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by Kevin Browne

Connecting McMaster students to Hamilton jobs

January 31, 2013 in Academic, Hamilton Economic Development, Industry, McMaster

Last night Software Hamilton (@hamiltonsw) and Hamilton Economic Development (@hamiltonecdev) hosted the inaugural Jobs Night at McMaster University. A big part of the motivation for me to organize Software Hamilton events is the frustration I’ve experienced watching the brian drain occur out of McMaster. Year after year an amazingly talented bunch of people graduate from McMaster University and generally leave Hamilton. I’m told this happens in “University towns” everywhere, but I’m fairly certain it’s worse in Hamilton. An obvious example would be RIM (now Blackberry), which has been great for retaining University of Waterloo graduates in their city. We can’t capture all of the McMaster graduates or even most of them at this point, but with Hamilton software firms now hiring in greater numbers than ever before we should be able to start retaining at least some of them.

McMaster has formal channels for connecting students to jobs that work great; my own experience with the co-op program during my undergraduate years was fantastic. I obviously forward any job opportunities I’m aware of to the right contacts internally (McMaster is my employer, and I’m a graduate student there currently).

But in past years I’ve also run more unofficial informal “networking events” for undergraduate students where I’ve had alumni come in and pitch what their company does and what types of jobs they will be looking to fill over the next 6 months. It ends up being educational for the students if nothing else, they get to see what types of career paths exist and what companies out there are looking for in terms of skills and experience. But a cool thing happened where every time I ran one of these events companies would fill positions with students they interacted with that night. I’ve always wanted to do one of these event focusing on companies from Hamilton specifically, but it wasn’t until the software startup and job surge over the last few years that doing so was really possible.

 

 

At Job Night last evening we had Mabel’s Labels, Weever Apps, REfficient, ProSensus, HiFyre and others from the Hamilton-area come in and talk about what positions they’ll be looking to fill over the short term to about 60 students in attendance. I know at least a few of these companies will be conducting interviews with students that they met at the event, and they spoke highly of the McMaster students that they have hired thus far. A representative from the Small Business Enterprise Centre was also there to explain the Summer Company program. Several students indicated they would be using the program to help launch their own software development shops over the summer. There’s a huge opportunity for them there… I get a lot of requests for help with short-term software development projects from companies that are overburdened with work but not yet at a level that they can justify hiring a new employee.

A single event like this isn’t going to stop the brain drain or build a better funnel from McMaster in to Hamilton. In some sectors like healthcare the talent already flows freely and in large numbers from McMaster in to Hamilton. But in others the talent doesn’t flow in to Hamilton, it just flows right out, and the lack of local opportunities can lead to a perception that McMaster is a bit of a wall within Hamilton. Based on feedback from participating companies and students, I suspect Job Night helped put a nice little crack in that wall, with many more to come.

 

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Avatar of Alex Pineda

by Alex Pineda

Stanford’s Venture Lab to offer new courses this fall

September 6, 2012 in Academic, Community, Education, Startup

Venture lab

There are 5 new Stanford classes to be offered on Venture Lab, an entrepreneurship focused Stanford MOOC initiative, this Fall.
Here is the list:

Technology Entrepreneurship, Chuck Eesley
Start up Boards, Clint Korver
A Crash Course on Creativity, Tina Seelig
Designing a New Learning Environment, Paul Kim
Finance, Kay Giesecke

“My technology entrepreneurship is going to be a repeat of last Spring’s class. It is also an opportunity for those of you who were too busy in the Spring to take the class on a fully developed platform. Clint Korver’s class on start up board is the first in our advanced series on entrepreneurship. The class is more suitable for those of you who already have formed a team. I highly recommend it! !

We look forward to seeing you in the next classes. Meanwhile, please spread the word to your colleagues and friends and on social networks.”
- Chuck Eesley

Stanford’s free online courses are taught by regular Stanford faculty and are highly interactive. Enrollees do not get Stanford credit for their work, but they do receive a statement of accomplishment if they successfully complete a course. The classes are delivered on a number of different platforms.

