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Justs came home from my third democamp and again, feel inspired and enthusiastic about the tech/entrepreneur/startup ecosystem that appears the be alive and growing in Toronto.

Firstly, a quick roundup of the democamp 22 presenters:

1.  Converstation with Yossi Vardi and Mark Skapinker – Yossi is a seriously accomplished tech investor who likely has an infinite amount of knowledge and experience from over 40 years of starting and investing in businesses.  Still, it was clear that the only way to tap into that knowledge in a meaningful way would be in a small social setting, through story telling (funny stories to be sure).  Clear and concise presentations don’t seem to be his strong point but he is certainly an entertainer.  Both Mark Skapinker and David Crow attempted to ask the question:  What do we need to do in Canada to invigorate the startup community?  I’ll get back to this later…

2. Agilebuddy – A Brightspark company with a tool to enable agile development and project management using an intuitive, web 2.0 interface and offered on a subscription SaaS basis.

3. Assetize – An ExtremeU graduate building an advertising platform to monetize your twitter profile.

4. iStopOver – Another Brightspark venture allowing peer-to-peer renting of space in people’s homes as an alternative to hotels and hostels.  Starting to do the same with office space.

5. Locationary – Very ambitious project to free data and make it available on commercial websites and products with location specific context.

6. Thoora – A Rogers venture and participant at TechCrunch50 last week – they are indexing the blogosphere, twitter and media sites to bubble up the most popular and relevant information, using what appears to be a pretty cool indexing algorithm that can find blogs and information that are relevant, regardless of the number of links to that information.

7. Uken Games -Another ExtremeU graduate and creator of a facebook game called Superheroes Alliance that is image-based and lets you fight, create missions and kill other super heroes, using your facebook network.  They have 50,000 active players and are cash-flow positive.

Find a more detailed account of these companies and presentations at Thomas Purves’ blog or at the democamp site.

I want to get back to the core question that was asked of Yossi and not really answered, perhaps because no one knows the answer.  How do we find and make available the capital necessary to fund innovation and startups in Canada?

Yossi is probably right in that this type of community is supported by creating the right culture.  I find this depressing though, because I’m not sure that culture is an easy thing to change.  I’ve said it before on this blog – Canadians are conservative investors and, to repeat what David Crow said tonight, are only willing to take on serious risk when it involves drilling into the ground.  The VC industry in Canada is largely dead, with the few funds that exist winding down and no sign of raising new funds.  Not for lack of trying I’m sure, but it’s likely too hard to raise any significant or meaningful funds in this country at this point.  To blame the economy is fair but the VC industry in the US is still alive, along with a much larger Angel community and that economy has been much harder hit than Canada.  Again, this points to a significant cultural difference.

There are certainly people and organizations out there doing good and supportive things in Canada but we need more, otherwise our best and brightest will go elsewhere to find the real money.

So where do we go from here?  Thoughts?  Ideas?  Perhaps we need to take the collective energy spent on new and innovative ideas for startups and pour it into a fix for this fundamental problem.

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to find such a vibrant tech community in Toronto, supporting entrepreneurs and startups through various forums, including Democamp – periodic events to demo new and exciting products and ignites to pitch startups. This is a fantastic, event for promoting your ideas, getting feedback, networking, improving presentation skills and having a good time. And there’s beer and pizza!

I found this community through some trolling on local blogs and sites, such as:

• startupnorth
• democamp
• Toronto Events Calendar
• OCE (Ontario Centres of Excellence)
• Barcamp/Torcamp

And some personal blog sites – in particular, the organizers and central figures of this specific community:

• David Crow
• Jevon Macdonald
• Jay Goldman
• Joey DeVilla
• Leila Boujnane

Following these people and some of the people around them on twitter has helped immensely to quickly integrate myself into the Toronto tech community and, while I’ve only just met a few of them the other night at democamp, I quickly feel as though my finger is on the pulse and I will meet many more interesting people in the near future.

For detailed info and analysis of democamp 20, search twitter via #democamp and/or #dct20.  I number of people have covered all the details in their personal blogs.

Thanks for a great event and looking forward to future events and getting involved with this great and supportive community of people.

This year’s web 2.0 expo in San Francisco was all about twitter – not literally, but you certainly couldn’t ignore twitter this year whereas it was relatively insignificant at last year’s event.

As a recent twitter user (have had an account since last year’s expo but only started using it in the last couple of months), I find that I use it primarily to follow interesting information but it has absolutely no “social” value for me at this point. Largely because I do not have a network of friends who use it – at least for now. As a result, I would say I’m 99.9% information consumer and 0.1% contributor. I do actually post frequent updates but it’s unclear to me at this point if anyone reads them and, for the most part, they are not tweets that would be classified as useful. Still, much like this blog, I think that it’s important for me to take part to be involved in the technology and possibly even find new and different social interactions.

While I continue to play around with twitter on a day-to-day basis, it was at web 2.0 expo that I saw the value of twitter in a conference setting. By using the search feature, I continually tracked all tweets tagged as #w2e which gave me a real-time insight into the all the various goings on and commentary at and around the conference. Furthermore, most speakers used twitter along with a keyword/tag to take questions in real-time during their presentations. Of course this went further then simply questions and allowed people (including myself) to post supplementary information about a given topic to other attendees and/or make comments throughout. I found this to be extremely valuable and it allowed me to “virtually” attend certain sessions that I couldn’t get to.

The twitter eco-system is certainly evolving rapidly. It will be interesting to see where it goes. Will twitter become the facebook of 2006 in Toronto where, in a matter of weeks, the entire “connected” city opened accounts 2 years ago? in 2009, I believe the value and long-term viability of facebook is still unclear. Will twitter take the same uncertain path?