Mixer review

September 10, 2008 by Dave Haynes

It had been too long, but the revival of the industry mixers went off nicely last night in Toronto.

Along with the usual suspects like Kris, Stephen and Raji from Artisan, Jeff Wismer from DDC and Haroon and Faizal from Cognovision, there were some familiar faces and some new faces.

Jack Boyczuk of Ridge Logic came up all the way from Buffalo, about a 100 minute drive if traffic cooperates. He has launched and now runs an eight person shop that is actively marketing SceneStudio, signage software aimed at small business.

Vince Tilley and his business partner (Peter??? … I am terrible about names) came by. Vince has been around the space for a buncha years, working with Hitachi and then Omnivex. He now has an IT services firm called Optimus that also does DS rollouts around the Toronto area.

David Spence from Coxcom, which does large scale rollouts, came by as well as a new sales colleague Tammy, who has a last name but didn’t have a card to help my feeble memory.

Dave Lawrence was there with a colleague Marcel (no card) from Nextech, which is getting active in the space and has the rights to that very cool LED technology uised at the Beijing Olympoics opening ceremonies.

Andrew Cherwenka from Trapeze Media dropped by – the first guy I’ve bumped into from online media that sees direct correlations and possible ties.

I got a chance to hang out a bit with Dmitry Sokolov, who recently signed on with Ingram Micro to handled business development for Canada for the massive technology distributor. Thanks to Dmitry, and Ingram, for whipping out his plastic to cover the evening.

All told, there were about 18-20 people and tons of good conversations. The next one is the same place, second Tuesday of October … and we’re going to stick with the same venue and 2nd Tuesday thing as long as it works.   

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