I made it out to the third Toronto Demo Camp last night. Topics included (bullets swiped from the wiki):
This was probably the most interesting to me (maybe because it was first.) I’m a fan of FogBugz myself, but the design decisions and constraints behind the project were fascinating (basically, the challenge was to find something that university students would actually use and not just fudge to get their grade - we’ve all probably had to convince someone of the value of this kind of software in the past.)
- openbluenetworks.com demo jewelry search platform and talk about outsourcing
I didn’t know much about the jewelry industry (and apparently, you have to in order to get into it anyway), but the outsourcing info was worth considering, especially for small shops, like, uh, mine. But where do you find help? Well…
- Geoff Whittington thelocalguru.com will demo thelocalguru.com and talk about why (and hopefully how) it was written
thelocalguru.com is a kind of skill matching system, where people sign up (and optionally pay) to market their talents to the community. To be honest, I didn’t see much of this - I was off to the side of the demos and the angle sucked.
- Nuvvo AJAX, RSS/Atom, iCal… Nuvvo is Web 2.0’s answer to eLearning.
These guys found that AJAX wasn’t just hype, it really solved a lot of key interface problems. Yeah, someday I’ll do more AJAX work…
- Blogware: Tucows’ brandable, resellable, very configurable blogging platform, written in Ruby.
A very clean presentation, focusing on the comment spam blocking portion of the product. The neat part of the Blogware offering is that it lets spam blacklists bubble up from the user to the ISP to the global Tucows environment.
- BlogChat: Simple service provides Ajax-based chat window to add to your blog.
It seems like every week someone asks me about chat solutions, and I haven’t found one that meets most price/performace/deployment needs yet, so I’m eager to find out about anything in the space. Again, my viewing angle (hey, I was late, my bad) stopped my from learning too much, but I’ll check it out later.
Good times, but on the whole I liked the presentations from the previous camp better. The crowd was a whole different story though - much bigger and just as (if not more) enthusiastic. Oh, and I discovered the hot conference trend of 2006 - Moleskines are the new Powerbooks.
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