DemoCampMontreal

DemoCampMontreal4 Report

On 18/8/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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Maybe it was because yesterday was Friday, but on announcing DemoCampMontreal4 yesterday on my blogs, I saw that there were only 4 demos instead of the usual 5. And so I added myself to the wiki in the 5th remaining slot thereby contributing as a presenter to the event this time around.

Initially, I couldn’t have any output from my laptop to the projector. It might have been a cable problem. Before the event start, I had chatted with Gary, Daniel, Tamu and Ben. Simon had a large digital clock readout on his laptop to countdown the 15 minutes per presentation, and Tamu was assigned the clock-keeping duties. Simon really is into these time-reversal devices, isn’t he?

Daniel wasn’t completely ready with his presentation, and so we just rotated the schedule. I informed Philippe, who was MC’ing, of the change. So, out-of-the-blue, I was now 4th presenter at DemoCampMontreal4.

1. Braincuts by Categorical Design Solutions

FranÃ§ois Magnan, along with two colleagues, demonstrated their online software, Braincuts, which relies on semantic searches and freely available information from Creative Commons licensed sources. The multimedia information culled from these different sources can then be very easily combined through the Braincuts web interface. More precisely, the GUI enables the positioning of the various multimedia elements on a visual timeline by drag and drop.

Effectively, this means that you could position an audio track in parallel to a video or slideshow, and this way you could edit a whole presentation, documentary or educational multimedia package by arranging various multimedia elements. Finally, the whole presentation can be published and shared with other people.

I found this really interesting, because, this is the kind of information aggregation that we are doing when researching and writing an extensive article for our blogs these days. Except, the blog ‘timeline’ is just how people scroll from top to bottom, reading text, and maybe watching a picture or a video along the way.

Now, if Braincuts could be reused to produce new multimedia blog posts, that would be extremely helpful. And to me, automatic discovery of semantically-related multimedia information based on keywords I specify would really earn it a Web 3.0 moniker.

The team has built an accessible and useful interface using only open standards and protocols, and for the GUI, they rely on JQuery, with additional components developed in-house. An impressive demo with lots of potential, especially in the educational realm.

2. David Xu – PodBeans.com

PodBeans (Podcast hosting, Social subscribing) is actually a well thought-out platform with two aspects, one for podcast publishers and one for podcast subscribers.

For publishers, there is a variety of services integrated into PodBeans to make it simple to start your own podcast and benefit from it. The publishing tool is built on WordPress, and makes it easy to upload your files. PodBeans provides the hosting and the bandwidth and both are unlimited. Moreover, PodBeans also contains tool for promoting your podcast, and there are at least two possible income streams – either through ads or paid subscriptions to your podcast if you want to set up premium content.

If you host your podcast and whole site on PodBeans, you can of course customize the look of it through WordPress themes. However, should you decide to include the content on your own site or blog, despite PodBeans hosting your podcast, then you can also do so by simply embedding automatically generated code into your site.

For podcast listeners or viewers (as PodBeans also does videos), it is possible to collect all your podcasts in one place, tag and organize them, and create a new personal feed from them. In addition, you can also discover what your peers on PodBeans have subscribed to. This part of PodBeans resembles Collectik quite a lot.

Overall, there is a good deal of integration of various services and technologies into PodBeans: open-source technologies, open standards and freely available tools have all been put to great use for this website.

3. Mitch Cohen – ClixConnect

Mitch demonstrated ClixConnect, which has a tagline of 24/7 Live-Chat Sales and Support Service. When a visitor connects to your ClixConnect-enabled website, a small popup window opens with either a representative from your own company or else a person from ClixConnect.

This allows the visitor or prospective customer to asks questions in real-time about the website or the products and services you offer through an unobtrusive and movable chat window. In addition, the system, can provide the visitor with automated recommendations on products based on the products being viewed.

The technology used as back-end is proprietary, but at the client site, all you need to do is sing up to ClixConnect and include a small HTML code in your website. In fact, ClixConnect can even do the integration for you for free if you send them your HTML page.

This is clearly interesting for sales and support, as it accompanies the prospective customer from the point of landing through browsing the product catalog until the close of the sale. I think it could also be used to diagnose website usability. If statistics were kept about frequently asked questions on website navigation for instance, then the benefits for tweaking the web design through direct consumer feedback would be obvious.

4. Josh Nursing – Hacking IronRuby, extending the e Text editor with Ruby, Cygwin and wxCocoaDialog

I had no presentation per se, as I hadn’t prepared any, thinking that the 5 slots for presenting were already taken until just 3 hours before the start of DemoCamoMontreal4. But I wanted to show what I had been hacking with around Ruby/Ruby on Rails on Windows so I stepped up to the mike when Mitch had finished.

First, I talked about Microsoft’s just-released IronRuby (pre-Alpha) which will run on top of the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) for .Net and about my tutorial on how to Hack IronRuby, in which I showed how I fixed a bug and also extended IronRuby. It’s easy to do as the source code (C#) and whole project structure is really clean.

IronRuby will run together with other dynamic languages targeting the DLR, namely IronPython, C# and VBx, a dynamic version of Visual Basic. This will enable you to reuse all the libraries from all the DLR languages from your language of choice. I will be able, for instance, to reuse all the IronPython, VBx and C# libraries from IronRuby.

IronRuby is significant to me for many reasons, the first of which is I am really fond of Ruby as a programming language.

Secondly, I mentioned that, to me, Microsoft have some of the best IDEs to develop in. The possibilities for Rapid Application Development of software including database access within Visual Basic are astounding when you know how to use the tool properly. Now imagine how great it would be to have IronRuby integrated with a Visual IDE and target Windows and other platforms.

