Dev::Blog

DemoCampToronto14 won the “swankiest DemoCamp” award thanks to the Toronto Board of Trade facilities, complete with buffet and fancy wooden chairs.

As is the tradition, the format changed again - this time the demos were shorter and then there was an Ignite-style series of sessions, which I liked a lot.

I didn’t get as into the technology as I have in the past, but I came home more pumped than I have been for the past few sessions.

A few notes:

Chris Thiessen’s Zoomii (private beta, nothing to see here) had a few lessons about affiliate linking - he’s working with the top 20,000 books on Amazon, and that seems to be enough for now, long tail be damned.  Why the selection?  Because he does a lot of stuff with the data in advance, including assembling a 63 gigapixel image (for some reason he thought to tile it).  “Picking the top zillion sellers” doesn’t really count as editing, but it’s a start, and I think the successful stuff that’s out there does and will rely on something at least a bit smarter than straight feed reading.

There was a real divide visible between those who’d done a presentation before and those who hadn’t, or at least those who hadn’t rehearsed.  Oh, and big fonts are important when your demo’s on a projector (which led to some irony in the demo for the product that aims to deal with information overload), and doubly so when you’re trying to demo a framework as opposed to an app.

I also ended up speaking to more vegans than ever before, so I was happy to see some overlap - most of this was in the form of referrals from other ‘campers I’ve spoken with in the past, but I think I might as well start positioning myself as the online vegan guy instead of trying to explain what it is I do in my day job - I had some interesting conversations about that too, but in the months to come I hope that there’ll be enough overlap and then I can talk without having to worry about NDAs.  A lot of the people I talked to were either running their own business already or were there to get ideas and contacts for their own venture, so I’m not going to be hiring anyone from this pool directly anyway.  Oh, and once again a huge percentage of the crowd claimed to be at their first
DemoCamp.  With an audience of 300, maybe retention problems are a good
thing…

All in all, a great night, even if I had to leave before the bar session.  Kudos once again to the organizers and presenters.

Tags: Democamp

I finally made it to a DemoCamp at No Regrets! I missed a few in the summer, largely because I didn’t feel like going out to King West. Of course, I had to wait until a freezing cold day with strong wind to brave the trek, and predictably, I got off the streetcar too early (hint: if you’re going West, it’s after the bridge. A few stops after).

I love No Regrets.

The venue was a lot smaller than MARS, but the fact that we didn’t have to move from the demo to the bar was huge, with much less drop off at the end of the talks. It’s also a bar where most people are standing up, which makes it a lot easier to join conversations. I must have talked to 20 people last night about all kinds of projects.

OK, the demos!

• Dave Humphrey gave a talk about Teaching Mozilla Development. I misunderstood (because I didn’t really prepare or even read anything ahead of time) and thought it would be about how to contribute to Mozilla, and that did get covered a bit, but it was more interesting to see the wide range of contributions his students have been adding to the system. Mozilla is the kind of app where at first glance I think it’d be pretty closed to additions with a clear path going forward and established contributors, but Dave really showed me how wrong I was.
• Alec Saunders (?) from Iotum demoed his Talk Now application for the Blackberry. I’m always stoked to see mobile apps get demo’d (Alec used a webcam of some sort to display the phone screens), but this app confused me a bit - it’s something so people can signal if they’re available to talk or not, but it’s being deployed on the device that people get because they’re absolutely desperate to be available all the time. Still, nifty stuff, and I look forward to seeing it roll out to more platforms.
• Albert Lai gave an update on BubbleShare, which was recently acquired by Kaboose. Key message: the amount of due diligence applied to vetting a purchase doesn’t scale linearly with the size of a transaction, and in fact there’s not much more work to clear something 10 times as big.
• Will Pate gave a demo of Flock, which I’d heard about but hadn’t actually tried. I don’t get to spend a lot of time on Macs these days, but it’d be interesting to try it out just to pick up a few new ideas.
• We also got some updates from previous DemoCamp presenters, some of whom are doing really well. In particular, Freshbooks went from 7,000 accounts to 130,000 in the past year. Mike apprarently gets email reports about this stuff every morning, which is something I really want to do at the office.

Other thoughts:

• I’m amazed and astounded that a sound system made of podcasting gear and PC speakers could actually work as well as it did. There was a bit of clipping and distortion, but I could understand everything that was going on.
• Traci Lords and heart attack jokes will never stop being funny.
• People need to bring business cards so I can follow up on the things we talked about, unless of course that was a variant on the thing where the girl gives you a fake phone number (not that that’s ever happened to me). Oh well, I’ll just have to catch them at the next event.
• Mobile Monday was on the same night. Apparently they had a bunch of VCs there talking about how to make money. We mostly talked about how much it sucks that you can’t get an affordable data plan in Canada (and no, I didn’t start those conversations, but they were frequent.)
• I don’t know where the idea bubbled up, but it seems that the pattern is that when you’re making something for yourself to use, just open it up to the world. That’s not a bad way to get started.

