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The sec­ond annual B.C. Demo Days took place today and I thought I’d share what hap­pened at the event, and talk about some of the presentations.

The first big event of the day was the announce­ment of the merger between New Media BC and WINBC, which will now be known as DigiBC. In case you don’t know what either com­pany is about, here is a small blurb about each com­pany from their respec­tive web­sites. New Media BC — “New Media BC has the man­date to strate­gi­cally pro­mote and con­nect BC’s thriv­ing dig­i­tal media com­pa­nies and grow the indus­try by enlist­ing the sup­port of gov­ern­ment and pri­vate sec­tor part­ners from BC and abroad.” WINBC — “Rep­re­sent­ing more than 250 mem­ber com­pa­nies, the Wire­less Inno­va­tion Net­work soci­ety of BC (WINBC), is the focal point for wire­less in BC. The orga­ni­za­tion brings this diverse sec­tor closer together by fos­ter­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion among early-stage wire­less com­pa­nies in BC.”. For more infor­ma­tion, check out their respec­tive about pages on the New Media BC and WINBC web­sites. Con­sid­er­ing all the work they’ve done for local com­pa­nies in B.C. over the years, I’m excited to see what they can do with all the tal­ent accu­mu­lated into one company!

Next, Michael Bidu (WINBC’s Exec­u­tive Direc­tor) and Jeff Laporte (WINBC’s Tech­ni­cal Direc­tor) talked about some of the more inter­est­ing tech­nolo­gies that they’ve been work­ing on, and they also talked specif­i­cally about the Olympics and what they plan to show­case dur­ing the Games. The thing I found most inter­est­ing was an Olympic media hub to be sit­u­ated in the mid­dle of Rob­son Square for the Olympics. They talked about, such as a data­base of busi­ness con­tacts that you’ll be able to sync with your phone, and they’ll have dis­plays all over the square to high­light some of Vancouver’s most inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies. The square also has a skat­ing rink! I’m hop­ing to vol­un­teer here dur­ing the Olympics, it could be a lot of fun.

After Michael and Jeff were fin­ished, the pre­sen­ta­tions com­menced. There were a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent new media and tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies at the con­fer­ence to present, all of them British Columbia-based. Below are quick write-ups about each presentation.

Absolute Soft­ware

· I didn’t get a chance to get the name of the pre­sen­ter, but the pre­sen­ta­tion was rel­a­tively well exe­cuted, and they had some inter­est­ing top­ics. They’re a soft­ware com­pany that focuses mainly on secu­rity in the tech­nol­ogy world, fix­ated mostly on track­ing of devices such as lap­tops, PCs, and phones. If your data is lost or stolen, you can remotely delete what­ever sen­si­tive mate­ri­als you have. They work with law enforce­ment to get your tech back in one piece through GPS. Clearly Microsoft is pick­ing up some steam …

AirG

· Con­tact: jamesb@airg.com

· James talked about some of the cool ser­vices offered by AirG, and there were a lot of ser­vices. Some of the ones I man­aged to write down: Voice, Sports, Games, Dat­ing, Chat, Divas (?), and Phat­lounge (?). AirG is quite well-known in the mobile space, and seem to be rapidly expand­ing. When I checked out their site, you’re asked to enter your mobile num­ber and you would then receive a text to view their site on your phone. I per­son­ally think that is a mis­take, that they should have both a web­site to high­light their com­pany and a web­site for their ser­vices, but maybe I just didn’t look hard enough.

Atimi

· Pre­sen­ter: Sean Howe

· Atimi is a soft­ware com­pany that has made many appli­ca­tions over a num­ber of dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies. Some of the notable com­pa­nies they talked about: New York Times, ESPN, and Access Hol­ly­wood iPhone appli­ca­tions, to name a few. They’ve made a lot of apps and have been in busi­ness for a long time, so despite this being the first time I’ve heard of them, they’ve estab­lished them­selves as a force in the mobile world to be reck­oned with.

Back­stage Technologies

· Pre­sen­ter: Alex Mendelev

· They are a rel­a­tively new com­pany who has been recently focus­ing on Face­book devel­op­ment, with games such as slots and scratch & win. They talked largely about Face­book and how they are big believ­ers of the plat­form. Oh, and this com­pany got the largest cow­bell out of them all . Peo­ple who attended the con­fer­ence will know what I mean.

