There was not a cloud in the sky this Thursday, and so I was heading to the SAT for DemoCampMontreal2 with a few recurring thoughts in my head like “Isn’t this the best city ever?”. There was a bohemian air throughout Montreal. And what’s St-Laurent if not the very heart of artistry and exotic wizardry?
I was supposed to lend a hand but reached the SAT a little late as this week has been a supremely busy one for me. I arrived at the same time as Brett so we greeted each other in the queue for name-tags. Julie was on name-tag and welcoming duty. Simon was already there photographing and he caught me again.
Fred and Simon were wearing Google t-shirts. I had told Patrick to come and he was there already. Saw Austin who was priming himself for MCing as John couldn’t be there this time around I believe. Said hi to Hugh McGuire with whom I participated in Brett’s impromptu Mashpit earlier.
Chatted to Patrick and told him that I should really get a seat up front for my fun report filming. Right behind Patrick, was Sean Power from Coradiant with three colleagues, so we talked about the good times we had at the last Web Analytics Wednesday organized by St̩phane Hamel. St̩phane is a super cool guy and his blog, Immeria shows his passion for Web Analytics. I told Sean and Patrick how I really thought his last two posts were very insightful and in-depth. Immeria is a really really great blog by St̩phane Рgo read it, bookmark it, add it to your blogroll. Sean said a few good words about my event report too and he was even presenting me to his colleagues by the name of my blog, YashLabs which they knew about! That was nice. Sean added that he was thinking of speaking at the next Web Analytics Wednesday in Montreal. That would be cool.
As the SAT bar was open this time around, so it was beer in hand that Patrick and I chatted to Julie about her upcoming presentation at the next BarCampMontreal. Eventually, I somehow stole Julie’s seat next to Simon, but she was cool about it.
The night was under way as Austin spoke about the sponsors and general sponsoring of the BarCamp movement here in Montreal. The sponsors are: Garage Technology Ventures Canada, represented by Tom Sweeney, and RadialPoint. Our host, was this time around again, the S.A.T.
1. Alec Saunders – iotum Talk Now
Alec, who hails from Ottawa, demoed iotum Talk Now, which currently targets BlackBerry owners and makes your calendar availability known to your friends. It is possible to make groups of people so that your availability information is customized per group. You can even make your availability known to a user who is not on Talk Now’s online web service as a web page is generated for you.
Alec was fun. He showed as an example how he was supposedly sending Bill Gates availability information to have a meeting about money – to finance iotum, of course.
“We’re looking for money” he said.
Come question time, Simon said “I do not have as much money as that guy in the USA, but…” to which Alec responded: “yes, but do you have money?”.
See? That’s what I meant about knowing your objectives for DemoCamp. The message was clear that night – iotum is looking for funding. As a sideline, they are also looking for people to try the service.
The iotum team will keep the availability sharing free and is planning to charge for other value-added services, like the ability to schedule conference calls for instance.
2. Hugh McGuire – Collectik
Austin presented Hugh and LibriVox just as I was saying the same thing to Patrick, which brought thunderous applause and screams from the audience. It’s understandable, LibriVox is such a great idea which leverages open-source software and principles and brings value today.
With Collectik, Hugh is helping solve another problem relative to the time spent for discovery and organization of podcasts. Collectik makes looking for podcasts of interest to you easy and helps to mix them up for easy listening. You don’t necessarily have to download the podcasts as there is a possibility of listening to them via a streaming Flash plugin.
All podcasts of interest are displayed clearly in one page and allow you to subscribe to them by a simple click. From there you can also get a feed of these into iTunes as a playlist, and listen at leisure or skip whenever you want to.
Hugh said several times that one important thing he learned with this project was that it is necessary to fix UI and architectural design issues first before adding more features.
With Collectik, you can also see what other people’s playlists are.
At question time, somebody asked about videos, and Hugh replied that Collectik also allowed you to monitor videos, so it’s a great solution. I believe Alex Eberts asked about whether it was possible to know which podcasts were popular and Hugh showed that this was already possible with Collectik.
Collectik is a fantastic project.
3. Martin Dufort & Alain Lavoie – Kakiloc
Martin Dufort took the microphone first to describe the services of Kakiloc. Kakiloc enables you to make your location and availability known to your friends. The website demo itself showed a mashup between a user’s locations and Google Maps, so that when one of your friends announces he’s around, you can locate him on the map.
Kakiloc also supports J2ME so that part of the overall service can be used on mobile phones too, which makes it a mobile location-based social network. The web-services allow for fast sending of text messages to your acquaintances’ phones as was demonstrated on the spot.
