Canada e-Connect - Jan 21-23, Toronto

Canada e-Connect Conference , Canada’s e- Strategy Conference, hosted by TIAC starts its program today in Toronto. One hundred and eighty six people from across Canada from British Columbia to Newfoundland & Labrador as well Yukon have registered including presenters for the second annual Canada e-Connect Conference.

Dr. Ian Fenwick, co-author of  DigiMarketing : The Essential Guide to new Media and Digital Marketing is the keynote presenter on the first day of the conference.  Other sessions on Day 1 include Vacations Canada TV, e-Distribution strategy, e-Marketing Strategy – Don’t Target, Engage, Making Travellers valued in the Web 2.0 era, Mobile Marketing Strategy, e-Tourism Strategy, Strategic Blogging and Forums, and Destination Marketing – The Road Ahead on the Smart Web.

Some of the companies represented here include, Google, TripAdvisor, Expedia Canada, Triptv.com, Flight centre, Rezgo, Quick Mobile, A Couple of Chicks e-Marketing, Planeteye, Jackrabbit, FCV, and Meridan reservations systems. As well alot of DMO’s and PMO’s are attending and participating at this conference. It plans to be a great two days of presentations.

Trazzler – From the founders of 71miles and Twitter, comes the ‘Where would I rather be right now?’ travel site Trazzler. If you have been reading the blog for a while, you know we are big fans of 71miles and twitter, so we were excited about the new site. And like both those sites, Trazzler is quiet in design and focused on its mission. The site takes into account your location and (they say soon) your personality to deliver one travel recommendation at a time (some call it ‘One Deal at a Time’). The recommendations are actually written by the human hand, rather than crudely pulled from other sites, and offer a simple description of the travel experience…don’t like it, click ‘next.’ Integration with Kayak provides the booking engine connection for the site.

And from the Trazzler blog, a great description of the site’s mission:

Trazzler’s mission is to free people from the distractions and cruft of online travel research. Clear your mind and ask yourself, “Where would I rather be right now?” Then flip through trip pages designed to place you emotionally in a moment with great photography and expert travel writing. Discover travel experiences with a more natural, meandering online experience. Add to your wishlist, explore your travel personality, and take a more inspired approach to online travel—Trazzler is about making it fun.

Wonderful. The site is a refreshing re-thinking of the travel planning site model.
http://trazzler.com/

TripKick – TripKick is SeatGuru for hotels. The service allows you to search (at this time within a limited number of cities) for hotel rooms and determine which room has the best view, best bathroom or is the quietest and away from the elevator. Brilliant. For example, check out the page on the W in Seattle, the site lists what rooms are oversized and have great views. Plus, the design of the site is simple, clean and easy to use. Thank you, TripKick.
http://www.tripkick.com/

PlanetEye – More new travel sites. With backing from some large investors, including Microsoft, PlanetEye takes a slightly different angle on the ‘clip and save’ travel planning site with a focus on mapping (from Microsoft) and images. In addition, the site features several ‘local experts’ in a variety of locations.
http://www.planeteye.com

Knol – Finally, a quick note about Google’s launch of Knol (a unit of knowledge), the search giant’s Wikipedia challenger. Knol, in simple terms, is a user-generated content / article site, like Wikipedia. But unlike Wikipedia, Knol will and can contain multiple articles on the same subject. Plus, unless you authorize contribution from other users, no one else can edit your ‘knol.’ Similar to Squidoo. And what is the travel connection? Think of all the expert ‘knol’ pages you can create about your destination. A lot of work, sure, but the SEO returns could be worth it. Keep an eye on this site, with Google backing it is sure to grow rapidly.
http://knol.google.com

Confession: I never go anywhere. Well, I do leave Toronto now and then, but as far as vacations? Never. Happens. Enter a former business colleague who has decided to get married in Mexico! Huzzah!  It’s a good excuse to finally put aside the ‘too busy’ and ‘too costly’ excuses and just GO.

