Live notes from DemoCamp24 w/ Gary Vaynerchuk

DemoCamp24 in Toronto is sold out, for those following at home, some live notes:

First up: Gary Vaynerchuk:

Greatest takeaway: big game is patience, way too many ppl give up right before it’s about to happen. If you don’t have the passion, if you’re not bleeding out the eyeballs for it you won’t make it, if it’s about cash you won’t make it. Patience and passion the pp theory. If you talk to ppl in their 90s they never say I wish I made more cash. The people who wake up in the morning who are pissed are losing.

What you can do is put down the wii, maybe not watch a lost marathon every weekend, you can start a company. That wasn’t true years ago. The fact that the internet, the most underrated thing in our society.

Question: How do you find your passion? Really hard. People roll up to me and say Gary what’s my passion? What am I fucking Yoda? What I can say you can’t be afraid of having more than one passion. Don’t limit yourself just skiing or rockclimbing, by doing that you limit your audience. We are in the personal brand business now, there are no editors to control who you are.

I never want to hear from people a 5 year plan? 5 years? 5 years ago there was no twitter, 5 years ago you needed a .edu to get into facebook. I react to what’s out there, I worry about what I can control.

Stickiness is important. You could get a trillion hits and it wouldn’t matter two foundations: quality content and customer service. Zappos is massively underrated. Zappos was the only competitor Amazon really worried about. Because Zappos wasn’t competing on price with Amazon. People cared more about Zappos. How many of you out there personally email to thank anyone who posts a comment on your blog?

First pizza, now on to the Demos:

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Jason Roks – founder of guigoog now called zero.in thanking the DemoCamp Community and announcing his Angel funding which he closed thanks to his demo at DemoCamp22. PROTIP: close Angel faster with convertible debentures and avoiding the challenge of valuing your company.

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GridCentric.ca – cluster computing demo. Virtual cluster. Normally when you scale out your cluster, you need to scale out the same machines, with virtual clusters you can add anything, you can even move the virtual machines while running from machine to machine. With GridCentric you can grow the scale the datacenter by instantly cloning running machines. Demo’s drawing a purple elephant on a paint app on one virtual machine, cloning that virtual machine and we see the same drawing app running on the new virtual machine. Idea: if you need a hundred machines you can scale them out to hundred virtual machines then throw them away when done. How does this compare to EC2? This is an EC2 on steroids for people who have their own clusters. Q: It is based on Zen hypervisor, modified with their control stack. Moneyquote: “I don’t want this to sound super nerdy.”

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DataTO. Helps the city of Toronto prioritize and release data. Have a site like a dell ideastorm with digg-like interface for people to submit and vote on requests for the city to open data. Now that the city has opened data, they really need help because they don’t have resources to open everything at once. The whole site was built in a week (wow) with developer time (@thody‘s) donated by his employer Architech Solutions. This is a great cause. Since the launch of this service many other cities Paris, London, Ottawa, Victoria have expressed interest. Intention is to open source the project, contact @remarkk if you want to contribute to the project.

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5BlocksOut solves the “lost in a big city problem”. It’s an online community where you ask questions or create missions like “where do you like going out for a drink?”. So far, looks like a gigpark crossed with digg for super local places and events. It also has a rather cute little hedgehog in the graphics. Other missions: I’m a hairy beast can you suggest a good esthetician? Indoor winter fun for little kidlets? site also let’s you drill down on hundreds of very local neighbourhoods, follow them and follow other “locals” twitter style. Request an invite, and metion DemoCamp to get a beta invite.

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Datamartist is (another) excel killer for desktop data analysis. Let’s you build db queries using a combination of visual drag and drop blocks and excel-like formula expressions. It’s a scratch pad for data, merge sets, cut paste columns from various source, with quick visualizations like distribution or ven diagrams of what data from one set that can join to another. Pretty neat, $750 a license, if you need this, we guess you probably know who you are. Moneyquote “we’re very oldschool (we’re a windows desktop app and,) it has business model: you buy it from us”. bonus points: for non-profits, it’s free.

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Equentia. is a news and, um, tag cloud aggregator of vertical news. Here’s an Eqentia portal for Canada Tech News.

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Cadmus is a neat idea. It answers the question: “what has been talked about on twitter, on rss etc. since the last time I was online”. What it will do is aggregate, crunch down and thread conversations for you. Algorithm works by looking at how important is the source and how important is the content. Moneyquote: “yes you can filter out foursquare updates from twitter”

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That’s all folks. Congrats and thanks to all the brave demoers. Time for beer.

Follow DemoCamp24 on twitter: #dc24 or #democamp