When explaining Calgary’s DemoCamp and BarCamp to friends, prepare for the inevitable question…

“Why does BarCamp happen in a lecture hall, but DemoCamp happen in a bar?”

Of course there is no good answer to this, but by restating the facts slower and louder your friend might think they’re missing something obvious. Pretend like you are talking to a dog. If you can indirectly communicate to them that they are an idiot even needing to ask the question… then you’ve won.

Why might you want to attend DemoCamp… and perhaps even demo?

• Learn what software is being developed in your home town. Tired of working on Calgary oil and gas applications? There’s always interesting project in need of code monkeys.
• Hone your presentation skills. Do you want to look like a frigging idiot in front of a of VCs? Stone cold sober VCs? Or a crowd which has consumed enough beer to forgive almost all your mistakes?
• Present to VCs! Yes there are investors there as well. If you’re going to make a mistake, best to do it in a casual environment where you can solicit feedback.
• Crowdsource potential pitfalls and improvements. Maybe there is a way to improve your app or market your app which simply hasn’t occurred to you. You’ve been working on that app for too long, so show it to some fresh eyes.

Hope to see you at DemoCampCalgary 11!

It is fall up here in Canada, which means the good times are over and the polar bear skins are getting hauled out of the attic.
We thought this would be a good time to get you caught up on the goings on of Cambrian House.

We’ve been building stuff. We Stealth-launched of our Chaordix Crowdsourcing software and we’re getting good traction on it.

• We built VenCorps on Chaordix and we’re really proud of the work we’ve done.
• We’ve also started work on Make Good Technologies
• We’ve got some other great partners on board that we will be announcing shortly!

Why have we chosen another name that is difficult to spell (a thousand curses on the squatter that bought Cambrainhouse.com)? It is an ode to Dee Hock, the founder of Visa. He spoke about bringing Chaos and Order together to create Chaordic organizations. With Chaordix software, you can combine the power of crowds (chaos) with the power of your organization (order). We also think it would make an awesome word to throw down in a scrabble game.

2. Gord and Blue miss making videos, so they’ll be posting stuff on a more regular basis now that summer’s over and Gord is finished working on his tan.

3. We’ve had proud moments over the summer

• We placed 4th at the KPMG Pick20 awards, they said nice things about us.
• Greg got a new motorcycle.
• MJ and Blue spoke all over, including Stanford, San Francisco, Vancouver, Banff, and the Calgary International Film Festival.
• We’ve got some awesome new co-workers

Maybe you have questions that our websites don’t fully answer. Feel like there’s no one to turn to? I’m here for you. Drop me an email mj [at] cambrianhouse [dot] com and I’ll be happy to chat.

Its been 4 months since Cambrian House’s last blog post. 4 months since our community website was deprecated and for all public activities, Cambrian House went dark. Ah the peaceful crickets.

Of course CH has signed over a million dollars in Chaordix sales over that time and infused our coding team with some amazing new talent. (But that is incredibly boring and I only mention because still the meme in circulation is that we’re dead. Thank you TechCrunch… How your gift keeps on giving while we continue chugging away.)

I expect we lost our core audience for this blog. Hello out there? [”Hello… hello… echo…”] Well there’s nothing more freeing than a blog without an audience. You can pretty much post anything you want!

In the coming months, we’re going to be posting video on a regular basis. The subject matter will be quite different since we don’t have an IdeaWarz to cover… but we’ll worry about that when we relaunch the video blog. What I wanted to do with this video was experiment with a style I first saw used in Zero Punctuation.

F-Word Language Warning!

How much effort can it be to animate like that I wondered? Minus the cleverness and stick figures of course… I was curious about frantic pacing of the visuals. The angry-man phone call was a perfect excuse enough to find out, and I’m here to report its a bit time consuming but totally doable!

So when you’re watching a future Cambrian House video and your friend says, “Hey, they’re kinda stealing Zero Punctuation’s animation style!” you can just shake your head and correct your friend:

“They are totally stealing Zero Punctuation’s animation style.”