Thirdly, Microsoft has decided to make IronRuby open-source (using the Microsoft Permissive License), and that means they’ll be accepting outside contributions to enhance and extend IronRuby. Besides, Microsoft will be hosting the source code on Rubyforge rather than Microsoft’s own Codeplex.

And finally, an avowed goal of John Lam is to be able to run the whole Rails framework on IronRuby to test its completeness. Therefore, there is a strong possibility that there will be amazing Ruby on Rails development tools for Windows.

I wanted to show more IDEs for Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but time was limited, and so I showed how to extend the e text editor. e is designed to be compatible with the Mac-only TextMate’s Bundle system. So, with some porting, the TextMate bundles can be reused within e. The latter contains several in-built ones which enabled easy insertion of code snippets, just like TextMate.
What I wanted to do was to access all Ruby methods for the most used data structures, like Strings, Arrays, Hashes and FixNums from e while typing Ruby code – a type of IntelliSense in Microsoft/Windows terminology. Ruby already has great reflection capabilities, and hence, a simple object_name.methods gives you a list of all the internal methods.

The way I did it was to use Cygwin, Ruby and wxCocoaDialog, the latter being a port to wxWidgets of Mac OS X CocoaDialog. That was the technical part of my ‘presentation’ as there was a short but quite complex piece of code there, which I’ll leave for another tutorial post here on YashLabs soon, but suffices to say that this is how it works:

1. A keyboard shortcut triggers a Bundle command.

2. The bundle command is a ruby script in which I referenced the wxCocoaDialog path, as well as the x and y position of the cursor at trigger time.

3. This Ruby script executes and gets all the methods for Strings, and builds a specially formatted array of entries (otherwise some symbols can’t be included in the menu)

4. The Ruby script taps into the system execution (through Cygwin) of wxCocoaDialog which populates a GUI menu with all the methods

5. The menu pops up in the editor, and you can browse through all the entries via the arrow keys or jump straight to an entry by clicking on the starting letter.

I demonstrated this with a string and from the menu, I pressed “u” to reach the .upcase method.

6. On selection of a menu entry, Ruby executes and prints a dot followed by the selected method name within the editor.

Because of time constraints, I didn’t show the other shortcuts for Array, Hash and Fixnum, but they work just the same and as well, and are easy to implement.

What’s also great about this is that the commands are accessible within your Rails code in e too. Because of the compatibility between e and TextMate, something similar can easily be done with TextMate and CocoaDialog on Mac OS X.

I also mentioned Microsoft’s Open-Source moniker adoption.

Daniel Haran – url_pipe

Daniel showed a partial version of his idea of piping urls and feeds through a RESTful implementation.

In his demonstration, he filtered feeds through Google Maps by proceeding the following way:

1. Feeds were geotagged through the piping mechanism

2. In Google Maps, he defined a polygon to restrain his domain of search to a region on the map (imagine for instance an area around Montreal)

3. By pasting the geotagged feed within Google Maps, and with a calculation of inclusion, he was able to further filter the feed he had based on the region defined.

Daniel used Ruby and Rails to prototype url_pipe and is looking for contributions to the source code. The overall functioning is similar to Yahoo Pipes but without the GUI and to YubNub which I have covered before. A more complete url_pipe could come in real handy for local searches, targeted advertising as well as automated discovery and filtering.

Finally, Simon wrapped up by thanking our sponsors and by reminding us of the upcoming ‘camp’ events, including FaceBookCamp for the end of this month.

I was joined by Philippe Chrun, founder and CEO of MyCarpoolStation and we discussed strategy a bit over a beer. I also caught up with JÃ©rÃ´me Paradis of ParadiVision and we spoke about .Net and where it’s all going. Alok Mohindra and I chatted about what lies ahead in the Rails world especially concerning Windows and .Net. Austin Hill was there and gave me some positive feedback about my impromptu hacking ‘presentation’, as did Simon and Roberto Rocha. Thanks guys, much appreciated. Well done Pierre, for co-presenting with Simon.

After some last minute conversations with Tamu, Gary (‘Use OS X’), Daniel and Simon (expect a Perl 6 demo soon), we parted ways.

It was great to present for a change, and to catch up with other people of the Montreal Tech community.

Thanks to JÃ©rÃ´me Paradis for the pics.

DemoCampMontreal4

On 17/8/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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BarCampMontrealLogo DemoCampMontreal4 is today at the S.A.T. There are 5 demonstrations scheduled by the members of the Montreal Tech Community. It’s free to attend.

Will be presenting at DemoCampMontreal4:

1. Daniel Haran – url_pipe
2. Francois Magnan – BrainCuts by Categorical Design Solutions
3. David Xu | Podbean – a Podcast Social Subscribing Site
4. Mitch Cohen – ClixConnect
5. Josh Nursing – I will speak about IronRuby and Ruby/Ruby on Rails IDEs. I also plan to show how to extend the e Text Editor with Cygwin, Ruby and wxCocoaDialog so as to make programming Ruby with e more comfortable.

MAP:: Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent

August 17th 6:30pm, 8:30pm 2007 — DemoCampMontreal4— at Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent

Don’t forget to add yourself to the list of registrants on the wiki below, and prepare to participate in this gathering of Montreal’s Tech Scene. If you are not presenting (and the five slots are taken already), prepare to help out there or at least later report on it on your blog or some other way.

For more information:
DemoCampMontreal4
DemoCampMontreal4-en

I will see you there.