If you are interested in MOOCs you may want to check these out too:

Stanford online
Coursera
Udacity
edX

 

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Avatar of Jacques Carette

by Jacques Carette

GenCheck – a generalized property-based testing framework

June 20, 2012 in Academic, McMaster

Test.GenCheck is a Haskell library for generalized proposition-based testing. It simultaneously generalizes QuickCheck and SmallCheck.

Its main novel features are:

  • introduces a number of testing strategies and strategy combinators
  • introduces a variety of test execution methods
  • guarantees uniform sampling (at each rank) for the random strategy
  • guarantees both uniqueness and coverage of all structures for the exhaustive strategy
  • introduces an extreme strategy for testing unbalanced structures
  • also introduces a uniform strategy which does uniform sampling along an enumeration
  • allows different strategies to be mixed; for example one can exhaustively test all binary trees up to a certain size, filled with random integers.
  • complete separation between properties, generators, testing strategies and test execution methods

The package is based on a lot of previous research in combinatorics (combinatorial enumeration of structures and the theory of Species), as well as a number of established concepts in testing (from a software engineering perspective). In other words, further to the features already implemented in this first release, the package contains an extensible, general framework for generators, test case generation and management. It can also be very easily generalized to cover many more combinatorial structures unavailable as Haskell types.

The package also provides interfaces for different levels of usage. In other words, there is a ‘simple’ interface for dealing with straightforward testing, a ‘medium’ interface for those who want to explore different testing strategies, and an ‘advanced’ interface for access to the full power of GenCheck.

See http://hackage.haskell.org/package/gencheck for further details.

In the source repository (https://github.com/JacquesCarette/GenCheck), the file tutorial/reverse/TestReverseList.lhs shows the simplest kinds of tests (standard and deep for structures, or base for unstructured types) and reporting (checking, testing and full report) for the classical list reverse function. The files in tutorial/list_zipper show what can be done with the medium level interface (this tutorial is currently incomplete). The brave user can read the source code of the package for the advanced usage — but we’ll write a tutorial for this too, later.

User beware: this is gencheck-0.1, there are still a few rough edges.  We plan to add a Template Haskell feature to this which should make deriving enumerators automatic for version 0.2.

Jacques and Gordon

 

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

AppsForHealth helps build Ontario’s eHealth community

May 11, 2012 in Academic, Education, eHealth, Hamilton, mHealth, Mohawk

Over the last two days I attended Mohawk College’s AppsForHealth conference. The two day conference first took place last year, with the second occurring May 10-11th of 2012. The first day of the conference was centered around talks, discussion panels, technology showcases and networking for professionals and students alike. The second day of the conference was centered around a student mHealth app design competition where teams of students attempt to design mobile solutions to health care challenges posed by industry sponsors. I was part of the UI design panel that took place during the first day of the conference. The diversity of the community at the event in terms of career backgrounds made for lively and interesting discussions, as nursing students, med school students, family doctors, policy makers and entrepreneurs in the audience connected with a diverse mix of UX and UI design experience on the panel. At one point the following Tweet was briefly brought up on the screen:

 

 

It reminded me of articles I’ve come across over the last year like The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future by Alexis Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) advocating for a new paradigm for startups, and Stop Building Apps and Start Disrupting Industries by Michael Karnjanaprakorn (@mikekarnj) encouraging startups to focus on disrupting industries such as education and healthcare.

I do love Angry Birds, but when I read articles like these and Tweet’s like the above, it makes me think about watching shows like Star Trek growing up, where technology was being used in the future to save lives and drastically improve quality of life. I remember Dr. McCoy thought our health care might as well be from the dark ages! Wherever they found their inspiration, I think that like health care professionals, a lot of engineers and scientists are motivated to do what they do by the possibility of improving people’s lives and creating a better future.

 

 

That’s why I’m excited about AppsForHealth and other events across Canada like Hacking Health in Montreal that are working towards increasing and improving the usage of technology in health care. The infrastructure for supporting eHealth and mHealth in terms of internet access, bandwidth and market penetration is now in place, and increasingly capable mobile devices are gaining larger market penetration with lower costs every year. There are great opportunities for using this new technology to improve health in Canada and around the world. And with rising health care costs squeezing government budgets to the point of credit downgrade warnings, technology may provide an alternative solution to the undesirable options of either decreasing services or increasing costs.

