We were lucky enough to win a draw run by Sun Microsystems for a ticket to MeshU which was held yesterday at MaRS. Good thing too because it was sold out!

It was a fun and informative day with lots of different talks divided along three tracks: Development, Management, and Design. I stuck mostly with the management track, listening to talks by Daniel Debow from rypple.com, Carl Mercier of Defensio, April Dunford of Rocket Lauch Marketing, and Jason Oke from Juniper Park. I did get to see one design talk about branding from Bruce Philip of GWP Brand Engineering.

I learned a lot and met many interesting people. The experience was great and we have Sun and Sandra Macdonald of Embarkonit Management Consultants to thank.

We had the privilege of doing a demo of foodea.com at DemoCamp Toronto 19.

It was a great event, with an enormous amount of community support. This time the event went back to its roots and was held at the Imperial Pub at Yonge and Dundas. The pub was a great venue, as it made the event more intimate and more conducive to conversation. For the presenters, it was also a great layout, as everyone in the audience was easily able to see and hear the demos.

As our first public demo of Foodea, it went off without any technical hiccups. In the brief five minutes we had, we explained the philosophy behind foodea, showed off our new homepage widget (thanks to Dritan!), gave a brief technical walk through of the site and it’s functions, and then did some Q+A. The questions asked by the community were great. Plus, it inspired many to search foodea for bacon related recipes, which is always good!

One of the questions asked was really interesting, “Why do we have so many content areas, instead of focusing on only one?” The answer to this is very simple, and fundamental to our philosophy. For us, foodea is where food lovers connect to share their passion. Foodea provides the tools and capabilities to facilitate this interaction. We believe users will gravitate towards the areas that interest them, and because we are a user generated community, we are not the content creators, or providers (we are also foodea users as well, check out our my kitchen pages, Matthew and Mike).

During the event, we ran a twitter search to see what the community was saying about us. We were ecstatic at the results:

@erin_bury - Erin Bury

@fuzzz - Andre Gaulin

@kurtgooden - Kurt Gooden

@lamachannel - Laura

@Sunir - Sunir Shah

@ahmadnassri - Ahmad Nassri

Check out all of the tweets here, and connect with us on twitter: @matthewharris and @mikeblankier

Also had some feedback from the blogosphere:

ThomasPurves.com
At first glace, Foodea is classic democamp, here’s a vertical special interest social media rails site I made in my pajamas. Essentially a social recipe site with the ability comment, edit, upload photo/video etc and the ability to export ingredients to a shopping list (not a bad idea). All ingredients also hyperlinked to the “pantry” area of site where they have a wikipedia like section dedicated to food ingredients.
http://www.thomaspurves.com/2009/03/03/democamp-19-million-toronto/

Mike Conley’s Blog
A food related website.  Lists recipes, lets users rate them, comment, etc.  As a user, you can add this recipe to your “Favourites”.  Recipes can have back-stories, you can add photos and videos (great for folks like me who need to see cooking happen to pull it off).
http://mikeconley.ca/blog/2009/03/03/democamp-march-3rd-2009/

The other demo-ers showed off some great ideas and products:

Akoha is the world’s first social reality game where you can earn points by playing real-world missions with your friends. Think of it like a real-world pay it forward. We really enjoyed Austin’s presentation, and picked up a few decks to give it a try.

BackType is a conversational search engine that indexes millions of comments from across the web so they can be discovered, followed and shared. These guys were super intelligent, and we will definitely be using backtype to keep track of foodea chatter on the interwebs.

Dex is a professional networking and CRM app.  It’s like if linkedin, salesforce.com and xobni had a (smart) baby.  A great idea, as it integrates all the social networking sites as well, and Scott was a really approachable and nice guy.

Image Spark is a tool aimed at creative professionals that lets you upload, discover and organize images that inspire your work. We love designing, and inspiration at foodea, so we’re looking forward to playing around with this innovative tool.

Albert Lai, Kontagent: Get Viral. Get Kontagent. Viral Engineering – More analytics, less STD. Kontagent is a provider of analytics for apps on social media sites, specifically facebook. Once we get around to launching a facebook app, kontagent is going to be a valuable source of metric information.

Aside from the demo’s, there were also a few Ignite Presentations. Ignites are short five minute presentations using 20 slides that are rotated automatically after 15 seconds. The Ignites at DCT19 were insightful and inspiring.

Leigh Honeywell, HackLab.TO: Leigh introduced us to HackLab.TO and the global hackerspaces community. HackLab is like a geek community centre where anyone can become a member, and have a place to work and play with technology!

Amos Latteier, n8rtxt.org. This was a great talk and crazy idea. You text your location to 416-662-3408. In return you get a personalized nature haiku. Here’s one of ours: Spring night, Victoria St & Dundas Square, Toronto, ON, Canada — “dark silvr mapls / Eaton Centre, a few stars / near cafe tabls”. At the end of the ignite everyone in the room was texting for their own haiku.