Cellmap

· Pre­sen­ter and Con­tact: Aaron Hilton — aaron@cellmap.com

· This pre­sen­ta­tion focused, obvi­ously, on cell phone maps. They cre­ate cus­tom map soft­ware for mobile plat­forms, for such places like UVic and Stan­ley Park in order to know what to see and how to get around. They also devel­oped an iPhone app for Can­pages. At the moment they are work­ing on a mobile con­tent plat­form, which is sup­posed to send real time location-based ser­vices to your cell phones.

CIS Van­cou­ver

· This pre­sen­ta­tion was much dif­fer­ent from all the pre­vi­ous ones in the sense that they focused on a media instead of web and wire­less inno­va­tions. They pri­mar­ily cre­ate effects for movies. They showed us a really amaz­ing video of Angels and Demons, high­light­ing exactly how the movie was made with­out need­ing to phys­i­cally be in the Vat­i­can to film it (because there was no way that movie would be allowed to be filmed in any Catholic-owned area). Amaz­ing stuff. They might have the same video on their web­site, go check it out!

Park­ing Mobility

· This com­pany offers a mobile solu­tion to help per­sons with dis­abil­i­ties find park­ing quickly and eas­ily. It uses real time maps to show loca­tions, free spots, and has the abil­ity to report any­one who is using the park­ing spots ille­gally. I wish I used this when I broke my ankle!

Darim Group

· Pre­sen­ter: Chang Hang

· This was a fas­ci­nat­ing pre­sen­ta­tion, based on per­sonal video cam­eras that you try to hide as best you can that hooks up to cer­tain parts of your body. This cam­era is used in the mil­i­tary and police, but they are try­ing to enter the con­sumer mar­ket. The idea was that you could attach this cam­era to your cloth­ing and stream your life live to the world. The prob­lem with this, in my opin­ion, is that the cam­eras are way too notice­able; they’re going to need to use smaller equip­ment. An inter­est­ing idea nonethe­less, if it was dis­creet enough, peo­ple may use it.

Muutu

· Pre­sen­ter: Ashish Anand

· The gen­eral idea behind Muutu is that it is local­ized search. You would search, for exam­ple, a name in a par­tic­u­lar city and the search engine would do its best to find you all the “John Smith’s” in Phoenix. The web app is cur­rently in beta for­mat and sup­port­ing specif­i­cally B.C. and California.

Next Level

· While you may never have heard of this com­pany, it has made quite a few high pro­file games, such as Punch Out, Mario Strik­ers, and NHL Hitz. The prob­lem is Nin­tendo tends to over­shadow when it comes to the name on the box, which tends to make their brand name suf­fer, but their games are of the high­est qual­ity. I believe they said they were hir­ing as well, if any­one is inter­ested (I’m sure most of these com­pa­nies are, but this one men­tioned it in their presentation).

Reixl

· This company’s pitch was that they do the best they can to improve your over­all prod­uct in all aspects from mar­ket­ing down to user inter­face, although it seems the focus was to improve the core busi­ness aspects more than your actual product.

RXNet­works

· While this pre­sen­ta­tion started off look­ing to be another location-based com­pany, I was taken aback by the tech­nol­ogy dis­played. They demon­strated how fast they were able to get loca­tions of var­i­ous cell and GPS-enabled prod­ucts com­pared to other com­peti­tors, and it seemed very quick. And I can per­son­ally vouch for that; I’ve worked with some location-based APIs, and this one seems to take the cake. They have a lot of dif­fer­ent track­ing con­fig­u­ra­tions, so if you want more detail I’d rec­om­mend check­ing the web­site, there is only so much they can pitch in 3 minutes!

Simon Fraser Uni­ver­sity Project

· Pre­sen­ter and Con­tact: Craig Scratch­ley — wcs@ensc.sfu.ca

· Talk­ing about this project will be a bit dif­fer­ent than the rest, because I per­son­ally know about the project and the pro­fes­sor who pre­sented, and was the one who got him to come and give a talk. This is a project that uses your loca­tion to give you rel­a­tive infor­ma­tion to the objects around you, but it doesn’t use just sim­ple GPS nav­i­ga­tion. While it does use GPS as a start­ing point, the first step you take is cal­cu­lated with a sen­sor mod­ule that has 3 axes of accelerom­e­ters, 3 axes of gyro­scopic sen­sors, and 3 axes of mag­ne­tome­ters. Using cal­cu­la­tions based on these sen­sors and your ini­tial loca­tion it finds your cur­rent loca­tion. The project is cur­rently sup­ported by Nokia on the Sym­bian plat­form, but they are build­ing the base code on a flavour of Linux in order to be able to port it to many other plat­forms. I may get involved in this project a cou­ple months down the road when I free up some time.

