I attended DemoCamp today at Toronto. I had heard a lot about it, so it was nice that I had a chance to experience it first hand. 
The event featured around 100 registrants, and was held at No Regrets. The ambience was good, but the place seemed cramped though, and it was hard to move around freely, which is what you would want at “networking” events (So Some Regrets). In any case, I had many take-away points, and this post offers some of the impressions I carry back to Baltimore, that’s later next week.
At DemoCamp its customary that 3 questions are *explicitly* asked, and here they go.
- Who (the heck) are you? (or so goes the tone)
- Why (the hell) are you here? (ditto)
- What do you expect from the (estemeed) audience? (ditto)
I liked the way they were asked, worked well as an ice-breaker, for almost all speakers (I guess?). Moving on, I have notes for only a couple of presentations, and that’s what I will be blogging about.
Feeling Bullish is a social stock recommendation tool. I liked it, partly because of my own interest in investing, and partly due the huge potential benefits this offers. This web-based tool is sub-divided into what they call — “Stock Central”, “Analyst Central”, and “Forum Central” with “Analyst Central” being their key innovation, or so I felt. All users on Feeling Bullish are “analysts”, and “karma” is correlated with their predictions on stock movement. Neat, I liked it. I did not hear from them on their plans of user boot-strapping. If they succeed, I think this tool will fly.
Paruba, is an e-commerce tagging site developed by Teehan+Lax, in the spare time of their employees (total of around 6 man-months). A browser bookmarklet enables users to bookmark their shopping preferences at Paruba. Its more like WishList 2.0, but integrating them across multiple vendors, and giving it the Web 2.0 social feel. Quoting Jon Lax, “its a delicious+flickr for e-commerce”. I would have loved to hear more about their monetizing plans.
Damian Conway, a great presenter, and one of the leading contributors to Perl 6 made a guest appearance. His opening line to a bunch of Ruby proponents was very simple - “I will show you what you will be using when you get sick of ruby”, and his slides were in VIM. He spoke mainly about developments with Perl 6. The any operator, automatic parallelization, and objects as first-class citizens stood out.
I believe he is presenting tomorrow at U of T. If anyone reading this post knows the exact location do let me know.
Other talks from Kristan Ucello, Cameron Browning were also good. Kristan demoed Domainer, a CMS like tool, and Cameron demoed his work on information visualization. When Kristan mentioned “domain squatters” as a part of their clientele, I was slightly concerned about misuse by spammers (and splogs, I have been researching for a while now). I am quite sure that’s not their intention, and they have everything figured out.
Some other images I captured are available on flickr. Thanks go to David Crow, Jay Goldman, Joey deVilla and countless others for organizing this. On DemoCamp, elsewhere (will update as new posts are made) — Brian Ivanovick, Sacha Chua, Olivier Yiptong, Rehan Zaidi, Adam Sadowski, Randy Glenn, Ian Irving
Comments 2
Hi Pranam,
Adam from Domainer here….
Rest assured “domain squatters” are not who we’re aiming our eventual product at, but I think we need to be careful about throwing around that term too casually.
There are thousands of individuals and companies that may own domain collections for a variety of reasons. Yes, some of those people use domains in order to set up linkspam and splog sites, or to “squat” on the trademarks of other companies. However, most of the people that you may call squatters own their domains through entirely legitimate means and want to put them to good use. We’re trying to enable that, as well as enable people who may own 2, 5 or 10 domains to build sites from a central interface.
Posted 05 Jul 2006 at 10:13 am ¶Pranam -
Thanks for the thanks! Keep coming out to DemoCamp and we’ll keep organizing them. Or step up and help out to keep the community running smoothly - there’s always things to do. People should jump over to the Wiki for more info, and sign up to the Google Group to keep up to date.
See you at the next DemoCamp!
Posted 05 Jul 2006 at 6:32 pm ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 5
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