DemoCampMontreal3 Report

On 25/7/2007, In BarCamp, DemoCampMontreal, Open Source, Ruby on Rails, Technology, Web 2.0, By Yash

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Rule-violation edition

It was a fun DemoCampMontreal3. Without further ado, here is what happened at the event.

1. Evan Prodromou, Nicolas Ritoux – Vinismo

Evan and Nicolas presented a new website, a guide for Wine connoisseurs, based on MediaWiki. Evan described how his experience with WikiTravel allowed him to build upon the core engine used there for Vinismo. The latter’s MediaWiki site is customized heavily. There is an integrated open-id extension among others, and the site also outputs semantic data through RDF. You could see that a lot of thought had gone into the underlying architecture of the system.

Nicolas also took a turn at presenting, this time in French, and spoke about how the site had been structured. The logo and the site design were made here in Montreal. The Vinismo team came to DemoCampMontreal3 with a powerful argument about the subject as no less than nine bottles of the finest wines were available freely (‘free’ as in ‘free wine’) at the SAT bar.

Update: Evan wrote in to mention they paid the SAQ retail for the wines.

Dedicated to accurate reporting, I duly sacrificed myself to sample some of the wines in between demonstrations.

Simon and some other people were convinced I was next to present. They confused me with Heri somehow. It could have been the wine.

2. Heri Rakotomalala – WorkCruncher

Heri demonstrated his online application for daily tasks. It’s a simple application with tasks that gets reinitialized each day. This means there’s some pressure involved for you to actually finish those tasks the same day. Heri emphasized that it wasn’t a feature-packed application, but a simple tool for personal productivity. Workcruncher would be available later as private beta.

Workcruncher allows teams to work together as you can assign tasks to a team member. There are also ‘followers’ who are people who can have a look at the tasks and the advancement, but to whom tasks cannot be assigned.

It’s a simple, even simplistic application which is easily built with Ruby on Rails and I’m sure Heri used RoR.

3. Mat Balez, Carl Mercier – Defensio

Mat started the presentation while Carl demonstrated an incarnation of Defensio, their learning spam-fighting software, as a WordPress plugin. Mat compared Defensio to Wordpress’s standard spam-filter, Akismet. Defensio has a ’spaminess’ level, which enables one to specify a threshold above which the spam entries are hidden on your administrative page. This helps identify false-positives and thus letting your genuine comments through. There’s also the option of hiding the spam content, which helps.

At this point, to me these were only additional features that could be implemented anytime within the Akismet source code. however, when Carl described Defensio in more detail, I realized there are additional advantages to the system. For instance, they have gone further with their API than Akismet’s. In addition, Defensio can run as a web service and protect anytime there’s an input of data on a web-form somewhere.

Technology used: Ruby on Rails.

To the absolute and audible horror of the audience, the Defensio team presented a few slides! Gasp! This means that they’ll have to pay some beers around to atone for their sins (the ‘no-slide’ rule of DemoCamp is a definite no-no). Simon was aghast, but had to regain composure quickly as he was presenting next, spurred on and introduced by Tamu, in a ravishing red summer dress.

4. Simon Law – Building a Revolutionary Magnet-Based Anti-Aging Device using a Cheap Wall Clock (Made in China)

The internet was abuzz with the possibility of Simon Law’s extremely controversial demo because of the totally ludicrous claims that it violated some well-established laws of science and provided a clean, free, means of reversing aging by drawing energy from the ether.

We scientists are known to cry “hogwash” to such claims as we dutifully follow our own laws. Anything else would be too high a cognitive dissonance for us to continue to function properly in this world. Understandably, the scientific community was skeptical of the claims about the magnet-based device.

Undaunted, Simon had built up a select panel of PhD-level scientists to explore the device’s capabilities under NDA and try to contradict his outrageous claims.

Besides, to demonstrate his seriousness, Simon had stopped taking investments from interested investors, and lately had stopped eating altogether until he could demonstrate in a foolproof manner the mythical device at work. Maybe that’s why he confused me with Heri earlier – everything’s a blur on an empty stomach.

To put a final nail in the coffin of skepticism, Simon had scheduled a highly-conspicuous televised and webcasted demonstration of how to build the device at the SAT, replete with real-time video cameras and onlookers in the flesh, knowing perfectly well that there would be reports of DemoCampMontreal3 all around the net in a jiffy.

Well, who knows? Tesla did something similar I gather, so he might be onto something.

Skeptic: “But it violates the Second Law of Ther…:”
Simon: “My NAME is Law!”

And besides, people do the strangest of things with magnets.

Simon dived right into the presentation, and my friend Philippe Chrun could hear me laughing all the time because it was reminiscent of Simon’s previous Omelette-Engineering presentation at DemoCampCUSEC1, and I was asking myself “Now what??!!”.

At one point in time though, Simon had his notepad filmed with the device’s structure drawn in pen on paper. This caused further outraged in the already weary (and wine-induced ethanol torpor) audience.

“Isn’t that a similar thing as a Powerpoint slide?!!!!”

Some boos ensued. They were friendly boos though, we’re a small community here. Simon will have to pay some beer next time. I mean he has to show the good example and be the first to be punished for infringing the rules he probably set himself. How else are we going to convince Mat to pay his beer otherwise?

Simon proceeded, but the final test before completely reassembling the device failed.

Phew! We would have been in for a big surprise with a demonstrated violation of the arrow of time, but…

But… were we really safe? Strange things were happening in the SAT, as a wall clock behind the bar was turning backwards while Simon reassured the audience that he would get the demo unit working at the end of DemoCampMontreal3!

Still, at the end of his presentation, there was applause (with airs of “I told you so” and “let’s taste some other wine”), despite the failure.