You can check out some video coverage of the first day of AppsForHealth here:

 

 

The student challenge portion of the event was focused on designing mHealth solutions to challenges posted by non-profit and health care organizations. Students formed teams with a mix of technical and medical skills in the weeks before the event, and were able to access professional mentors during the pre-event mixer and the event itself to improve their solutions. The top three prizes as awarded by the judges were $3000, $2000 and $1000 respectively. Check out the list of challenges below:

  • World Vision Challenge – How might we use mobile technology to support growth monitoring and counselling for children under the age of 5 to improve nutrition and reduce child mortality in developing countries? [link]
  • Electronic Dermatology Consultation – How can mobile technology be used to streamline dermatology consultations in the primary care setting? [link]
  • Mobile Assistance Solution for Youth with Lupus – How could a mobile app increase connectedness with other young people with lupus; track symptoms; remind them to take their medications, include an up-to-date summary of their current status; allow communication of their health status to health care providers; and ide healthy role models in a way that is easy to access, empowering and fun and that won’t require individual feedback to users? [link]
  • Interoperability Between Specialized Data and Generic EHR – How could nurses use technology in a long term care organization to plan, evaluate and document evidence-based care? How could technology enable safe transition of care at shift change? How could technology interoperate with the EHR to improve patient care and capture health outcome data? [link]
  • Mobile Education App for Prostate Cancer – Design an application that will be used to educate men on prostate cancer and provide them with the relevant questions to ask their doctor, based on their profile and disease stage – screening, diagnosis, treatment, living with cancer or remission. [link]
  • Technological Assistance for Children with Chronic Health Conditions – How can technology be used to improve accessibility and ease of use of the new WHO classification system (ICF-CY) to process, collect and display information about the ‘disability’ and ‘functional’ status of children with chronic health conditions? [link]
  • Mobile Solution to Reduce Mortality Rates in Northern Haiti – How can we use mobile decision support and mobile technology to improve effective institutional delivery referrals to reduce maternal and infant mortality rates in rural communities in Northern Haiti? [link]
  • Leveraging Technology to Assist Seniors with Alternative Living and Long-Term Care – How could mobile technology be used to assist seniors and their families explore and discuss alternate living environments and long-term care options? [link]
  • Medical Records Challenge – How can a chronic disease patient track their relevant symptoms using an application, meanwhile utilizing the live data from this symptom tracker to trigger retrieval or receipt of research- based recommendations, and present those recommendations to both the patient in their PHR and to their health care providers’ EMR? [link]

The winners were announced at the close of the event on Friday afternoon:

 


1st Place $3,000: Shivani Goyal & Joanne Wong (University of Toronto) for their solution to the youth with lupus challenge supported by SickKids.

 


2nd Place $2,000: Kent Tsui (McMaster University), Gawain Tang (McMaster University) & Steven D’Costa (Ryerson University). Electronic dermatology consultation challenge by Hamilton Family Health Team.

 


3rd Place $1,000: Lauren Harris,Teresa Coutu, leanne Fernandez (McMaster University), Adam Carriere, Lina Tirilis (Mohawk College). Supporting seniors with alternative living and long-term care planning challenge, Niagara Haldimand Brant CCAC.

 

Though I love that it takes place in Hamilton, it was clear during the event that AppsForHealth really has fast become Ontario’s conference for mHealth and eHealth professionals. The keynotes, panelists, experts, technology demonstrators, professionals and students came from Waterloo, London, Toronto, Hamilton and post-secondary institutions from all over Southern Ontario. AppsFoHealth is playing an important community building role for the region. It brings together a group of people with diverse talents and connects them to one another so that together they have the skills required to tackle these challenges. For me personally what I liked the most was being reminded about why I became interested in science and technology to begin with. And I think it was because the challenges themselves were so focused on ideas that would save lives, improve quality of life, and help create that better future for everyone. Organizers Christy Taberner, Duane Bender (@duane_bender) and Mark Casselman (@markcasselman) have put together something really great. I can’t wait to see AppsForHealth 2013.

