B. Mann Consulting

Well, I'm just getting home from a great night out. We polished off DemoCampVancouver03 to -- I think! -- great success.

Our second one was moved to the Irish Heather across the street, and while it was still fun and had good presentations, it's just not the same vibe as doing it at WorkSpace. Thanks again to Bill, Dane, and the crew for letting us host there.

We shook up the mix a little tonight by adding battle decks: "secret" slide decks that two volunteers have to "pitch" to the crowd, and go head to head to see who can put together the best spiel to the audience. Thanks to Megan, Kris, and Roland for pulling this off, as well as John from HandiMobility and Michael Fergusson from Kinzin / Are You Normal? for being our first contestants.

The pitches and presenters were really hard to choose from: we keep getting more people out and more great ideas. I'm not going to go into massive detail other than to point to DemoCamp Vancouver's official live blogger, Miss 604, as well as my friend Graham, who had good comments / feedback for the presenters.

Yes, I'm missing a ton of links in this post. It's getting late, so I wanted to get this up for starters. Thanks to all for attending and participating -- it was amazing to hear about all the other upcoming events. There really is a lot happening in Vancouver, and events like this just help to highlight that.

Last night saw the first Launch Party event here in Vancouver (background write up by Rob Lewis of TechVibes here). Maura Rodgers, Danny Robinson, and Dimitri Sirota joined forces to put on what I can best summarize as being a social gathering for Vancouver's tech community, from entrepreneurs to marketers to interested potential investors.

I've come to know Maura and Danny quite well. They've come back up from the Valley and have now settled back here in Vancouver, with a commitment to make Vancouver's tech community -- including a healthy ecosystem of investment -- really shine. Conveniently, that's completely in line with what I want to accomplish as well. I quizzed Maura ahead of time to compare/contrast Launch Party with DemoCampVancouver. Here's what she had to say:

Moving here from the Valley, where there is no shortage of fun events for people to attend, I thought an event like LP for entrepreneurs, techies, marketers was missing here. There are lots of great events like democamp, barcamp, VEF, and they fill a need too. After work, I am just looking for good mingling and want to bring the people together in and around this city, who are sitting on great ideas but not everyone knows about them. Every month, we hope to showcase about 4-5 cool, early stage companies in the city. It will be very informal and fun and give the people, who are not competing in the decibel competition ;), a chance to warm up and be involved.

We have connections to Silicon Valley. We know investors, marketers, companys there and want to make them aware of the Vancouver scene. Our next LP will most likely be in November. I will be collaborating with the people of the very popular event Twiistup of CA, who are interested in the scene up here to put on a bigger, more involved event than our first called Launch Party with a Twiist. We hope to get more people from South of the Border up for that one.

So, there you have it. Launch Party fills a more casual, social role to meet and catch up with what folks are doing. I think the attendees had a good time networking with each other as well as sitting in on demos/pitches on the startups that attended. It was great to see everyone out, meet some new faces, and get to learn more about some of the great companies and products that folks are working on. I wanted to especially send some congrats to Sun, who stepped up as one of the main sponsors. I just got back from DrupalCon Barcelona, where I met Scott Matoon from Sun -- I'm impressed to see Sun stepping up to different communities, from local ones like Launch Party, to global communities like Drupal. Other than that...go Maura Go!

And now that you're all partied out, head on over to WorkSpace next Thursday, October 4th, for DemoCampVancouver03.

(Photo by Roland Tanglao, of Victoria Revay and Dave Olson)

Next Thursday, September 13th would be slightly less than 6 weeks after BarCamp Vancouver...but would keep things rolling.

What say you? Should we go ahead and roll with something ad hoc next week, or wait until October 4th? Leave a comment! Make a blog post! Suggest a topic/speaker/demo!

Update: Oct. 4th it is, check Facebook for the event listing that just got sent out, and I've just copy/pasted the wiki page: DemoCampVancouver03. Coming up right before that is Launch Party -- but I'll do a longer post on that as I get more info on it.