Quizzed as to what could be the cause of failure of the demo of the polemical technology, Simon had this to say:

“Er, I think it could be the searing heat of the S.A.T. spotlights reflecting on my glasses which damaged the clock’s delicate mechanism. It’s delicate you know…like… CLOCKWORK! HAHAHAHAHA!!”

Fellow member of the Montreal Tech community, Hugh McGuire, a stalwart believer of the prevailing laws, shared this observation through a Twitter post:

“I believe Simon really saw what he says he saw, but I’m afraid this might be a case of prolonged self-delusion.”

Subsequently, Simon suffered some backlash from Engadget which had previously blogged enthusiastically about his demonstration. Fear not, insider sources have just revealed that a full-blown interview with Simon is also under way.

5. JÃ©rÃ´me Paradis – CharterWeb

JÃ©rÃ´me, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at YULbiz (the meeting of business bloggers in Montreal), was at his first attendance of DemoCampMontreal, and he was presenting. That’s quite a feat! He presented a project codenamed CharterWeb, which he built in collaboration with FranÃ§ois Aubin, of Cognitive Group, who couldn’t attend.

CharterWeb is a Web 2.0 application built for V1 Jets to enable the discovery and reservation of Jets. The application relies on Google Maps to display the maps as well as the draggable routes for each Jet. In addition, the app. can show the relevant details about each Jet and flight. There is a possibility of browsing through different available flights on different days so that should you be unsatisfied with the actual routes and schedules, you can find a similar one easily.

CharterWeb also incorporates the capacity to detect important information within emails through a recognition algorithm, and then interface that with the online application.

Having talked extensively with JÃ©rÃ´me last time, I guess he used Microsoft .Net to build part of the application.

Thanks to Sponsors

Simon took some time to thanks the sponsors of the event: Akoha, Standout Jobs, Garage Technology Ventures Canada, and the S.A.T., our hosts.

Thanks for the wine as well, Vinismo team.

As a grand finale, Simon demonstrated the cheap wall-clock running backwards! The arrow of time was successfully reversed and therefore, all of the DemoCampMontreal3 attendants were youthful again. Or maybe it was the resveratrol.

It was great to meet with Mat Balez, Adrien, Chris Scott and Pierre Phaneuf (the power of Facebook!), Carl Mercier, Kim VallÃ©e, AmÃ©lie Racine, Mark, Philippe Chrun, Angelo, Fred, Julie, Simon, Tamu, Roberto Rocha, Alok Mohindra, Martin Dufort, SÃ©bastien Paquet, and others.

Amazing Montreal Technology – Sygenics Evolution

On 17/5/2007, In AI, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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Sygenics Evolution logo I mentioned Sygenics‘ Evolution before in my DemoCampMontreal report in glowing terms. I have since met with Raj Vadavia, the CEO and Thomas Fedoryak, the Chief Strategic Officer of Sygenics. They have taken the time to describe Evolution more precisely so that I could improve on the technical accuracy of the article. Thomas sent the edits and I incorporated them into the blog post today.

Since the patent was pending at the time of the initial report, Thomas said that the website could not divulge more details of the underlying technology, nor did he want to simply leave a comment on the blog post for rectification.

This technology is innovative and nothing short of a revolution in persistent data storage and what it enables above the data layer. Evolution makes your data dynamic and adaptive. I wrote before in a follow-up post that Evolution and Evonium’s DARWIN technology based on it enabled Rapid Business Process Re-engineering. It is also clear that the whole field of Business Process Optimization is changed considerably with Evolution.

That is, the organization’s mechanical heart of IT + Business + Finance just comes closer to the adaptive organism metaphor thanks to Evolution.

I foresee a very bright future for Evolution based on the incredible discussion we had Raj, Thomas and myself and forthcoming plans of Sygenics that I will not divulge.

We also had a fantastic over-arching discussion about AI, a field which is of tremendous interest to all three of us.

I mentioned Ruby on Rails once more, and that merging RoR with Evolution would bring a lot of business value for the whole Business + e-Business stack. That would entail interfacing RoR and Evolution or RoR and Evonium’s DARWIN. Additionally, a Ruby bridge for the Evolution API would be fantastic. I mentioned how building a parser for Ruby can be difficult right now, and that Ruby 2.0 would be much faster than the current implementation thanks to an updated virtual machine, YARV. Antonio Cangiano from IBM Toronto Software Labs has an interesting shootout between different Ruby implementations.

I urge you to read the updated post, or to contact Raj and Thomas. I also have two detailed brochures about Evolution which I can give away thanks to Raj and Thomas.

A common theme in my blog since I came to Montreal is “where are the smart people doing great things in Montreal?”, and here they were with me sharing a great meal, ideas and advice, and also telling me more about this astonishing technology. And it’s all from Montreal.

DemoCampMontreal2

On 31/3/2007, In BarCamp, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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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 StÃ©phane Hamel. StÃ©phane 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 StÃ©phane – go 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 TechnoCitÃ© blog.

—————————————————————————–
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.
—————————————————————————–
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?

DemoCampMontreal2 – Thu March 29th – SAT

On 28/3/2007, In BarCamp, DemoCampMontreal, Firefox, General, IBM, Mashpit, Mozilla, Open Source, Technology, By Yash

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BarCampMontrealLogo

DemoCampMontreal2 happens tomorrow. Geeks, Entrepreneurs, Visionaries, Savvy Businessmen, Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists of The Montreal Tech Scene will gather freely to share a most fantastic 2 hours together, and maybe even a drink or two at the SAT bar while seeing five interesting demos.

