I continued my unbroken attendance to StartupCampWaterloo last night. As always, it was a great turnout. It seems like a younger croud with less familiar faces than normal, but still a good crew.
The evening started with people giving their first pitches, hoping to get a turn to present. Here were the pictches:
After the attendees voted on what they would like to see. The presentations began in order of who recieved the most votes.
The first demo, Ultrasaur is a service to audit changes made to files on a computer. The pitch is protecting companies against crooked system administrators.
It works by storing the “fingerprint” of files on Ultrasaur’s web servers. There is an application that runs daily and uploads the fingerprints for all tracked files on the computer. They aleve concerns that the app might be working maliciously by providing the source code of the app to their customers.
This looks like an interesting idea. My take away is that I still believe that it would be possible for system admins to circumvent the system.
The founders call this a tool to solve “information overload”. Basically it is a tool that lets you collect hyperlinks and add comments to the links. Links can be collected into “Streams” that can have multiple collaborators.
My first thought is that is looks a lot like Google Wave which was just announced at Google IO last week. When I asked them about this, they told plan to take advantage of the Wave API which lets you build your own wave-like applications that take advantage of Google’s protocol.
They presented an iPhone game called ThreadBound which Side scroller/puzzle game. They spent most of the time discussing with the group ways to market the game so they can make money off the game.
This was more of an idea than a product. The founder wants to create a system that automatically films events like rides on roller coasters and then gives people the option to buy a disc containing the video. The disc would also contain a number of links to other content or places to spend money such as buying more tickets to the theme park.
They have a partnership with IBM Canada who has already built a prototype kiosk. They just need to write the software to actually capture the video and burn the discs. They are looking for developers to help out with this. It looks like Kaimeria has a lot of experience with video production, but none in software development.
This certainly is a good idea, thought I’m certain that it has been done before.
Mark from Primal Fusion showed up late for the event, so the organizers squeezed him in here because they were pretty sure we would be impressed. They were right.
Primal Fusion works to help you find information on any topic. First, you type in a few words and the system then suggests related tags to what you typed in. This step is impressive, as example, when given “Rapid transit” the system suggested “Monorail” as a related tag.
Once you have selected some tags, you can have the site find news, web pages and photos from various sources on the web. You can then combine all of the content into an attractive web page that you can send out to your colleauges and friends.
Right now, the only output is a static web page. But they say that in the future, you’ll be able to create automatic search bots that use the topics/tags you chose to continue to find more relevant content.
This is a system that can take all of the e-mail alerts that you have set up for monitoring systems at your company and do great things with it. In PagerDuty, you can create a schedule of who is curently “on call”. When an alert is sent, PagerDuty telephones the “on call” person and uses text to speech to tell them what the problem is. They can then choose to ignore the alert, send the call to someone else, or mark the alert as fixed.
This system really simplifies the issue of receiving lots of e-mail alerts and not knowing whos turn it is to fix the problem. You can even set up mutltiple levels of scheduling so that if the first person doesn’t pick up, the next person on the list will get a call.
I spoke with the founders afterwards and they said that they are reproducing the complex alerts system they used while working at Amazon. I know that there are great developers at Amazon, and reproducing their work certainly isn’t a bad thing.
Giftah is a place where you can sell unwanted gift cards. It acts much like an eBay for gift cards, with an auction for each card. It is easy to pay much less than the face value for the card. For most types of cards, they even verify the amount that is on the card, so you know that you’ll get what you are paying for.
This is a great idea, that needs some help marketing and a little visual clean up on their site. I think that they can really succeed with this.
After the last presentation, the question was raised as to where else people can meet up and show what they have been working on. Here are some of the suggestions:
As always StartupCamp was a great experience. It is always great to see what other entrepeneurial minds are coming up with. I’m constantly impressed with the variety and number of new startups that come to the event.