Another interesting thing about Kakiloc was that friends of friends were also shown in your instant messaging-type of application. Therefore, given geographical proximity, you could choose to chat and meet with that person who is only 2 degrees of separation away in your trust network.
At one point Austin said “We have people from Yahoo and Google here”. He was kidding! But seriously, this will happen for DemoCamps in Montreal. Both Yahoo and Google are now in Montreal, so it’s just a matter of asking them to attend or participate, explaining the potential benefits. There are many other great companies here in Montreal too.
4. Brett Gaylor – OpenSourceCinema.org
Brett started off his presentation by showing a most interesting clip about old media people speaking to young kids about downloading music. Lots of fun, and in there lies also the rise of the Commons for artistic and technological sharing. This concept, which already existed before but which has been crippled by pure money-making is coming back slowly but surely thanks to Lawrence Lessig and his project The Creative Commons. Lessig is a fantastically intelligent man. Go to his site, download two of his free books and start reading now.
Brett actually showed some footage made for this forthcoming movie about Free Culture, called “Basement Tapes”, including GirlTalk and Lawrence Lessig.
Brett explained the concept behind his shiny new website for Open-Source Cinema where users could download video footage, re-edit them and upload them back. These contributions may in turn make it into the final movie.
Much applause for Brett too. His project is great so all the applause was well-deserved.
Brett mentioned the open participation experiment called Mashpit which he nicknamed BeerCamp. This united Brett, Sylvain, Hugh and myself and we all lent a hand to enhance the website CMS. I hadn’t met any of them at that time, but the reason we met was because all four of us were already seeped in open participatory culture and knew it was important to go out there and participate. It was fantastic and it’s great to see where his project is heading now.
Somebody in the audience generously offered to host Brett’s project. Isn’t that amazing?
5. Anand Agarawala – BumpTop
BumpTop was presented at another DemoCamp and then later also at the TED conference in Monterey. Anand, who lives in Toronto, showed the 3D interface which is a layer above your usual 2D desktop metaphor. The interface is best seen and manipulated to grasp what it’s about so the videos will speak for themselves. Suffices to say that BumpTop allows some realistic physics-based manipulation of icons and photographs.
The audience was engaged throughout as the demo was both fun and impressive.
How impressive? Well, having already seen Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel interface demo, I think that using a mouse with BumpTop is also a limitation. BumpTop would work much better with a TouchScreen.
In fact, I had noticed some similarities with Jeff Han’s demo at the gesture-recognition level for grabbing and manipulating groups of icons and the popup menu too. So at the end of the night I did ask Anand about this and he said that he had spoken to Jeff about it and the latter had said that it was a kind of homage to BumpTop. Well, this better be true Anand as it’s written here now.
As parting words, Austin emphasized how it was important for the community to get out and make itself known and participate in the BarCamp events.
Post-Demo Conversations
Patrick
Patrick and I had quite a long and interesting talk as usual. I urged him to consider presenting some of his ideas at a forthcoming DemoCamp or BarCamp. One of his many pet projects is about net accessibility and the other one he told me about was about a distributed fault-tolerant system. It’s funny because I was recently thinking about the need to keep secure digital collections of humanity’s history everywhere. Patrick’s solution however is meant for personal use, but I’m sure it could also be adapted. I also told Patrick about how one could use distributed computing technology like the one for Folding@Home so as to render Computer Graphics frames throughout the internet to make an open-source 3D movie.
Patrick and I also spoke about Twitter. I basically said that I wasn’t using Twitter as I need the meditative/reflective mood conducive to elaborating blog posts. Incidentally, Heri asked me to try Twitter a few days ago but I passed on the invitation.
Heri
Speaking of Heri, we met and he said that he thought that advertising would one day disappear. I told Heri that if Google is the behemoth it is today it is more importantly because of advertising – the majority of the revenue itself is made with advertising. Besides, a recent Google acquisition was a company making adverts within games. Whenever there is a product or a service and you have competitors, then there is a need to advertise and market. And there is value in advertising for the end user too for new product and service discovery. This is crucial, so I know it’s not going to disappear. Its form can morph but it will always be there as long as there is business.
And personally I welcome the new disruptive pricing models online advertising brings with it. There are services which are free thanks to online advertising. Moreover, advertising can help as a revenue stream for an online project, so much so that it can also become a strategy for funding a web project, the actual extent of which varies with scale, of course.
