New Demos, new day for TO tech
A new ground-up approach to tech events in Toronto is giving the city’s tech scene new life
A couple of weeks ago, I attended New Demos 2, the second in a new event series started by internetVin and Tommy Trinh, two Toronto west-enders who turned a serendipitous meeting into a scrappy demo day in January, followed by a slightly less scrappy (but still pleasantly underproduced) version two in April. The format of the event was simple: A handful of people building stuff have five minutes to show the assembled crowd what it is they’re building. There’s no exhibitors, there’s a limited number of spots available for the crowd and the only marketing is word-of-mouth.
It felt more like the end of a hackathon than even the most informal night of programming and cocktails that you typically get in the city scene these days (also, it was a fully dry event – with an optional ‘after-party’ hosted at a nearby bar that was similarly done quick and cheap rather than takeover and canapés.
New Demos 1, and New Demos 2, were easily the best tech events I’ve attended in years (yes, you even can include the rather large annual tech event that I hosted until very recently). Much of the stuff demoed was raw, and some of it wasn’t even really a product or a prototype — more a process diary or a perspective on how someone was thinking, about society, creativity and the combination of both. Some stuff was polished and launched, too, and more than a few of the tools on display found their way into my daily routines.
One prevailing theme common to many of the projects with an occupation with AI, and how to center new product development on the capabilities that things like LLMs make possible. Leaving aside the technical demos, another theme was a movement away from the typically Canadian tendency to avoid the spotlight – replaced with something that still felt very distinct from the American bravado and showmanship that sometimes gets attached to US founders, but that felt like finally Canadians were feeling confident in their abilities, and driven to share that with a crowd of their peers.
Canada’s entrepreneurship economy is in a bit of a furor right now, but I know one thing for sure after attending both of these: The builders coming out of Toronto, Waterloo and other amazing Canadian centers of technical education aren’t paying attention to that – they’re focused squarely on building, and building in public with an emerging network that wants them to come out, share what they’re up to, feed back into each other and create some damn amazing stuff.
ICYMND2 (in case you missed new demos 2), here’s what got shown off and by who:
Chaotic Era (Gabriel O’Flaherty-Chan)
Folding Fan (Eric Chen)
Reflecting on Recent Experiments (Anson Yu)
Chatforce (Robert Ciborowski)
Kinopio (Pirijan Keth)
Spacebar (Daniel Armitage)
Noisy, Calculated, Imperfect Design (Erica Whyte)
Stackabl (Devansh Shah)
Keyflow (Millin Gabani)
Command Line Factorio (Case Ploeg)
Futureland 2 (internetVin)