation and commercialization showcase in Canada with over 2500 attendees & over 300 exhibitors.

OCE Discovery picture of show floor

Some of the highlights of Discovery this year:

  • Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences is the keynote speaker on the morning of May 19
  • A hot panel on the direction of mobile app development in Canada, moderated by Kunal Gupta, CEO and Founder of Polar Mobile.
  • A full track on Stereoscopic 3D technology including S3D gaming development
  • Indra Laksono from Toronto’s own ViXS Systems on the future of digital technology in the home. (btw, ViXS is a very cool company, check them out.)
  • The return of the Elevator Pitch competition – Dejero Labs and Gridcentric were past award winners.

Check out the full agenda.

DemoCamp at Discovery

Moderated by David Crow (@davidcrow), with guest speaker Anand Agarwala from Bumptop (now at Google) kicks things off with a unique “Art of the Hustle” (Street Smarts for the Startup World) presentation, followed by a showcase of 5 unique selected startups to pitch in front of an audience of over 300 participants, including panel members:

Discovery is not the usual DemoCamp venue. But, we are looking to accomplish 2 goals:

  • Put some interesting, exciting new DemoCamp start-ups in front of an new audience; and,
  • Put DemoCamp in front of that new audience and inspire some of them to join future DemoCamps

Want to demo?

We are looking for up to 5 startups or entrepreneurs to demo a new technology. Selected presenters get 5 minutes to show us the best of their application and then ask the audience for feedback, coaching, and insight from a highly connected, if occasionally cynical, crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, and pitch advice and the opportunity to deal with the hecklers.

Apply to Demo

Want join the audience, offer advice, heckle and get to explore the full conference floor?

Discovery is a full conference and trade show at the MTCC with all the typical costs and overheads. We run it on a cost recovery basis with a lot of very generous help from sponsors, but costs are a lot more than your typical Democamp.

But, we want you there. You can join us at DemoCamp and visit Discovery  with a one day pass May 19 for $250 if you use the promotion code DC250 when you register. (The full price for the 2 days is $895, $75 for students with ID.)

OCE Discovery 11 May 18-19, 2011