What an absolutely awesome event. We had 19 start-ups introduce themselves at the start of the event in a round the room intro (I wish I'd taken a photo of our whiteboard with everyone's names). Over 85% of the audience were first time Camp attendees so they had no idea what the un-conference was all about. And, our youngest entrepreneur yet, Grade 11 student Brandon Ces, owner of CES Landscaping. What fun!
Given we had a great audience (see my last post), David Crow did a great job of telling folks how things work and Jim Parsons suggested we do the round the room introductions after which things sky-rocketed with buzz, networking, questions, presentations, and general good times.
Jesse, my co-instigator, wrote a post of the event including some great photo's, especially his last one with two entrepreneurs talking over an OLPC laptop.
Here are some of the start-ups that presented:
* Village Toolbox
* Wimax solution from Khosrow Modarressi of UoW
* FightTube.tv
* Student from the Velocity residence at UoW presenting 3 ideas for mobile apps - can you post your name please :)
* for the other 2 folks, please LMK who you are and I'll edit this post with your startups!
Dan Debow talked about his experience growing WorkBrain and his current start-up Rypple.com. He got lots of tough audience questions, including how you know when to stop trying - what a great question. Dan had told a great story about one of the first start-ups he tried to launch in the music space, think last.fm. He met much great resistance and so switched his focus back to Workbrain, to help them grow to 230 or so million in annual revenues. If you haven't tried Rypple.com yet, I highly recommend the service and have been contemplating using it to find out more about what you all thought about the event. Assuming I get the time to do that this week, I'll post some of the results :)
We had new sponsors this time around too: Sun Microsystems Start-up Essentials program. Launchpadlaw.com a legal service offered by Shibley Righton LLP. And so, we had lots of great food and beverage, Thanks!