Alden Woodward
Alden Woodward of Evonium was there so I asked him about whether the last DemoCamp had helped bring their amazing technology to the light. We had a long chat and I asked him whether Evonium could do dynamic form production. Alden said they didn’t do that, but it’s very easy and fast to produce new forms. I asked about that because I recently caught up with a former colleague and friend who now works at a company in the US and their technology does do dynamic form production. Alden said that their prospective customers sometimes do not believe their ears when he explains how fast Evonium can develop and enhance their Business Information systems. I told him he should make a strong statement out of it for his upcoming marketing campaign, like “we develop 10 times faster than with SAP” or something.
Daniel Haran
I also spoke with Daniel Haran from Growwwing about why a full-stack dynamic Business Information Systems is something highly interesting for business agility. Daniel asked me about what I’m passionate about and I replied that it was to bring value to business through information systems. I like optimization. I also spoke about Ruby and Ruby on Rails, of course. This reminded Patrick to check it out someday. I think we’ll have an exchange of demos with Patrick as he’s an expert on PCSoft’s WinDev and WebDev. For WinDev, the tag-line is “Develop 10 times faster” – see? – another high-impact statement. Incidentally, Rails made headway when people said that it enabled developing web applications 10 times faster than Java. Daniel mentioned he couldn’t stand going back to Java now that he programs in Ruby and Ruby on Rails and he’s happy with them.
Never underestimate the importance of happiness of coders for the productivity of your business. If you haven’t had a look at Ruby as a programming language or Ruby on Rails as a framework for rapid prototyping and development of web applications, then I urge you to do so. Rails outputs AJAX natively.
Patrick 2
After Daniel left and Hugh too (I told Hugh how much I had liked the Collectik demo), this brought us logically to Ruby and Rails. I told Patrick that the reason Rails was such a great framework was because Ruby allowed easy development of Domain-Specific Languages. Patrick however, had a good question: “How is a Domain-Specific Language different or better than procedure calls”.
I was preparing an answer thinking of the :scaffold symbol in Ruby On Rails which automatically produced all Create, Read, Update, Delete methods for DB access extrapolated from your DB model when we were interrupted by Angel Anduaga of Podtattoo, describing his project of laser-engraving iPods and also asking about who he should talk to to be able to present at DemoCamp.
I told him about BarCamp and DemoCamp and described how there was no need to talk to anybody per se, one could just go to the wiki at BarCamp.org/DemoCampMontreal add one’s name and presentation and be able to present.
“How much does it cost to present?”
Me: “It’s free”
“Who do I have to talk to?”
Well, it’s DemoCamp or BarCamp, and as I had already explained you don’t necessarily need to speak to anybody, but it’s difficult to understand this if you’re still thinking along traditional conference or business lines. This is unlike conferences, it’s unconference. Not everything in the old model applies.
All in all, a great night at the SAT again with Montreal’s Tech community. It was a fun night, with some great technology demos. I got to catch up with some friends and meet some new people. Austin made for a great MC too. Well done, everyone. Thanks to our sponsors and the SAT and all those who made this event so great.
Memorable quotes
“Yes, but do you have money?” – Alec Saunders (to Simon)
“Imagine all the people… Living for today” George “Dubya” Bush (Imagine mashup)
“Who do I have to talk to?” – Angel Anduaga
“If you build it, Yahoo will buy it” – Hugh McGuire (see Alec’s event report below for the context)
Other DemoCampMontreal2 reports and pics
1. Alec Saunders of iotum
2. Martin Dufort & Alain Lavoie of Kakiloc
3. Heri Rakotomalala of Montreal Tech Watch
4. John Stokes of A Montreal Startup
5. Fred Ngo of Silicon Island sent some link love. Thanks Fred.
6. Simon Law has the best pictures
7. Bosko Milekic was happy
8. Hugh McGuire of Collectik
9. Hugh has put up a more extensive write-up on his new site.
10. Alistair Croll has a write-up
11. Roberto Rocha from the Gazette has a Report on the Reports on his fun and informative TechnoCité blog.
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Update:
- Stirling Westrup wrote in about WordPress malfunctioning. I was aware of this for a few days. I updated WP but the actual problem was the HashCash plugin which doesn’t currently work well with PHP 5. Plugin deactivated – Akismet is doing wonders anyway.
- Hugh wrote in about my misspelling Collectik and the need to correct the link too. Corrections made.
Thanks Stirling and Hugh.
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Looks like Youtube introduces some audio-video synchronization issues, so I’m thinking of exploring alternatives. Brett suggested using Blip.tv for movies. Laurent swears by DailyMotion. What do you think?