The wedding is in February ‘09, so there’s plenty of time to plan – and do I love to plan! (It’s somewhat of an obsession, no joke…)

Enter PlanetEye. One of Toronto’s most well known tech folks, Mark Evans, is part of the great team behind the site. PlanetEye.com is a one-stop destination for all the travel planning needs I (or you!) might have.

PlanetEye is still in beta but it’s already shaping up to be a fantastically easy-to-use planning tool with geotagged photography, some very cool mapping technology and a growing cache of travel content from a team of in-house writers and professional sources. Snazzy!

PlanetEye has a neat “Travel Pack”  feature that lets you “clip” the interesting photographs, attractions, hotels and restaurants discovered on PlanetEye when planning a trip or simply putting together travel ideas.

Congrats to Mark and the team on the launch of PlanetEye – if all goes well I’ll be off to Mexico in February for my very well planned trip!

There were fantastic submissions. Here is who is presenting for DemoCampToronto17.

• SceneCaster by Alain Chesnais
  We will demo the SceneCaster 3D solution with our recently announced SceneWeaver technology that allows you to view inter linked 3D scenes on *ANY* XHTML ready device. If you have native 3D support available, we will take advantage of it. But you don’t need to be on a high end gaming PC to work with SceneCaster. We will show the solution working on an iPod Touch to demonstrate that we have “3D anywhere” technology available today.
  
• PlanetEye presented by Butch Langlois
  PlanetEye is a new online travel guide with a difference. We’re combining beautiful travel photographs, mapping technology and advice from locals and travelers to give people a real sense of destinations around the world.
• AskItOnline presented by Kaitlyn MacLachlan
  AskItOnline is a “web 2.0″ online service that allows you to easily create and deploy your surveys online. Using a drag ‘n drop interface along with AJAX and other client-side code, creating a survey has never been easier!
• GigPark presented by Pema Hagen & Noah Godfrey
  GigPark is a way to find services with the help of your friends. TorCampers have already recommended their favourite web designers, blog hosting companies, startup lawyers, commercial real estate agents, office cleaners, accountants, and logo designers. We’re going to show everyone how they can use GigPark to find the service providers they need to help run their startups (and their lives).
• .NET Development on a Mac presented by Geoff Norton
  The Mono project has just released our first version of MonoDevelop running natively on the Mac (no X11). We think its a compelling (and free) alternative to booting up VMWare/Parallels and running Visual Studio.

And we have a few Ignite Presentations to round out the evening, including:

• Social Services Mashup presented by Clara Severino
  he Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI) and Partnership Platform, which acts a catalyst between non-profits and the IT sector, have partnered to explore more intuitive and user-friendly approaches to locating services and organizations of interest in Ontario’s neighbourhoods.The main objective for the project is to amalgamate both privately and publicly available data from various online sources, to develop a centralized database of services and organizations of interest to newcomers to Ontario’s neighbourhoods in order to provide users with an interactive visual representation of desired services mapped to a specified region. The potential for expansion of services and customization in the future is huge! A number of non-profit organizations have already expressed interest in using this application for their own audience.Our intention is to get feedback from the tech community to improve our solution and raise awareness of the impact of technology on the non-profit sector.This innovative initiative is a great way of getting both the non-profit sector and the tech community to come together to improve quality of life.
• The Future is Simple presented by Geo Perdis
  I would like to talk about the future of communications and my belief that it is simple. That is to say that simplicity will rule in a world where more and more media come at us faster and faster and compete for our finite attention.This presentation would be an extension of a micromedia riff that I did back in November 2007 for a micromedia meetup. See http://micromediameetup.pbwiki.com/FrontPage and
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/11/01/answers-are-in-whats-the-future-of-communciations/With respect to selecting this talk, I think that I can provide a balanced perspective on some unique services possibilities and opportunities that the Toronto-area technology and media community can lead in defining, developing and deploying here and around the world.In turn, I would hope that the community would get some additional insights as to what we can do locally that is unique and original to our circumstances, conditions and location.
• Leveraging Things Wide Open presented by Mike Beltzner, Mozilla
• How to Rock presented by Rannie Turigan
• The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks presented by Tom Purves