Technorati Tags: DemoCamp

Robert Scoble’s interview with Steve Wozniak is worth watching if you’ve got an hour to kill. They talked a little about the Homebrew Computer Club, which was a little before my time, but it captured my imagination when I read about it in Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution back in high school. Computers, especially hardware, have gotten a little more complicated since then, but it struck me yesterday how the current “Camp” movement is probably the best approximation of the energy that must have been present in those days, and it’s exciting to think of what might come out of the new generation of meetups.

Not-so-coincidentally, I made it out to DemoCamp10 last night after missing several over the summer (paradoxically, my first DemoCamp was at the Radiant Core offices, which wasn’t exactly easy to find, but I couldn’t summon the motivation to look up No Regrets on the map). I’m sure that in the Homebrew days there must have been a few demos where the magic smoke was let out, and the tradition carried over last night. Still, there were a few solid presentations. I was particularly interested in the first one, an online grading and code review system (screencast here). I have no need to mark students’ work, but as ( I think) Greg Wilson pointed out, there are some applications for code review within a development team. My life as a former bank guy kicked in and I thought it’d be interesting to see some kind of financial application review process. Talking at our table, the consensus seemed to be that the left side of the app was solid for most uses, but the right side would be awesome if there was some kind of plugin architecture so various needs could be catered to. There’s a lot left to be done in the collaborative workspace, and the system I saw last night could fill a few of those holes.

Technorati Tags: DemoCamp

I may have missed Mesh and BarCamp, but I did manage to drag my sorry butt out to DemoCamp6 last night. Forgot my camera, though…

The contenders

First up, we had Joey and Ross showing off TuCows’ new Start service (codename: skydasher) and their publicly-accessible FeedCache service. Start was fun,
if you’re into web portals and whatnot, and I’ll probably take a closer look at it for some upcoming music-related projects. FeedCache is something I really should get into, possibly not for work projects (we have our own RSS caching mechanism), but I’ve got one or two external projects floating in my head that might be able to make use of this.

Also, I was near the back of the room and my eyes were still misty from the smog outside, but I think I saw Ross’ computer close enough to identify it as a ThinkPad with an Apple sticker on the back. We’re twins! My excuse is that my girlfriend is like a two year old when it comes to stickers (I used that line in a meeting and actually got some more stickers out of it). No idea about Ross’ motivations or hauls during meetings.

Ross also mentioned Dave Winer’s share your OPML project, which I have just tried. Apparently my list is similar to Om Malik’s. Perhaps he can tell me what I’ve missed each day; I know I can’t keep up.

Second up, Blogscope, a U of T project that collects blogspot entries and spews out a bunch of stats. It’s got a nifty zoomable bar graph and can find correlations among the entries with other search terms. When I tried it, it kind of highlighted the splog problem, but presenter Nilesh Bansal said that they’re working on some algorithms for that. If anything, that was the one problem with the presentation - he said he wanted feedback, but the response to just about every question was “we’re working on that.” Maybe our questions just sucked.

There was a bit of a gap between the second and third presenter due to some problems with the projector. I amused myself by watching someone play with some kind of imaging-related app on a laptop a few tables over. At one point the picture was of a naked lady.

Joshua Wehner ended up being third, with his Rails-based convention scheduling utility. It was a pretty domain-specific app, but I could see it being useful for other conferences.

Finally, Anand Agarawala presented BumpTop, an alternative desktop metaphor proof of concept with physics from the Unreal Tournament engine. While I don;t know if anyone wanted to use it as their desktop, everybody smiled at some point in the presentation (watch the video to find out why). I think the main lesson from this demo was that applications should be enjoyable to use. If you can find a way to make people smile while working with, say, a spreadsheet app, why wouldn’t you?

The After Party was good clean fun - we got there first and ended up sitting with a group on the main floor of Molly Brown’s, which was fine, since one table full of people is all I can really talk to at a given time, but later I went upstairs and ended up being one of the last to leave. I met a lot of great people, which is really the point of the whole evening, innit?

Oh, and I also traded for this business card:

The only thing scarier is that the printer was listed on the back - they’re free cards that you just pay shipping on. At $7.90 for 250, it’s cheaper than a domain registration, and probably more fun at parties. I’m finally going to get my professional hand model cards!

Technorati Tags: TorCamp, DemoCamp