DemoCamp Dubai – A Quick Review Of The Event

The second DemoCamp Dubai event to be organised by Dubai Internet City took place at the Dubai Knowledge Village Auditorium a few hours ago, and I have to say the reaction I had and the one I saw and felt from the people in the auditorium was a lot better than it was at the previous one; the presenting startups were interesting, and the setup felt a bit less formal, which was a good thing.

If there’s one thing I still think needs to be addressed in future editions it’s that the presenters should spend more of their time on stage showing us how their projects work instead of taking us through powerpoint slides.

The event kicked off with a non-startup presentation by Marwan bin Haider, the CIO of DEWA (Dubai Electricity and Water Authority), who talked about DEWA’s iPhone, BlackBerry and iPad apps as well as the process of building such mobile apps and how developers could go about creating apps themselves.

The startup presentations kicked off after that in the following order:

O-Minds: An open source and web development company, who presented their free FlashFirebug tool that allows developers to debug Flash files on the fly through the browser. They also talked about the use of Unity to create rich virtual 3D environments that can be accessed online through the web browser.
Presenter: Ashraf Amayreh (Founder).

Book Trader: A university project launched by two students in the form of a website that enables students to buy and sell their used books, in order to make and save money.
Presenters: Alexander Fuchs, Jamal Al Bloushi (Founders)

AdGoing: A platform that is basically an ad marketplace, enabling publishers to put their text and display ad spots up for sale, and making it easy for advertisers to find and buy them. A new feature that was announced at this DemoCamp was the notion of Agents, whereby other parties would be able to setup their own marketplaces based on AdGoing’s platform, with a cut of their revenue going to AdGoing.
Presenter: Saleh Ali (Founder).

twtrtales: A project that enables collaborative story writing through tweets. People would get to start a new hashtag for a story, and then they’d start contributing to writing the story one tweet at a time, with users being able to say if they like the additions and through that deciding what goes into the story and what doesn’t.
Presenters: Kedar Iyer, Rami Kayyali,  Nagranee Channa (Founders).

The Question Company: An sms-based service that enables users in the UAE to sms any question to them and get an answer back in a few minutes time. The service is available for both Etisalat and Du subscribers and costs 3 Dirhams per question.
Presenters:  Andrew Meikle (Founder, Managing Partner), James Oliver (Sales & Marketing Manager).

Loomni: A new project that was recently reviewed here, attempting to make continued education and learning cheaper and more accessible to everyone through shorter, better targeted courses given by specialists.
Presenter: Nagi Salloum (Founder).

Stay tuned for more about this DemoCamp Dubai event and the startups presented at it. There’ll hopefully also be some videos from the event too.