Shawn Konopinsky, Infusion Development – Designing for a big table. An eye opening discussion of the evolution of user interfaces, and the movement towards NUI.

Varun Mather, Alertle - What we did right and where we screwed up - a look back on the crazy past few yrs running a “Web 2.0″ (now dead, too) startup. A frank and open presentation on the promise of a great idea, building it out, and watching it fail. Varun is the man for being able to stand up there, and give this talk.

Aidan Nulman, @anulman - a call-to-action for DemoCampers to get involved with local community organizations needing specialized work. Spoke about @Communitie, a project focused on social good, by connecting specialized workers in Toronto with local non-profits that need specialized work.

What did we get out of our DemoCamp experience? We had a great time demo-ing foodea to community. Saw many fantastic projects and met lots of interesting people in the Toronto startup community.

Bottom line. We plan to rejig our strategy in the coming days and shift our focus towards bacon

HoHoTo is shaping up to be The Toronto tech event of the holiday season. It will be held on Monday December 15th, 2008 at The Mod Club in Toronto.

If you are interested in attending, I recommend getting tickets asap, as they will likely sell out quickly!

Tickets are $10 with proceeds going to the Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank.

“Join us at the #HoHoTo holiday party at The Mod Club Monday, December 15, 2008 at 7:00 PM (ET). Cash bar, DJ’s, and lots of twitterluvvin’ - what more could you want? It’s for geeks, phreaks, webheads, twitterfiends, techies, media, marketing, and PR types and all their friends. And everyone else! DJ’s, interactive media, and loads of holiday cheer, all for a great cause - The Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank.
It’s for geeks, phreaks, webheads, twitterfiends, techies, media, marketing, and PR types and all their friends. And everyone else! DJ’s, interactive media, and loads of holiday cheer, all for a great cause!”

Tickets are available at the official HoHoTo page, or via EventBrite. You can also contribute directly to the Daily Bread Food Bank (even if you don’t plan on attending).

If you’d like to follow or share event updates on twitter, use #HoHoTo.

This past weekend, Foodea.com had a booth at the Gourmet Food & Wine Expo. Having our own booth there was an amazing experience, as it was our first public showing of Foodea.com. We also had a chance to sample some great food and wine from our fellow exhibitors!

Check out some of the shots of our booth:

As you can see, we had a big honkin TV (courtesy of Camera Department)!

We showed two clips:

This was a montage of different cooking segments that foodea users have uploaded. *No audio.

This video was an overall tour of the site. *No audio.

People really seemed impressed by the site and it has been reflected in our rising hits. Another factor in our hit counts going up is the fact that, during the show, we opened up the site to the public! No more pesky invitation codes or signing in to take a look around.

We met some very cool people at the show, here are some shots of their booths.

Share a Glass was our neighbor. They are a wine entertainment company that create events for wine tastings and educate people about wine.
http://www.shareaglass.com/

The Perfect Steak Company is all about giving you the perfect steak. From prime cuts to awesome sauces, the Perfect Steak company has you covered.
http://www.theperfectsteak.com

Cheese Of Canada is home to cheese expert and personality Gurth Pretty. Gurth is an awesome guy who is very passionate about not only cheese, but also foods and cuisines that are uniquely Canadian http://www.cheeseofcanada.ca

August’s Harvest is a Canadian company that creates several products, including a line of spreads made from Saskatoon berries. Similar to Blueberries but much tastier and sweeter. Pictured here is Eli Ham who co-runs the company and is an all around cool guy.
http://www.augustsharvest.com

Live Organic Food Bar is one of the first restaurants to have a profile on foodea.com. Owned and run by Jennifer Italiano, the booth was wicked and the food there is incredibly tasty, and since its vegan, very healthy.
http://www.livefoodbar.com

Come visit Foodea.com this weekend at the Gourmet Food and Wine Expo! The expo runs all weekend at the Metro Convention Center (South Building). It features over 200 exciting food related exhibitions, and more than 1,200 fine wines, beers, and spirits.

Tickets are $15 and are available at the door or through Ticketmaster.  Sampling tickets are $1 each.

Show Features:

• One day unlimited access to the Expo floor
• The opportunity to explore and learn about nearly every wine region from around the globe
• Complimentary professional chef presentations at the Food Network Stage
• Cheese tastings and educational sessions at the Dairy Farmers of Canada Cheese Corner
• A chance to sample cuisine from some of Toronto’s hottest chefs and restaurants
• Access to premium spirits and sampling from Toronto’s finest craft and micro breweries
• Preview the newest accessories and gift items for wine and culinary enthusiasts
• Live entertainment in the Central Entertainment Area
• Informative wine tasting sessions at the Connoisseur’s Corner stage (nominal fee to attend)

Must be 19 years of age or older. No children or infants permitted.