 

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

McMaster graduate student built a Tricorder

April 21, 2012 in Academic, eHealth, McMaster, mHealth

Peter Jansen (@thetricorderprj) recently earned his PhD in Cognitive Science at McMaster University, and as part of his research he built a working Tricorder!

If you’re interested, maybe you should talk to Peter, he’s looking for partners. There is also the Qualcomm Tricorder X-Prize, a $10 million US prize contest to essentially recreate the Tricorder from the Star Trek franchise. Maybe we’ll see somebody try to build that at AppsForHealth 2013!

 

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Avatar of Alex Pineda

by Alex Pineda

Online courses update

April 20, 2012 in Academic, Digital culture, Education, Industry, Web

It’s not too late to sign up for the April 23rd start of Computer Science 101, Automata, Compilers, Computer Vision Fundamentals, Introduction to Logic, or Machine Learning.

They’ve also added a large amount of more offerings starting later in the summer and fall of 2012. There are around 40 or so classes, check them out: Coursera.org

Coursera

Udacity is also offering 6 courses right now, all taught by world-class professors, all currently in their first week. The first homework assignment is not due until Tuesday the 24th so you still have time to join. You won’t be disappointed in their quality and engagement.

Udacity

Lastly I’m currently taking “Principles of Economics” at academy.mises.org, there are monthly offerings for under $200 if you are interested in broadening your scope in that kind of area.

Mises

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

Improving education with technology – Dundas Central model

April 11, 2012 in Academic, Education

The Spectator covered Dundas Central teacher Heidi Siwak’s (@HeidiSiwak) efforts to use technology to improve learning using technology last December in this article, but I’ve been meaning to throw up a post about it here in case anyone missed the story. Heidi’s efforts have also been covered in The Globe & Mail’s “Future of Education” series, and last month Dundas Central won The Ken Spencer Award given out by the Canadian Education Association for innovation in teaching and learning.

The class uses YouTube, has experimented with a livestream channel and podcasting, uses a document camera to share information, has hosted a student-led global Twitter chat, and have designed a tourism mobile app, amongst other innovative efforts. Heidi is sharing these new models for learning with peers in the US, Canada and Australia, turning the initiative into what the writer of the Ken Spencer Award text called the ‘Dundas Central model’.

Heidi maintains a blog at www.heidisiwak.com where she documents these efforts, in addition to posting about education and technology in the classroom. The students themselves explain how they use technology and what they’ve been up to in the video below, which itself won the 4th Annual 21st Century Video Classroom Challenge.

I have a research interest in education technologies and I’m a fan of “learning by doing” when it makes sense. So it’s great to see a classroom that embraces experimentation with new technology and practical applications. It’s even better to see that the results are being shared openly with the world so others can benefit from the experimentation.

 

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Avatar of Alex Pineda

by Alex Pineda

Learn Web Application Engineering by the co-founder of Reddit

March 28, 2012 in Academic, Education

If you haven’t joined an online course already now is your chance! Udacity has listed several new courses coming up mid-April including Web Application Engineering taught by Steve Huffman, the co-founder of Reddit. Udacity currently has two active courses CS101 and CS373 that you can jump into today for free.  It’s not just Udacity but Coursera with many courses running now or will be running shortly, and let’s not forget MITx.

The first of these free online courses were started in October of 2011: AI Class, Machine Learning and Introduction To Databases. They were run by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun, Andrew Ng, and Jennifer Widom respectively.

Sebastian Thrun, along with several other co-founders, then created their own company called Udacity. Thrun’s methodology is based on the idea of iterative progression: you may get a C in college and be done with it, but with Thrun and Udacity you may get a C, have to try again, and try again until you understand the material and can get an A. Courses are taught by Stanford professors and other passionate guests; mostly using youtube videos and a built-in python interpreter, which leads to an intuitive and fun experience.