MAP:: Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent

February 27th 6:30pm, 8:30pm 2007 — DemoCampMontreal1— at Society for Arts and Technology (SAT), 1195 Boul. St. Laurent

The presentations

1. Collektik – Hugh McGuire

Hugh is the mastermind behind project LibriVox, which harnesses open participation and open-source software together with the free content of Project Gutenberg to provide you with a growing collection of free audio-books for your listening pleasure.

Wasn’t that a long sentence? Well, through LibriVox, a volunteer could read it out loud, record it, upload it onto the site so you could in turn freely get it as a long audio sentence in mp3 for your media player. And if it’s too long, people can collaborate on the task too.

Come see his newest project, Collectik. It’s like mixtapes but for podcasts.

Or else he might also present a super-secret stealth-ninja-mode project. Something kept under wraps behind a second closed vault door or something.

2. Kakiloc – Martin Dufort

A location-based mobile social networking project. Austin Hill is said to have gently persuaded Martin Dufort to present – something involving twisting arms.

3. iotum Talk Now

iotum Talk-Now enables you to customize your availability information and share it through your BlackBerry.

4. Open Source Cinema – Brett Gaylor

Brett Gaylor was the host of the first impromptu Mashpit in Montreal so that an ad-hoc team of four (Brett, Hugh, Sylvain and myself) met around mostly Macs, a few Sleeman beers and some tasty end-of-night whiskey all soaked up in pizza to help bring his Drupal-based collaborative web-site to fruition. Brett is currently working on “Basement Tapes” a movie about free culture. During his project, he’s met some little-known people like Lawrence Lessig, DJ Girltalk and me.

5. BumpTop

Anand Agarawala from Toronto will present BumpTop’s revolutionary interface technology which puts physics and realism back into your bland 2D GUI.

For more information:
DemoCampMontreal2
Fred also has more info on his blog.

Looks like Austin Hill will replace “Big” John Kopanas (a worthy successor of the UFC’s “Big” John McCarthy) as MC this time around, and multi-talented, omelette-engineering expert, Simon Law will fulfill photographic duties again.

Quick Presentation Tips

At DemoCamp, there are no slides. This can be tricky. Here are a few tips to keep in mind and also put in practice for your experience to be a success:

1. Know you goal for presenting at DemoCamp
2. Based on your goal, define your audience
3. Know which language and communication style you want to use with your audience
4. Communicate the benefits of your projects, your goals early.

For instance, if your goal is to find funding for your startup, then you know you want to reach angel investors and venture capitalists. You should then make it clear that your objective is to find funding but make sure also that you manage to make a convincing case of your business benefits very early. I’d say about 80% of your presentation should be about the business benefits and 20% about the technology itself to also cater for the geek audience in this example.

Of course there are other goals to presenting at DemoCamp, just make sure you communicate the benefits clearly to your audience. Clear communication will also make it easier for us to spread the good news about your projects and technology and about you too.

Previous Reports

1. DemoCampMontreal1 – part1 – part 2
2. DemoCampCUSEC1

This last week of March sure is an event-packed one in Montreal’s Tech Scene.

I will see you there. Say hi.

—-

If you’re an astute geek or tech-oriented business person who reads my personal blog at YashLabs, you are most probably already using FireFox and have installed the Operator plugin, which will enable you to easily add these events into your online calendar. All are open-source and free technologies.

DemoCampMontreal1 Report – Part 2

On 4/3/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, DemoCampMontreal, Linux, Open Source, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ubuntu, By Yash

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Part 1 of the DemoCampMontreal1 Report is here.

Based on more information provided to me during a recent meeting with Raj Vadavia (CEO) and Thomas Fedoryak (Chief Strategic Officer) of Sygenics, I have updated the description of the fantastic Sygenics Evolution technology today so that it portrays the technology more accurately. Thanks to Thomas Fedoryak for the more accurate wording. Josh – 17th of May.

3. DARWIN by Evonium Inc. – Kingsley and Alden Woodward

John set the tone for the presentation as usual and practised his ~~Bruce Buffer~~ John McCarthy impersonation. He also posed for a photograph in a cheeky Wasnot@BarCampbutgotaT-ShirtNaNaNa stance.

Note to self: the UFC will be in Montreal later this year. Attend. Mixed Martial Arts events have done a lot to change how I think about Martial Arts in general.

The Evonium team demonstrated DARWIN, a modular and customizable framework for Information Management. The demonstration itself at DemoCampMontreal1 showed just a small subset of DARWIN’s possibilities, focusing on the ease of adding new data within the framework and updating a form to access the contents.

The real Wow factor here is Alden Woodward mentioning that DARWIN could evolve with your business process. Now, this statement seems innocuous like this, but what if you factor in that you can re-engineer your business process, easily and rapidly customize your whole Information Systems within and with DARWIN to reflect this while the system is still running LIVE?

A nearly real-time evolutive Business Information System – that’s nothing less than the grail of Business agility! Absolutely fantastically impressive, considering that it is time-consuming and sometimes difficult to re-design your Data models, especially if you using a relational DBMS and rewrite your access code. Now, how do you think Evonium achieves so much flexibility within their framework to do that?

Just imagine tracking the efficiency of multiple business processes per business domain to find what works best in each type of business.

The presentation itself could have been geared more towards showing these benefits. It was difficult to grasp the benefits of DARWIN with the demo as I am not familiar with the interface and based on the feedback I heard here and there, many people did not get the message, which is unfortunate as I strongly believe that Evonium have a winner with DARWIN.

DARWIN is applied to Manufacturing and to Science Laboratories and Science Research in addition to Businesses. Kingsley Woodward is the President and CEO of Evonium Inc.

