DemoCamp with Howard Lindzon – June 9, 2011

Some rights reserved photo by Andrew Louis (@hyfen)

DemoCampToronto # 29 – The Dirty Details #dct

Date:

June 9, 2011

Time:

6:30 – 9 PM EST

Location:

Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, 55 Dundas St W, Toronto, ON

Register to attend:

Keynote Speaker – Howard Lindzon

Howard Lindzon is co-founder and CEO of StockTwits® – a social network for traders and investors to share real-time ideas and information. StockTwits was recently named “one of the top 10 most innovative companies in web” by FastCompany and one of the “50 best websites” by Time magazine.

Mr. Lindzon has more than twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. With a unique vision for starting and successfully managing innovative companies, he is the Managing Partner of Social Leverage, a holding company that invests in early stage web businesses. Howard continues to manage a hedge fund he started in 1998.

He created Wallstrip, and more than 400 original web video shows, which was purchased by CBS Corp. in 2007. He is an active angel with many success angel investments including: Rent.com, (purchased by Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), and Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). Mr. Lindzon’s new media and internet business investments also include: Limos.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Buddy Media, Ticketfly, Assistly, Bit.ly and Tweetdeck.

Mr. Lindzon received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management.

We are looking for amazing entrepreneurs & demos

The goal at DemoCamp has been to provide a platform for local companies to launch, get product or pitch feedback, to establish a presence for recruiting, to help with PR and social media awareness. We try to get a group of highly connected and apparently highly cynical entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, investors and others in a room to watch entrepreneurs in a safe environment. It’s something between a graduate seminar and a show. The goal is to demo your product and get feedback about your demo, your design, your market, etc. You decide. (It’s a work in progress, but it’s a social event).

We’re also 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 cynical crowd. You get market advice, technology advice, pitch/presentation advice. Startups seeking advice should apply to demo.

Apply to Demo »

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.

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:

Scott Pelton (@spelton) from GrowthWorks,
April Dunford, (@aprildunford) Founder and Principal Consultant, Rocket Launch Marketing
Leila Boujnane (@leilaboujnane), Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Idee
Anand Agarawala (@anandx), Product Manager, Android System UI, Google

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.)

Shoestring budgets & sponsorship

We continue to run DemoCamp on a shoestring budget. Sure it sucks that it’s during the day. Sure it sucks that it costs $15. But we run these events at cost recovery. Sometimes we lose money (uhm, StartupEmpire anyone).

Venue, food, Audio/Visual, and special things like a movie. They all cost money. BTW don’t forget the tax. The ticket price reflects the maximum we think people are willing to pay plus the maximum sponsorship amount we think we can cover. Did you know that a theatre + A/V + special feature + lunch is about $30/person+tax, almost $34/person. So we reach out to the community of companies and include the least amount of advertising and sponsorship. Make sure you check out:

Anand Agarawala and Bumptop! This is an EPIC sponsorship. You have to be at DemoCamp from 4pm-6pm to find out what it is.
Eqentia builds the a semantic publishing platform for knowledge tracking & competitive analysis
XtremeLabs is hiring agile engineers and ui designers for the hottest mobile development company on the planet.
Microsoft BizSpark jumpstart your startup and speeds up your time to market.
FreshBooks is the fastest way to track time and invoice your clients.
Mercanix develops tools that enable organizations and their people to do good work.
Rob Hyndman is the bee’s knees & the cat’s pajamas. Startups looking for a lawyer: Start here.
Rypple builds social software that makes workplace feedback easy and fun.
Dayforce is the hottest enterprise software company in Toronto. Hiring dev, qa, ui and sales ninjas.
Kontagent is a Facebook Fund funded startup that is hiring rockstar developers in Toronto.
OCE is helping commercialize the next generation technologies like Bumptop & Sysomos.
KPMG Information, Communications & Entertainment (ICE) practice helps startups to succeed in turbulent markets.

These are organizations that are looking for funding, PR, and they are hiring. Are you a developer? designer? marketer? pr professional? Are you looking for a job? Make sure you check out each of these companies. They are part of our ecosystem. They support events like DemoCamp. And they make it possible for you to have a great experience. These folks essentially cough up a relatively small amount of money for a logo, a blog post, and the hope that events like DemoCamp make Toronto a great place to find and retain talent.

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