At the same time Professor Andrew Ng, along with Professor Daphne Koller  created their own company Coursera.  They are currently offering tons of free online courses taught by professors from Stanford, UofM, and UC Berkeley. Many of the Coursera and Udacity courses overlap.

MITx has launched it’s first course Circuits and Electronics with world re-known professors Anant Argwal , Gerald Sussman (author of SICP, and Scheme programming language), and Piotr Mitros.

There is another MIT endeavor not related to MITx. It is that of Professor Pritchards’ Introductory Physics course running on the MIT RELATE platform which like all others you still have time to register for.

If you’re anything like me you run a tight schedule, so it’s a good thing that most courses will be repeated every ‘term’. The professors improve on every iteration of their classes so you can only expect them to get better, and already the quality is outstanding. Overall it’s a great system and I love the fact there are multiple players from big schools engaging in this method of education. It could lead to something revolutionary if it hasn’t already. If it’s all a bit much I’ve included short descriptions, links, and video where available, for all relevant courses below.

I think everyone should at least dip their toes into one class from Udacity and one from Coursera, you never know where it could lead you or how it could change your context.

 

UDACITY

CS 101 – BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE
For non-programmers learning to program and develop a minimal search engine in python. Taught by Professor David Evans, a great teacher.

CS 253 – WEB APPLICATION ENGINEERING
How the web works, managing state, security, integration, scalability, more… – Taught by Steve Huffman (co-founder of Reddit, Hipmunk)

CS 262 – PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Implement a limited javascript interpeter using python while learning lexical analysis, parsing, and more … – Taught by Professor Westley Weimer

CS 373 – PROGRAMMING A ROBOTIC CAR
Working in python and dealing with probabilities, sensors, path finding, more … – Taught by Professor Sebastian Thrun

CS 387 – APPLIED CRYPTOGRAPHY
Symmetric/Asymmetric encryption, Public-key protocols, Secure computation, more… -Taught by Professor David Evans

Under development:
Theory of Computation, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Distributed Systems, Computer Security, Algorithms and Data Structures, Software Engineering Practices

 

MITx

6.002x CIRCUITS & ELECTRONICS
Serves as a first course in electrical engineering or electrical engineering and computer science – Taught by Professor Anant Agarwal, Professor Gerald Sussman, Piotr Mitros

 

MECHANICS ONLINE (SPRING 2012 MIT RELATE)
Introductory Newtonian Mechanics with some calculus. “We’ll train you to concentrate on planning and understanding the solution rather than focusing on obtaining the answer. ” – Taught by Professor Pritchard

 
COURSERA

MODEL THINKING

From the game of life to societal models of rioting behavior, modeling will help you become a better thinker – Professor Scott E. Page (University of Michigan)

Model Thinking

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

From spelling and grammar correction in word processors to machine translation on the web, from email spam detection to automatic question answering, NLP is everywhere – Taught by Professor Dan Jurafsky (Stanford) and Professor Christopher Manning (Stanford)

Natural Language Processing

GAME THEORY

Learn modeling of conflict among nations, political campaigns, competition among firms, and trading behavior in markets such as the NYSE. – Taught by Professor Matthew O. Jackson (Stanford) and Professor Yoav Shoham (Stanford)

Game Theory

PROBABILISTIC GRAPHICAL MODELS

Learn algorithms for using a PGM to reach conclusions about the world from limited and noisy evidence, and for making good decisions under uncertainty and more. – Taught by Professor Daphne Koller (Stanford)

Probabilistic Graphical Models

CRYPTOGRAPHY

Learn how two parties who have a shared secret key can communicate securely when a powerful adversary eavesdrops and tampers with traffic and more. – Taught by Professor Dan Boneh (Stanford)

Cryptography

DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS I

Learn several fundamental principles of algorithm design. You’ll learn the divide-and-conquer design paradigm, with applications to fast sorting, searching, and multiplication. Learn the answers to questions such as: How do data structures like heaps, hash tables, bloom filters, and balanced search trees actually work, anyway? – Taught by Professor Tim Roughgarden (Stanford)