During Question Time, Raj Vadavia popped a question about the underlying technology.

“Don’t you guys work together? PLANTED QUESTION!!!” said John playfully.

But actually, that was the whole point and the subject of the fourth demo, Evolution or Part 2 of my “Wow!” moment.

4. Evolution by Sygenics Corp – Raj Vadavia

Raj Vadavia started by saying how most modern programming languages are object-oriented (like our beloved Ruby) but RDBMS and these languages do not mesh well together.

He then described Evolution, a new technology that frees business logic from being locked into a given data schema, by installing a true real-time dynamic data model directly within Relational DBMS. Raj said that with Evolution, DB administrators need not go down to the level of the relational tables to modify them. Instead, modifications are initiated from a higher level through an API, and instantly reflected in real-time by the adaptive (or ‘plastic’) Evolution data model. Raj added that Evolution was the result of more than four years of research and development and that the technology is patent-pending. Sygenics Corp, the makers of Evolution, found out during their research that RDBMS and their fixed schema models are actually a bottleneck in data-centric business systems.

Raj said that Evolution uses mathematics, more precisely Set Theory, to manipulate the data. Woah! I was transfixed by the idea. Raj continued to speak about Evolution while looking at me but his words had become a blur as I was lost in metaphysics territory. Could it be that there are other things we take for granted within either our Information Systems and the Businesses they integrate into and that applying a new mathematical model could open up amazing optimization opportunities?

From Sygenics’ website:

The fixed table schema that are used by relational databases are the core bottleneck in the development, lifecycle and flexibility of any data-centric software solution. These fixed schema are the weakest link because they were never intended to change or adapt once activated.

Suddenly, a loud booming voice resonated throughout the SAT room.

“Raaaaj?… Raaaaaaaaj?……”.

OhmigodTheSATisHauntedThere’sAGhostInTheMachine!!?!!

“Raj, it’s your subconscious…. You have five minutes left for your demo.”

It was John, of course.

Evolution dynamically modifies its own data structure (within your relational DB, like Oracle and MS-SQL) without having to manually re-tool access routines or migrate existing data to a new schema. This enables fast reconfigurable data models without having to stop your production system, and is the reason why Evonium’s DARWIN can enable you to dynamically rewire your business logic as your business process changes.

If I were an investor looking for innovative Business Information Systems opportunities that night at DemoCampMontreal1, this is where I’d put my money: Sygenics’ Evolution and Evonium’s DARWIN framework. Their concepts and technologies made my mind reel for a few days.

Interface Ruby and Ruby on Rails with these two technologies and you have the core of the ultimate flexible full-stack Business Information Architecture. Couple this with a Cognos and Google Analytics type of analysis and reporting and you have a fantastic arsenal to track different business processes’ efficiencies so as to select the best one based on practical results.

Sygenics The presentation also suffered from the ‘unfamiliarity with the interface’ phenomenon, but it did show that there was no need to go down to the level of the relational database schema for modifications. But here again, I cannot help but wonder whether the message did get across.

Nevertheless, I’m totally amazed by Evolution. Revolutionary as the website says and I’m inclined to believe it.

Raj Vadavia is the CEO and majority shareholder of Sygenics.

Notes:
- Always distinguish form from content. The two presentations above might have been better formulated with respect to conveying the benefits to the audience, but the technologies and concepts beneath were the most impressive that night and probably the most impressive I’ve seen in the past two years as I’ve mentioned in Part 1.

5. ilovetoplay.com – Marc Chriqui

Marc Chriqui’s stated goal for ilovetoplay.com is to help make people fit, which is a laudable initiative. His demonstration showed the website which helps people find partners for sports activities. He showed the fields within the user profiles and also how photos are added within the site.

Marc also found a creative way of using his 15 minutes of DemoCampMontreal1. After the main presentation, he asked the audience feedback about the marketing aspect for the website and showed us an image with a teasing tag-line.

Tamu, who was sitting in the row behind me, voiced some valid observations about how it can get tiring for people who do not look like the model to see yet another photo not representative of themselves, but Marc replied “You don’t want to be fit?” which created a ripple of laughter in the audience, effectively drowning Tamu’s message.

Well, it’s a good idea to ask for feedback at DemoCamp. Some audience members are even willing to give you that feedback for free, so you might as well listen carefully to their contributions. Another audience member also gave Marc feedback, and John added his perspective too – all relevant.

Note:
- You can use DemoCampMontreal to get feedback on your product and marketing. But make sure you lend an attentive ear if you do get it.

Wrap-up

John announced that the DemoCampMontreal1 team would go to the Ste. Elizabeth afterwards. Then Fred and Simon took turns with the microphone to thank all parties involved and inform people about upcoming events.

Post-demo conversations

Heri and I had talked a little in between demos and I had also caught up with John who said he was away for a while since CUSEC but came back to Montreal. After the wrap-up, I greeted Robin and asked him whether he was going to attend the first Mashpit in Montreal, and he said he’d most probably be there.

I also met Carl Mercier who is a successful serial entrepreneur based in Montreal. Carl, Heri and I swapped business cards spent quite a fair amount of time happily discussing the Montreal Tech Scene. Carl’s business card is a sight to behold – classy and beautiful.

After this, I checked with John whether he was going to the Ste-Elizabeth and then I moved near the bar where there were still a handful of persons around chatting.

Silicon Valley North

I wanted to meet Austin Hill and he was there generously giving the Evonium team and Raj Vadavia feedback on the presentations from his perspective as a VC and Angel investor. Alden, Kingsley and Raj were attentive and open to the feedback. Raj proposed that Austin try to apply Evolution to the problem of sifting and sorting email messages as Austin had mentioned this as an example of a real-world problem that a VC or investor could easily relate to and which would have been advantageous to demonstrate to make the presentations more effective.