UBC Project

· Pre­sen­ter: Nima Kaviani

· I stepped out dur­ing this pre­sen­ta­tion, but from what I can remem­ber it was a project based on inter­ac­tive ways of deal­ing with displays.

Vir­tual Wide Web

· This project seemed excit­ing, although they may be rais­ing the bar too high. The idea is that VWW is a recre­ation of the web in three dimen­sions, although to me, it seemed like a rival of Sec­ond Life for the PS3. One of the quotes from the pre­sen­ta­tion said “Do you wish you could go back in time and cre­ate a startup on some­thing you know you could have made, but didn’t have the idea for? That wish is com­ing to life with VWW”. This thing does sound like it has the poten­tial to be great; it sounds like a quasi real life MMO . The demo looked great and the inte­gra­tion of busi­ness into the pro­gram sounds promis­ing, but I don’t think it’s the sec­ond com­ing on the Inter­net. Look­ing for­ward to see­ing more though!

Vantrash

· The first thing talked about was that Vantrash is a sim­ple site that allows you to find out when garbage col­lec­tion is going to be in your area. While it seemed like there wasn’t more to it, it’s the back­end that impressed me the most. It uses a REST-ful API to dish out the data, and appar­ently there is more data than just the garbage col­lec­tion sched­ule, so I expect a cou­ple more prod­ucts to roll from these guys pretty soon.

Ver­rus

· This com­pany is purely about pay-for-parking, and they seem to have a solid strong­hold in the indus­try, as appar­ently they are work­ing with 90 dif­fer­ent cities across North Amer­ica and Europe. Essen­tially, instead of using coins, you use your phone account, and instead of won­der­ing when time expires, it lets you know in the form of text/email/whatever. One very inter­est­ing point was that there is a par­tic­u­lar city (Lon­don?) that is elim­i­nat­ing pay by toll com­pletely and instead just using polls with infor­ma­tion on how to pay by phone. Food for thought on how much we’re rely­ing on phones these days.

Wire­less Image

· Pre­sen­ter: Simon Bucker

· These guys essen­tially want to change the way we adver­tise on the web. Their idea is that we as con­sumers are so accus­tomed to adver­tis­ing that we can ignore most of it, but what Wire­less Image intends to do is to throw adver­tis­ing at you in a way you can’t ignore. One of their strate­gies involves brands, phones, and ring­tones. Their think­ing is that teenagers love all of these things, and so if they were to offer free ring­tones, they would eat them up. The catch is that there is embed­ded brand­ing infor­ma­tion in these ring­tones. Although this is just one of the many planned in-your-face adver­tise ideas they’ve got in store. Keep an eye on this com­pany to see how their strat­egy pans out.

XOMO

· Con­tact: jeff@xomodigital.ca

· The XOMO appli­ca­tion is com­pletely focused on fes­ti­vals. Essen­tially what the idea entails is you hav­ing a GPS-enabled phone, and for it to give you real time infor­ma­tion on what is going on around you, what you should go, what you should see, and what you should do. Out­side of that aspect, it also allows you to upload pho­tos of the event as it goes on, and based on the loca­tion, it will upload these pho­tos to the appro­pri­ate fes­ti­val photo album. It sounds pretty cool in con­cept, but I’m not sure how often peo­ple are going to be whip­ping out their phones to find out what to do when they’re at a music fes­ti­val. We’ll see how this project pans out. Make sure you check out their geo-tagged feature.

Switch Inter­ac­tive

· The pitch is that they are an inter­ac­tive enter­tain­ment site that will cre­ate qual­ity media con­tent for what­ever prod­uct you have. They mostly do flash, which I’m not par­tic­u­larly fond of, but these guys clearly love it, and if I wanted some­thing flashy (pun intended), I would love to have these guys cre­ate pro­fes­sional con­tent. Their demos looked good, and I par­tic­u­larly liked the Santa fight.

So there you have it! These are sum­maries of some of the best and most inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies com­ing straight from British Colum­bia. If there are com­pa­nies from the events read­ing this, let me know if there is any infor­ma­tion I left out that you would like added.

Shawn Jansepar