MegaBytes

Bamboo bicycles. An army of evil robots. A Flying Monkeys Horn Orchestra. A mighty ugly workshop. A bucket of mathematics.

Just what is going on at the Pacific National Exhibition this weekend?

Nothing unusual -- only the Mini Maker Faire, back for a second year in Vancouver. 

The Maker Faire is on this weekend (June 23 and 24) from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the PNE, Hastings and Renfrew. Tickets are $17 per day for adults and $12 for children. It's a celebration of DIY culture -- making, tinkering, hacking, crafting and sharing. And not only do local DIYers get to show off their stuff, the audience is encouraged to take part -- you can make your own felt bead, mix your own perfume, or solder your own flashing LED light. You can draw, weave, spin wool or pretend to be an angry bird and throw things at evil pigs.

Annemarie Tempelman-Kluit was stuck for a domain name for her new website. The mother of two young daughters, she had noticed a dearth of local parenting information on the Web, and was determined to launch her own site to fill the void. Her initial choice of a name had already been taken, and Tempelman-Kluit felt that the price the domain squatter was asking was too high.

Then one morning, Tempelman-Kluit sat down in exhaustion after tending to the needs and whims of her two young daughters. Abruptly, her two-year-old asked her for something else. 

“I’m not a yoyo!” Tempelman-Kluit exclaimed, not too thrilled at the prospect of jumping up once again. It then occurred to her that parenthood was also an emotional yoyo -- the high of elation one moment, the depth of despair the next.

And so yoyomama.ca was born.

Hootsuite is one of the most popular Twitter clients available. And no wonder -- the web browser-based app can show multiple Twitter accounts at the same time, along with LinkedIn, Wordpress, Foursquare and other accounts. You can schedule tweets, get analytic reports and much more. The premium version is even more versatile and there are also mobile apps - for the iPhone and iPad, Android, Blackberry and others.

Hootsuite was developed by Vancouver-based Invoke Media and spun off as a separate company about three years ago, says Invoke’s Co-CEO David Tedman. While Hootsuite’s CEO Ryan Holmes seems to be everywhere -- at conferences, in the media -- Tedman keeps a lower profile as he works to ensure Invoke is not a one-off fluke.

Zite. Say it aloud and it sounds like a sneeze. But Zite, the brainchild of two former UBC students, is changing how we get our news.

Until a few years ago, I started the day with the Globe and Mail, first on newsprint, later on my laptop and, most recently, on the iPad.

But I’ve abandoned the Globe. My morning news now comes courtesy of Zite, a Vancouver-born iPad app.

Zite, which is also available for the iPhone and HP's TouchPad, aggregates (or brings together) stories from a variety of sources. Since it was launched, it’s been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and was recently bought out by CNN.