MinneDemo 2 Recap
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"Whew!" is all I can say.
It went off great! Dan and I learned from the first event and found a venue that could accommodate networking and demos. I was worried that no one would want to watch the demos, but that was completely unfounded! The demo room was packed, and so was the bar.
We have to give a big thanks to our sponsors, the presenters, and Ted at the Acadia Cafe for making this event possible.
We had a really diverse crowd of people from all kinds of backgrounds. Justin Kruger and Bob Waldron -- who are hard-core into BarCamp -- even drove up from Milwaukee (and crashed at my place), and a couple of guys from Souix Falls's Electric Pulp who were in town showed up.
Unfortunately, I didn't get to see all the demos, but what I did see was promising (though next time, we're going to have to enforce the no PowerPoint rule with a cricket bat). The Doomtree Reactive Video utility was pretty much the awesomest thing I've seen in a long time.
The coolest thing about MinneDemo and MinneBar is the community that they foster. After three events, faces and names are starting to be familiar. People I met at MinneBar are friends, and people who came to the first MinneDemo are part of the tech scene. I think it will just grow from there. I'll be disappointed if we don't get some startups happening out of this...
More:
MinneDemo thoughts thread on Google Groups.
Graeme Thickins: 'MinneDemo 2' Was One Hot Ticket!