If you know anyone looking for a great job in Guelph, Ontario, send them me way asap! Specifically we’re looking for:

• Front End Developer, details or apply.
• Developer, details or apply.

As well, if you just have tips on how to get the word out there about our open positions, let me know?

DemoCampGuelph9 is coming up on May 13th. Head here and sign up if you’ll be attending. If you’d like to submit for a demo spot then contact me directly asap.

Our invited speaker this time around is Jay Goldman, who will be speaking about TransitCamp — the story and the end results. Jay is a technologist, designer, speaker, author, and generally swell guy. He wrote the Facebook Cookbook, hosts Mr. Mobile on Butterscotch.com, works at Rypple, the world’s most awesome startup, and is a steward of the Toronto DemoCamp Community.

Please note the venue change as we’re at the eBar this time around. As usual, if you’ve been before, please bring someone new along. If you haven’t joined us before then come say hi. Spread the word, talk us up!

A quick all-over-the-place post.

MeshU
Once again thanks for the Mesh crew for putting on Mesh and MeshU in Toronto last week. Organizing events like this can be a thankless gig at the best of times. I was lucky enough to speak at MeshU and I will make excuses in saying I had little time to prepare. If you were in my session I hope I was better than a “gaping hole in the schedule”. Something tells me I won’t need an agent anytime soon to handle the flood of requests for speaking engagements.

Awards
While it technically is tooting my own horn, I’m actually tooting the horn for the amazing crew I’m lucky enough to spend my work days with. BrainPark was recently recognized as one of the “Top 25 Canadian IT Up and Comers” by Branham.

I’m more proud of this one, however, as it speaks more to how we do things rather than what we do. We’ve been recognized as one of “WorldBlu’s Most Democratic Workplaces 2009“.

In both cases, we’re recognized amongst some great companies so congratulations to everyone at BrainPark. I’d like to tell you to take the rest of the week of but that wouldn’t be very democratic of me.

I’m fortunate to have to chance to speak at the sold out meshU tomorrow in Toronto. It will, however, be a late night prepping tonight. If you’re attending, please be patient with me and realize I’m a late sub and have had little time to prepare. Make sure to say hi at meshU or Mesh as I’ll be at both events.

Thanks again to Mark, Mathew, Mike, Rob, Stuart and the many others who toil to make these events happen each year.

I’m forever saying, to anyone who hasn’t yet tuned my voice out, that search will soon be like browsing is today. No one browses the web anymore. We all, however, spend too much time searching today, oh the avenues we have available to us. I can search in more places today than I ever thought possible.

Here’s the issue, I don’t want to search. I’m as interested in searching on my computer as I am in searching for my keys every morning or that one sock. It’s a painful means to an end I want stopped. Give me that Alfred dude batman has who’ll hand me my sock and keys just as I’m about to say “where’s my soc…oh, thanks Alfred”.

Add to this that I don’t want to put things in folders, name them creatively, tag them etc, all aimed at surrounding the objects with every conceivable piece of meta data possible in an attempt to predict the exact context in the future in which I’ll try to recall them.

So, examples of a glimpse of a better world? I present Tineye. The most publicized usage for tineye is seeing how other people are using a particular photo. That’s incredibly useful to a niche I’m not in. The usage I’m interested in relate to a more human search.

Check out how Ali used tineye. Here’s what I want. I’m walking home tonight from work. I walk by the church you may have noticed if you’ve been to Guelph. I consider how cool that church would look in various lighting and realize that tons of photos have likely been taken of this place. I pull out my camera and snap a picture. That photo is my search query. Hopefully tineye will show me loads of photos people have taken of that church, maybe even connect me with wikipedia and other information about the church.

Realize what I did NOT do. I didn’t craft the perfect search query. I didn’t tag anything. I didn’t even have to get the name of the church.

Why am I thinking about all this? Well let’s say that at brainpark, we’re hoping to do what I’ve described above with images but with your work product. Allow you to stop searching and get back to getting work done.

So apparently we don’t learn from our mistakes? I love it that it’s news in 2009 that a business requires revenue to sustain themselves.

“Ultimately, though, every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internet bubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch.”

For me, the subtle part of this is when you think about how many responsible businesses don’t exist today because of this approach. Over the short haul, it’s tough to pit reasonable business plans directly against unreasonable ‘free’ handouts. Sure there are some who stuck to their guns and succeeded but they’re the exception.