I didn’t have the opportunity of speaking to either Raj Vadavia or Alden and Kingsley Woodward about their technology but I did talk to Austin. I asked him about Silicon Valley and the state of the Tech Scene in Toronto and Montreal. Austin mentioned that SV has a lot to do with the mindset but that it was also a question of economics. He said that Toronto is currently ahead of Montreal in terms of activity in the Tech scene, but that he is convinced that Montreal has the potential of becoming the next best SV-North.

That was precisely what I wanted to hear. And with the kind involvement that Austin has in the community, I have no doubt that his words are becoming a reality.

We talked about my background and the Python-wrangler video. Austin said that they were tracking views both on Youtube and from his blog. His blog is an absolute must-read and is a gateway I found when I looked for people in the Montreal Tech community online.

Austin was very approachable and generous with his time, information and even will to help me connect with other people. Generous and friendly, just as I had imagined him from reading his blog and it was a pleasure to talk to him. If SV has Reid Hoffman, Montreal has Austin Hill.

Happiness has a reddish hue

After speaking with Austin, I talked to David FugÃ¨re and he was enthusiastic about Ruby on Rails’ support for REST and web services APIs. Aha! Code Genome is using Ruby and Ruby On Rails. That may well be why David is smiling all the time. Ruby and RoR make happy coders and happy businesses.

SÃ©bastien Pierre said goodbye, but I caught up again with him at the metro, and we talked about Software Engineering in France. I told him about INSA de Rennes, where I did my degree. We spoke of Sugar, which I saw him demonstrate at DemoCampCUSEC1, and of the Recent Changes Camp, or RoCoCo, which is forthcoming in Montreal. This will definitely be an event to attend.

The many faces of the DemoCamp format

DemoCampMontreal1 was astonishing for me. Evolution was especially superb as a singularly original enabling technology and concept which in turns makes Evonium’s DARWIN a reality. I saw that a DemoCamp was not just a meeting among geeks but also an avenue to pitch your startup to willing investors since Austin Hill was present and Tom Sweeney of Garage Technology Ventures Canada was there too, a way to get feedback and advice on your product, marketing, an opportunity to hone your presentation skills and meet smart people and even probable partners. A DemoCamp is all these things simultaneously.

Thanks to Fred for getting me involved, Simon and John and all those who helped with the event and thanks to all those who took some of their precious time to chat, especially Heri, Carl, John, Austin, David and SÃ©bastien. I couldn’t talk to everybody but I would have loved to talk to Simon about his recent trip to Norway, his work for Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution and his omelette-engineering demo, and I would have asked Ben about the passion podcast and whether he had had submissions. I will gladly see you all next time.

Memorable quotes

“Let get it on!” – John (imitating ~~Bruce Buffer~~ UFC referee, John McCarthy)
“Julie, I hadn’t seen you for a while – I liked it that way.”- John (to Julie)
“Mon franÃ§ais n’est pas trÃ¨s bien aujourd’hui.” – John
“Planted question!” – John
“Raaaaj? Raaaaaj, it’s your subconscious. You have 5 minutes left” – John (to Raj Vadavia)

“80% de notre objectif est atteint…on avait besoin d’un deadline” – Thierry Poitras

“I want people to get fit.” – Marc Chriqui (on his objective for the presentation)

“It was a metaphor!” – Simon (about his omelette engineering demo)

“We use mathematics to manipulate the data.” – Raj Vadavia

DemoCampMontreal1 Report – Part 1

On 2/3/2007, In BarCamp, BarCampMontreal, DemoCampMontreal, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Technology, By Yash

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Tuesday February 27th

There were beautiful lights this afternoon in the Montreal skyline. It was DemoCampMontreal1 day, and there were more than 40 registrants on the wiki. I knew it would be fun to be there and reconnect with Montreal’s Tech scene, but little did I know that I would see some of the most amazing technologies in about 2 years… This photo is by Simon Law

The previous “Wow!” moment a couple of years ago was right after I typed scaffold :category while following Curt Hibbs’s Ruby On Rails tutorial on O’Reilly’s OnLamp. At that time I wrote an enthusiastic email to the Linux User Group I was in, saying “I’ve seen the future of web apps”. Two years later, RoR use is rocketing and Ruby just entered in TIOBE’s top ten programming languages index – you know the score.

I reached the S.A.T., the “SociÃ©tÃ© des Arts Technologiques”, on St-Laurent early as Fred had asked to help with the T-shirts for BarCampMontreal1 attendants. I tried the door. It was closed. Recognizing Simon inside, I waved to him, smiling. Simon waved back from inside with a warm smile and walked off. Simon is a riot. Have you seen his mysterious and supposedly loosely Software-Engineering-related videos about cooking eggs?

I would have remained stuck outside if it weren’t for a nice smiling lady working at the S.A.T. who said hello as she passed me by. She let me in the room where preparations were underway for the night including testing the triple big-screen arrangement.

T-Shirt Duty

I greeted Simon again and he invited me to build myself a name tag. Our MC, John Kopanas, to whom I had talked briefly at DemoCampCUSEC1, was already on the spot. Fred arrived not long afterwards with a box of T-shirts, telling me: “This is yours!”.

Fred: It’s not in alphabetical order or anything. You’ll be okay?
Josh: Sure, I’ll get to meet people

While Fred was briefing me about the T-shirt distribution…
“Stand very still!”. It was Simon trying to photograph us. We obliged. Time flew.
“Can I move now???” asked Fred after an eternity and threats of cramps setting in, still holding a T-shirt in mid-air in front of me as Simon’s camera wouldn’t focus.

