DemoCamp 8

They do seem to be coming thick and fast, don’t they? Last night’s DemoCamp was held at No Regrets once again; turnout was down a little from the previous one, but I blame that on it being cottage season. Presentations were:

• WildApricot: a web-based tool to help small organizations (think a local soccer league) handle memberships, registrations, fees, and events. The presentation came complete with apricots ;-)
• JobLoft: the hands-down hit of the evening, this started last September (!) as a student project at Ryerson, and is now a four-person company with real customers. It's a job-finding service aimed at young people looking for work in the fast food and retail industries. The site is very slick, and they've done an excellent job of integrating geographical information, RSS feeds, and all the other useful bits of Web 2.0. I think the crowd was blown away by how professional it looked, especially considering how quickly it was put together, and how young its authors are.
• Filemobile: helps bloggers manage pictures, video, etc. The presenter didn't seem very excited about his own stuff.
• Languify: a collaboration between John Greene (Nuvvo) and Nicolaas Handojo, an undergrad student at U of T, who did the work as a 49X project. Languify is a web-based system for managing the translation files used to internationalize and localize applications. Nuvvo is putting is up as a service to the community, in the hopes that volunteers will use it to provide translations for various pieces of open source software. This presentation was part of Nicolaas's coursework; he passed ;-)
• Mike McDerment of FreshBooks.com closed the evening with a never-quite-coherent lecture (with slides—sssss…) about the importance of funnels. Or something. I was hoping he'd show us how to implement some of the ideas from Peterson's Web Site Measurement Hacks, but he didn't.

The coolest thing for me all evening was the fact that DemoCamp9 is already full, are are four of the five slots for September’s DemoCamp10, and David Crow didn’t know. That’s as good a definition of success as I can think of…