We see similar behaviour on the services side with BandOfCoders. There’s always a lower, and usually unreasonable, bid. It’s easy to get drawn into that but before you know it you’ll be forced to sacrifice what differentiated you in the first place. Inefficiencies, and driving them out of your company, is one thing but unsustainable businesses are just hard to compete with.

In our case, we typically don’t compete. A lot of those projects and clients return to us after having spent more than our original quote and ending up with far less. It’s unfortunate but something that often requires first hand experience.

The same exists with ‘free’ applications or services. You need to be very aware of the applications you use regardless of price. There’s typically a real cost to you, or your company, associated with migrating off any service or application. An unreasonable business model will eventually fail and you’ll have to find a new home and pay those real costs to migrate there.

This is also why offerings like Bizspark mean nothing to me personally. If you choose a tech stack to build your business around purely because of a few free years, you’re naive and in trouble. Nothing against Bizspark as the same applies to an open source stack, don’t choose a foundation for your business because of free licensing costs!

Don’t let age or lack of skill get in your way. With Jamie from Brainpark’s help, I’ve been able to live out my dreams, including playing hockey with my local OHL team. Live your dreams people!

hockey

Another Brydon hits slopes

This week’s DemoCampGuelph8 was my favourite we’ve held so far. The part I love about hosting this event, it feels like I’m just taking a bunch of friends out for pints, which is a dream for me.

While we are very lucky to be sponsored by Communitech and Sun, these events are not your typical conference affair. They aren’t museums or corporate deals you just show up and walk through while keeping to yourself. These events will only be as great as what the community decides to put into them. Myself and the people who organize these do nothing beyond simple promotion and organization. They live and die on what you all bring to them. What I’m trying to say is you’re all doing a great job because these events are getting better each and everytime so thanks to all who attended, helped organize, demo’d etc.

Now, for those of you who missed out. If you aren’t making it out to these events because demo’s don’t interest you then I’ll let you in on a poorly kept secret. The demo’s are not the point, they’re the gravy. This event is purely about connecting and strengthening our local tech community. That’s done through relationships and everything about how we plan these events is focused on facilitating that. If you aren’t part of that then what are you up to exactly?

What’s Coming?

We’ll pick a date and announce DemoCampGuelph9 in the coming months, likely with a May date. I grabbed us DemoCampGuelph.com to create a simple one stop shop for all info about dcg. If you’re interested in activity around this event, sign up to our google group as well.

I love hearing feedback about these events, so please comment here or contact me directly. Please forward all purely negative comments here or start your own event.

Last reminder, tonight is DemoCampGuelph8. Get out and join us at The Albion! Sign up to attend and introduce yourself tonight.

You can be either a fan of Super Mario bros or a fan for the cartoon characters of your childhood, no matter what character impressed your memory, the most important thing is that you lived a real long lasting adventure following your hero.

We want here to make a list of all the top cartoon characters of all times, in order to give voice to those old cartoon personages who are by now forgotten by many people or that the youngest generations didn’t get to know.

Bobby Hill: this cartoon character played in “King of the Hill” in the late 1990’s. He has a positive attitude, he’s always funny and dreamer, but he probably didn’t get to grow up.

Wonder Woman: this is the most popular female cartoon character who played the role of a common male hero. She is sexy and strong, beautiful and superhero.

Daria: the cartoon series where we can find Daria is called “Beavis and Butt-head” and it’s from late 1990’s. Daria is smart and tries to be herself, her life is like many other teenagers with a boyfriend and stressed out parents.

Batman: who doesn’t know Batman? This is one of the heroes who conquered the fantasy and imagination of many generations. Fast, prompt and ready to transform himself in order to save people in trouble.

Superman: one of the super heroes who is coming back in a revival of the last times. Superman fascinated the imagination of many young spectators of his powerful adventures and has been playing a part in comics during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

Spider man: another well known popular super hero who comes from the late 1960’s. He is half human and half spider and he’s still today very loved by many young kids.

As you can see each generation got their superheroes but it’s also a matter of fact that many old heroes come back from the past to fascinate the latest generations.

Each cartoon has its protagonist just like each game has its player. And with an iphone bingo app you can be the real and only one protagonist of your favorite bingo games. Start to see how to play and see how funny it is to play bingo online directly from your mobile phone.

You can bring your games everywhere you go as long as you can connect to the internet.