Design and Analysis of Algorithms I

SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE

Learn engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using the highly-productive Agile development method for Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails – Taught by Professor Armando Fox (UC Berkeley) and Professor David Patternson (UC Berkeley)

Software as a Service

COMPUTER VISION

Learn about remarkable successes of computer vision – capabilities such as face detection, handwritten digit recognition, segmenting out organs or tissues in biological images and more – Taught by Professor Jitendra Malik (UC Berkeley)

Computer Vision

Under development:
CS 101, Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction, Making Green Buildings, Information Theory, Anatomy, Computer Security

 

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Avatar of Kevin Browne

by Kevin Browne

Free online resources for learning programming, computer science

January 16, 2012 in Academic, Community, Industry

Robert Porter (@rgeraldporter) wrote a really great blog post recently: If you want to learn programming for the web.. where do you start?. Programming skills provide ample job opportunities; jobs that also tend to be well paid too. At the same time the cost of learning such skills has never been lower thanks to innovative online solutions that are grabbing attention lately such as Codeacademy and MIT’s free online courses and certificates program. Utilizing these free and accessible online resources to obtain these sought after skills may be a new way for some people to open up career opportunities and raise their income level.

So here is a list of resources for learning programming and computer science, from workplace level skills to elementary school level skills (for junior – because it’s never too early to foster and interest and start learning!). What else should be on this list? A lot of these resources are more academic in nature, are there any resources in the same vein as The Pragmatic Programmer to help somebody that has “learned a programming language” become a better “programmer/developer”?

 

College, University and Workplace Level Online Resources

Codeacademy
“Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code. It’s interactive, fun, and you can do it with your friends.”

Google Code University
“Courses and innovative resources to help CS students, faculty, and instructors.”

MIT OpenCourseWare
“MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.”

School of Webcraft
Part of the Peer 2 Peer University, a “grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievement”. Courses on how to code are run online. Other schools exist for topics such as mathematics.

Stanford University – Free Online Courses
A variety of free CS and math courses will be made available online, scroll down to the bottom to see the featured courses.

The New Boston
Free educational videos.

Webcast.Brekeley
“Webcast.Berkeley is UC Berkeley’s central service for online video & audio for students and learners around the globe.”

 

Elementary to Secondary School Level Online Resources

Alice
“Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming.”

Computer Science Unplugged
“CS Unplugged is a collection of free learning activities that teach Computer Science through engaging games and puzzles that use cards, string, crayons and lots of running around.”

Hackety Hack
“Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up. No previous programming experience is needed! With Hackety Hack, you’ll learn the Ruby programming language. Ruby is used for all kinds of programs, including desktop applications and websites.”

McMaster Computing & Software Outreach
“Whether you are a student, teacher or parent we hope to provide you with the resources you need to learn and have fun with Computer Science and Software Engineering!”

Scratch
“Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.”

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by Kevin Browne

DemoCampHamilton3 Recap: Crow Call

October 3, 2011 in Academic, CIPS-GH, Community, DemoCamp, Department of Computing and Software, Hamilton, Hamilton Economic Development, Industry, Innovation Factory, McMaster, McMaster Industry Liaison Office, Open Data, Open Hamilton, Outreach, Startup Drinks, Startup Weekend Hamilton

DemoCampHamilton3 took place in front of an estimated 200+ members of the community on Wednesday September 28th at the Twelve Eighty pub right on McMaster University campus. The largest ever attendance for a DemoCampHamilton event was double the previous record, mostly because so many McMaster students showed up for what was probably their first DemoCamp experience. DemoCampHamilton3 had excellent community sponsorship in the form of Innovation Factory, Hamilton Economic Development, McMaster Industry Liaison Office and the Department of Computing and Software.

The event was kicked off with a keynote by the “godfather of DemoCamp” David Crow (@davidcrow) himself. Hamilton’s community is young and still learning, and David shared valuable advice about aiming higher, about the importance of “adding two zeros” to our entrepreneurial expectations. He challenged us to not to make excuses about things being easier in Silicon Valley, but to go there and do it if we thought so. David also talked about the strength of community not being in the number of nodes, but in the number of connections between the nodes. He also left us with a useful list of what to read. Thanks for coming down to Hamilton, David!

