David Crow seemed to be in his usual shape today for more fun and frolics! Good recovery David, my best wishes!

The presentations today started a bit late because we were missing a projector. No projector, no presentation. The issue finally got resolved around 19:15 and soon the 1st demo started:

Domainer.com

The people from Domainer.com came just looking for feedback, after 2 and a half years from conception. The product they demo’ed consisted of a neat looking web-interface used to “administer” and publish web pages. The interface being very ajaxified, allowed drag and drops, menus poping up and about, all the pretty stuff.

They claimed that some people are responsible to maintain up to 100 domains and they want to provide an easy interface to publish content and modify their themes and layout. Pages would be generated from drag & drop menus and themes & layout would be changed at the click of a button.

The essence of what they want to achieve is essentially captured by “frontpage plus”. They are to offer full hosting services as well.

FeelingBullish.com

Riding the web 2.0 bandwagon, the people at Feeling Bullish aim to build a community and use the wisdom of the crowd along with the human desire of recognition for hopefully accurate shared financial knowledge. The demo consisted of an overview of the web-interface, and the different recommendations and ratings the web-app offers for users as a result of the collective opinions.

The demo started with stocks; Each company on the stock market has a page which contains plenty of statistics and other information, as well as ‘bullish’ ratings such as sell, buy, hold etc. which are essentially the collective wisdom they talk about.

These ratings are obtained by the predictions of users. The more accurate the prediction of the users turn out to be, the more their ‘reputation’ increases. More reputation == more credibility == more effect on the bulllish rating system. They plan to support blogging as well, for news headlines etc.

The people they target are more from the financial sector than from the techie world, attempting to create something like Investment 2.0. They haven’t figured out a business model yet, but as Leila & Sutha accurately put it, having a thought out monetization plan is sooooo web 1.0!

Paruba

The name Paruba is interestingly inspired from a Seinfeld episode where Kramer says this word with no apparent meaning. Again, a very ajaxified interface greets us for this demo. In this word I made up, I’ll try to explain what they’re trying to do: social book-shopping. Basically, they are banking on this current society’s trend towards consumerism and its mantra: you are what you buy.

They provide a web application to showcase what you possess, to display what you might desire (for a wishlist, wedding list etc) or just to discover new products. Lots of drag & dropping, fade ins and outs ensued. The presenter talked about how the team needed to invest personal stakes in the project to build enough motivation (he called it “pain”… he must not enjoy developing! ) to steer it towards completion.

As per the previous presenters, a very web 2.0 startup trend with the business model (or lack thereof) manifests itself here, although they did learn ruby on rails developing it.

The Glove

This demo is cool and is very reminiscent of the NES power glove. The glove itself is basically a presentation tool created to make presentations more intuitive to the viewers. In my opinion, it just serves to attribute the status of ‘geek’ to the presenter more than being a must-have piece of equipment, but it does free up the hands. Its like using a wireless mouse without needing to move the mouse on a surface to move the cursor, so it might actually make it more intuitive for the presenter as opposed to the viewers!
What he presented was a visual representation of networks of files and/or data. He used it to represent websites in a tree structure, in 3D. The glove helped navigate through the tree, as well as to control the camera. A web designer by trade, he uses the application as well as the glove to clients, showing them how crappy (and disorderly) their websites are, as well as showing them pretty tree-like structures standing in for ideal websites. Rotating, zooming in files, moving leaves of the tree were what we saw.

Damian Conway

This man is such a joker. He circumvented the “no powerpoint” rule of DemoCamp by using vim presentation slides. Rather humourous slides and ASCII art kept us entertained. He showcased many new features of Perl 6; a rethinking of keywords to make them more intuitive, reduced syntax complexity, writing an http client in around 15 lines of code, and finally cool new functions (all, any, etc) which are implemented using parallel computing. Perl 6 is also completely object oriented (unlike Java!) and can now have a Java-like syntax. He reminded us that code obfuscation will still remain a feature of the language for years to come, for more confused fun!

A riot, this guy is not to be missed tomorrow @ Bahen Centre, room 1180 from 18:30-21:00!

Conclusion

All in all this democamp went very well, as usual. It was nice being able to eat & consume alcoholic beverages while sitting through the presentations, although I doubt 150 people would fit the location. Great job everybody for organizing this again successful DemoCamp.

Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 @ 3:46 am barcamp, business, software
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