Month: January 2007

DemoCamp is Back!

After a little break for the holidays, we’re please to announce the return of DemoCamp with DemoCamp Toronto 12! It takes place on Monday, February 5th at No Regrets Restaurant and Lounge (42 Mowat Avenue, Toronto). The presentations start at 6:30 p.m. and run until about 8:30 p.m., after which the social part of the evening begins.

What is DemoCamp?

DemoCamp is an event in which the various players in the Toronto tech community — programmers, engineers, designers, managers, agile process people, entrepreneurs, marketers, promoters, journalists, students, tech enthusiasts and users of technology — to get together, show off their current projects, talk, exchange business plans and business cards and meet. The idea behind DemoCamp is to encourage local techies to share ideas and get to know each other, and as a result make our tech community more vibrant and prolific.

DemoCamp is essentially a high-tech “show and tell” session. It’s a chance for local techies to show off their latest projects, whether they’re complete or works in progress. Keep in mind that we don’t want marketing pitches or sales presentations; we want to see demonstrations of your technology at work! That’s why one big philosophy of DemoCamp has traditionally been “no slideware”.

At the start of their presentations, presenters must answer these questions:

1. Who are you?
2. What are you presenting?
3. What do you hope to the community will gain from your presentation today?
4. What would you like from the community in response to your presentation?

Another major philosophy of DemoCamp is “there are no spectators”. Just because you’re not presenting doesn’t means that you can’t play a role. We encourage people to ask the presneters questions and start conversations.

Who’s Presenting at This DemoCamp?

Here are this month’s presenters:

• Will Pate will talk about Flock, a Mac OS X-based web browser designed with social interaction in mind.
• Mike Beltzner will talk about how they do distributed development over at the Mozilla Project.
• Albert Lai will talk about Bubbleshare, which was recently acquired by Kaboose.
• There will also be a number of people who’ve presented at previous DemoCamps, and they’ll tell us about the current state of the projects they presented.

A Bit About the Venue

No Regrets is a great restaurant on the western edge of Liberty Village, the warehouse district south of King between Dufferin and Strachan streets. The space is nice, the staff are very friendly, and the food is great. I recommend the roasted red pepper soup, the sandwiches, their selection of draft beer and my current favourite, the smokehouse salad.

Come on Down!

If you want to see what the bright lights of the Toronto tech community are up to, or want to get involved in one of the most dynamic technology scenes anywhere, you don’t want to miss this events. Save the date: Monday, February 5th at 6:30 p.m..

If you’re looking for work and think you’d be up for managing two of Tucows’ biggest services — Hosted Email and Email Defense — come take a look at the Tucows Blog, where we’ve got the details of this job position.

The Tucows Squishy Cow certainly gets around! The latest sighting is on the cover of this week’s Quick and Simple magazine, a weekly produced by Good Housekeeping, where she’s used to illustrate the cover story, Goodbye Clutter!.

(Yes, I know that the Squishy Cows are manufactured by a company that sells them to companies other than Tucows, but I still think of the Squishy Cow as ours.)

For more Squishy Cow sightings, go check out Flickr; you’ll find them tagged with either squishycow or squishycows.

“Respectable journalists don’t just disclose,” writes Ian King, who takes issue with my acceptance of the Vista-pre-loaded laptop from Microsoft last month.

I will counter and end the argument by saying “consider the source”. In this case, Mr. King writes for the Sun chain, a group of newspapers who unashamedly model themselves after British tabloids, from so-called “reporters” who are really drunks with notepads, to the “page three girls”, to bad writing to the target readership of just-short-of-functionally-literate yobbos, chavs and lager louts. Barely suitable for fishwrap, I’ve seen better papers after wiping my ass.

Respectable journalists don’t work for the Sun. The organization for which Mr. King works is not so much a newspaper as it is a flyer for a bunch of discount stereo stores that uses what barely passes for “news” as a excuse for printing.

P. Diddy’s not the only celebrity who’s been photographed doing some inappropriate staring.