There was a great crowd (wish I'd remembered my camera!), lots of new folks. Communitech did a quick chat on what that offered as services to entrepreneuers, they've been sponsoring the GuelphDemoCamps since their inception. I hadn't realize that all of their services were free to the community.
I represented the Sun Startup Essentials program and was fun for me to sponsor a round of refreshments on their behalf and talk about their great new program for Startups. Feedback I'm getting in general is, finally :)!
The quality of the demo's were great and I was amazed at how much open source technologies are being applied in lots of different ways. Chris Long of Well.ca did a presentation on Solr and how they are using this search tool within the application to deliver highly relevant results to users. Solr also has the feature of word recognition on a partial or even incorrect basis. So if you type LaRosh vs LaRoche it will still recognize what you're after.
Christian Fobel did a demo of Arduino.cc - now this was a totally fun open source robotics gadget. I had never seen that before so I was blown away.
Brydon and Ali also tried something new they'd seen at another conference, a kids panel on technology. What a great idea to find out how kids are using the web and technology. Here were some of the highlights from the panel:
* no fear of internet because there are "too many educational things at school about it" and "Facebook has privacy settings - no one but my friends can see my pictures" and "no chat rooms cause they're lame"
* why not myspace? fb is what is used now, not go to website harder to understand
* where do yo go for research for school? "grandma, internet for book search, my parents then my sister, and the library to sit for hours"
Declan Whelan talked about test based development. Part of the agile concept of development and coding for the use case tests. And, John Rockefeller demonstrated GiantGoat.com a new web-based CMS they just launched.
Thanks Brydon and Ali for another great event.