YashLabs

DemoCampMontreal2 happens tomorrow. Geeks, Entrepreneurs, Visionaries, Savvy Businessmen, Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists of The Montreal Tech Scene will gather freely to share a most fantastic 2 hours together, and maybe even a drink or two at the SAT bar while seeing five interesting demos.

MAP:: Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent

The presentations

1. Collektik – Hugh McGuire

Hugh is the mastermind behind project LibriVox, which harnesses open participation and open-source software together with the free content of Project Gutenberg to provide you with a growing collection of free audio-books for your listening pleasure.

Wasn’t that a long sentence? Well, through LibriVox, a volunteer could read it out loud, record it, upload it onto the site so you could in turn freely get it as a long audio sentence in mp3 for your media player. And if it’s too long, people can collaborate on the task too.

Come see his newest project, Collectik. It’s like mixtapes but for podcasts.

Or else he might also present a super-secret stealth-ninja-mode project. Something kept under wraps behind a second closed vault door or something.

2. Kakiloc – Martin Dufort

A location-based mobile social networking project. Austin Hill is said to have gently persuaded Martin Dufort to present – something involving twisting arms.

3. iotum Talk Now

iotum Talk-Now enables you to customize your availability information and share it through your BlackBerry.

4. Open Source Cinema – Brett Gaylor

Brett Gaylor was the host of the first impromptu Mashpit in Montreal so that an ad-hoc team of four (Brett, Hugh, Sylvain and myself) met around mostly Macs, a few Sleeman beers and some tasty end-of-night whiskey all soaked up in pizza to help bring his Drupal-based collaborative web-site to fruition. Brett is currently working on “Basement Tapes” a movie about free culture. During his project, he’s met some little-known people like Lawrence Lessig, DJ Girltalk and me.

5. BumpTop

Anand Agarawala from Toronto will present BumpTop’s revolutionary interface technology which puts physics and realism back into your bland 2D GUI.

For more information:
DemoCampMontreal2
Fred also has more info on his blog.

Looks like Austin Hill will replace “Big” John Kopanas (a worthy successor of the UFC’s “Big” John McCarthy) as MC this time around, and multi-talented, omelette-engineering expert, Simon Law will fulfill photographic duties again.

Quick Presentation Tips

At DemoCamp, there are no slides. This can be tricky. Here are a few tips to keep in mind and also put in practice for your experience to be a success:

1. Know you goal for presenting at DemoCamp
2. Based on your goal, define your audience
3. Know which language and communication style you want to use with your audience
4. Communicate the benefits of your projects, your goals early.

For instance, if your goal is to find funding for your startup, then you know you want to reach angel investors and venture capitalists. You should then make it clear that your objective is to find funding but make sure also that you manage to make a convincing case of your business benefits very early. I’d say about 80% of your presentation should be about the business benefits and 20% about the technology itself to also cater for the geek audience in this example.

Of course there are other goals to presenting at DemoCamp, just make sure you communicate the benefits clearly to your audience. Clear communication will also make it easier for us to spread the good news about your projects and technology and about you too.

Previous Reports

1. DemoCampMontreal1 – part1 – part 2
2. DemoCampCUSEC1

This last week of March sure is an event-packed one in Montreal’s Tech Scene.

I will see you there. Say hi.

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If you’re an astute geek or tech-oriented business person who reads my personal blog at YashLabs, you are most probably already using FireFox and have installed the Operator plugin, which will enable you to easily add these events into your online calendar. All are open-source and free technologies.