Jennifer Cameron (@JenniferVerdant) CEO of Verdant Analysis showed off their financial analysis software – the Cogent financial statement analysis tool and Forecast communication platform for the financial community. Verdant Analysis was actually a top ten finalist at the Lion’s Lair event which took place earlier in the month!

Next up was DemoCampHamilton stalwart supporters FluidMedia who did a demo of SkinnyBoard, web-based software that helps agile project teams collaborate to get work done. Somebody yelled out “I love SkinnyBoard!” before the demo could even begin, so they are doing something very right!

Gavin Schulz (@GsMaverick) and Brian Graham of Open Hamilton (@OpenHamilton) demoed the Dowsing app that helps people find the nearest public water play feature, swimming pool, or beach. Joey Coleman (@JoeyColeman) is the passionate leader of the Hamilton branch of the Open Data movement to have governments release or make open certain kinds of data in formats which afford themselves to the creation of apps like Dowsing. If you’re interested in developing Open Data applications, the group meets regularly on Thursday nights at Hamilton’s local hackerspace ThinkHaus.

Next up was the co-founders of another Lion’s Lair finalist, Brad Ross (@BradARoss) and Mike Saniga (@mikesaniga) of Quant Interpretations. They did a demo of their “QiiQ” consumer intelligence solution – a web-based interpretive solution that helps business owners and managers make better decisions: rich insights about consumers: where they live, how they live, how best to connect with them, and how to find others like them.

Alex and Ruxandra Bucataru then came up to demo their Enthuzr social marketing platform that makes word of mouth marketing easy, more viral, and truly measurable. In addition to giving attendees access to an Enthuzr beta invite, Enthuzr is also a sponsor for the upcoming Startup Weekend Hamilton event happening October 21st-23rd – way to support the community guys!

Finally we had Adrian Duyzer (@adriandz) and Martin Eckart of factor[e] design initiative up to demo HomeFinder, a site for finding new and resale homes that is similar to MLS but designed to be much easier to use. They also did a quick plug for a new web portal of the Hamilton Light Rail initiative.

Some people from ThinkHaus were handing out lazzored acrylic keychains in the shape of 8-bit era Super Mario – did you get yours?! If not ThinkHaus (@ThinkHausOrg) opens their doors on 25 Dundurn ST N every Tuesday at 7pm for an openhaus – why not pop in and check out what other cool stuff they have going on? We also had several other community event announcements. Pat Gaudet of CIPS-GH announced a talk by great Mohawk professor Duane Bender taking place at Mohawk College at 6pm this Wednesday October 5th on the state of electronic medical health records in Canada and what the future holds, reservations (required to attend) and details available here. Stephanie Shuster (@stephshuster) and Tammy Hwang (@tammyhwang) of the Innovation Factory talked about the upcoming Innovation Night taking place on the evening of Wednesday October 12th at the McMaster Innovation Park, details and registration here. One night later on Thursday October 13th starting at 6pm we will be having the first ever Startup Drinks Hamilton in the cool downstairs pub of the Kelsey’s at 875 Main Street West, register here.

Special thanks to Dwayne Ali (@interestica) for making our cool new logo, maybe you want to check out his equally well designed website Secret Hamilton that is all about exposing the “hidden gems” of Hamilton? ;-) Special thanks to Jim “microphone guru” Rudnick (@JVRudnick), Simon “unconference Yoda” Woodside (@sbwoodside), Brian Hogg (@brianhogg), Jessica Pavlin, Tammy Hwang and Stephanie Shuster.

It should also be noted that the sponsors for DemoCampHamilton3 aren’t just sponsors, they’re part of the community too, as evidenced by the Department of Computing and Software’s outreach program, the McMaster Industry Liaison Office’s STEM program, Hamilton Economic Development’s mentoring programs and networking events, and Innovation Factory’s Flight Program.

 

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