I couldn’t keep the pose anyway as I was laughing.

For about 20 minutes, I was asking people their names and whether they had attended BarCampMontreal1 in which case I handed them a T-shirt according to the size indicated on the list and crossed out their name. I also sometimes prompted them to write their name-tags and guiding them to the DIY coat-check behind me. DemoCampMontreal1 is a type of D.E.Y. event – Do Everything Yourself.

They were a very interesting 20 minutes, since I recognized some of the names from the Montreal Tech blogosphere. I recognized Austin Hill and Alex Eberts from the extremely fun Python-wrangler recruitment video for their Montreal startup code-named Project Ojibwe. Alex told me they had had thousands of views the last time he checked. Seth Godin links to the entry with a few thoughts on the process.

When Ben Yoskovitz introduced himself, I said “Instigator!” and handed him his T-shirt. I even recognized his voice since his recent foray into podcasting, the Passion Podcast. Ben launched a recurring event for Tech Entrepreneurs in Montreal. The first episode was a resounding success.

I chatted with Heri of MadMedia, whom I’ve been in contact with by email recently, and a nice lady named Tamu. Heri has launched a blog where he focuses on news about startups and entrepreneurship in the Montreal Tech scene with a quick analysis on each item – it’s called The Montreal Tech Watch.

Roberto Rocha, from The Gazette, also fetched his T-shirt and we swapped a few words. Roberto is covering news about the Montreal Tech scene with his freshly-launched blog, TechnoCitÃ©. Roberto informed me by email today that the blog had been renamed from ‘Montreal Tech Scene’ to ‘TechnoCitÃ©’.

I exchanged a few words with a seemingly very happy and perpetually smiling attendant, who was in fact the only one with whom I swapped business cards right there and then at the table while I was on T-shirt duty. I made a mental note to later check back with David FugÃ¨re from Code Genome to see what it was exactly that made him so happy and smile all the time.

Some of the presenters also dropped by the T-shirt table, and that’s how I met Evan Prodromou and Raj Vadavia who were presenting first and last respectively. Tom Sweeney of Garage Technology Ventures Canada asked me if Austin was there already. I replied affirmatively and it was easy to spot Austin in the audience through his hip beret. Tom Sweeney is photographed by Simon Law.

Opening

Things sped up from there. John took the microphone to introduce the concept for DemoCampMontreal1 and captured somebody’s iPod for his girlfriend’s 23rd birthday despite Simon’s warning to the gullible audience member not to trust him while Evan was getting ready, followed by Austin who duly thanked all the sponsors of the event: RadialPoint, Tom Sweeney and Garage Technology Ventures Canada, Project Ojibwe, and of course, our hosts, the S.A.T.

Introduction by John Kopanas

Austin Hill thanks the event’s sponsors

Demonstrations

1. Evan Prodromou – MediaWiki extension for OpenID

OpenID is a protocol which enables single sign-on across a growing number of sites supporting the protocol. Evan creatively tried to circumvent DemoCamp’s ‘no-Powerpoint’ rule by displaying the Wiki documentation for OpenID.

Unfortunately, Evan had some technical issues during his demo which were pinpointed to probable DNS problems. This could have projected the wrong impression about the benefits of OpenID, and it did to some extent, but fortunately a member of the audience asked about this, which enabled Evan to explain that the demo wasn’t functioning as expected.

It could have been stressful to open DemoCampMontreal1 in front of a 60-people strong audience and realize that the machines are never going to cooperate fully, but Evan took all the technical difficulties in stride with good self-derisive humor.

Notes:
- Have a backup or offline solution for your demo in case of network issues
- Humor helps alleviate a demo which deviates from your expectations
- The ‘no-Powerpoint’ rule should really be a ‘no-slide’ or ‘no-documentation’ rule

2. Growwwing – Daniel Haran and Thierry Poitras

John was in his usual what-do-you-want-to-get-out-of-your-presentation form which helped focus the Growwwing team’s minds on their goal. Their objective for demoing at DemoCampMontreal1 was to have a deadline to progress on their project. Use DemoCampMontreal as a milestone for Project Management and self-motivation… Fair enough – That’s quite a creative use to a DemoCamp!

Growwwing is a web service which helps small business owners easily set-up a website for marketing their products or services through the use of several already available web APIs. Daniel demonstrated how they could access the Flickr API easily and choose pics with a Creative Commons License and also do basic in-place image editing for a user’s website.

When they encountered a small glitch in the demo, Daniel explained in perfect English that he had been refactoring the code very recently since their main Ruby on Rails developer was on paternity leave. Later on, when replying to a question in French, his reply was in impeccable French. Well done, Daniel.

Growwwing uses RubyOnRails.

Although their objective was really self-motivation at reaching a deadline, the team has blogged that they were told about partnering and financing opportunities among the benefits they derived from presenting at DemoCampMontreal1.

Notes:
- You can use DemoCampMontreal as a way to mark a milestone in your project
- At DemoCampMontreal, there are opportunities to meet potential partners and investors.

Fred has a post about DemoCampMontreal1 wrap-ups on his blog.

Read Part 2.

YashLabs

Finance, Technology and the pursuit of Alpha Beauty

DemoCampMontreal4 Report

DemoCampMontreal4

DemoCampMontreal3 Report

Amazing Montreal Technology – Sygenics Evolution

DemoCampMontreal2

DemoCampMontreal2 – Thu March 29th – SAT

DemoCampMontreal1 Report – Part 2

DemoCampMontreal1 Report – Part 1

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