Hello blog.

I have been abducted by aliens for the past couple of weeks and they allowed me to go back to earth for the DemoCamp and to write this blog post. DemoCamp 9 has been yet another awesome outing. Lots of regulars and new people as well, and amazingly cool demos. Today, we’ve had folks driving 3 hours all the way from Sudbury, talk about dedication!

That’s [H]ard man, and they had an awesome app as well, but we’ll get on that later. This week, our Phys. Ed. graduate cum technologist David Crow finally turned up with the Barcamp T-shirts! They were actually stored in a warehouse in the alien complex I’ve been in and the abductors thought it would be nice to release us all at once.

Ahh DemoCamp… it’s been 2 months. We had BarcampEarth last month (for which I still have draft articles yet to post! >.< ) as documented by Ryan Coleman, Peter Dawson, Ryan McKegney amongst others. In any case, here is my transcription of DemoCamp which took place today:

Dictabrain

Dictabrain is a venture founded by James Wood, and having Vlad Jebelev on board, both ex-Cows from Tucows. The webapp targets the people that tend to vocalize their thoughts more than they can write. These people usually record whatever they’re saying and need to somehow transcribe that to a written format to store or to share with other people.

The app, using a telephone, matches the calling number with a predefined setting, requires a PIN and allows the user to talk his/her heart out. Then the brain behind Dictabrain (a female brain I should say) transcribes this voice to text rapidly and posts it for the user’s convienience on the web. (EDIT: The beer must have been having a conversation with me at that time cause I didn’t catch it, but apparently, the transcription is human-based. Hmmm… not as cool as I thought).

The duo wanted to show off their baby and need alpha testers to see how much their Dic-Ta-Brain stretches. They are proud RoR developers and run Asterisk, the open source PBX. They plan to be live in a month to a month and a half.

InfoQ

The dude behind TheServerSide.com (An enterprise Java news site/community and more), Floyd Marinescu, is at it again with InfoQ. A very impressive demo with thoughtful uses of AJAX. It is a news/article website geared towards the enterprise software development community, with exclusive news reporters and column editors.

Completely and thoughtfully Ajaxified, the website allows you to tailor your news depending on the “community” of your choice. Funny enough, Ruby is one of the choices, and although I think Ruby is cool at all, I hardly consider it “enterprise” in its current state. The developers at InfoQ push the envelope even more by allow a user to have a personalized RSS feed. How cool is that?!

As well as posting filterable News posts, InfoQ proposes exclusive articles, white papers as well as videos of conferences. They plan to release videos every couple of weeks or so. When viewing videos, get this, they use the concept of widgets to turn a side-bar used for navigation into a content-container in case you’re in the boring part of the vid. How COOL is that?!

In addition, they offer tagging, internationalization (Chinese soon to come), AJAX mouse-over comment-thread reading (try it!). They have 1500 unique visitors everyday, which for a June launch is pretty good. Implemented using Spring and Jackrabbit, they are [E]nterprise to the bone. This is a keeper, definitely check it out.

ConceptShare

After seeing such a cool demo, we didn’t expect to be wowed again by another one. Enter ConceptShare. These are the 2 people that came all the way from Sudbury, a.k.a. the boonies. It is a web collaboration tool for basically everything that has some visual element to it.

ANOTHER collaboration tool you might say, NOT SO they say. Rather than calling it an online collaboration tool, Scott Brooks prefers to describe it as a tool to get feedback and to share ideas with people working on the same project. A very humble description, as I think it ‘s FRIGGIN AWESOME.

It allows users to annotate, comment and draw on pictures. Of course, you can add people from your group or choose people that have made themselves available for consultation as “experts”. The users can circle things, point at things and write little comment bubbles, read what other people said, chat live, and read chat logs.

This is AWESOME for working with customers, as it cuts down on the MOUNTAIN of lost email, pdf’s and *shudder* FRICKIN Word documents all over the place. (!! PLEASE NOTE: Word or any MS fileformats are NOT exchange formats!!). For technologists this is awesome, considering the lack of people skills we have, to discuss UI with other people.

They’ve also got an impressive and fast image scaling feature with little resolution loss which has to be seen to be fully appreciated. They have RSS feeds for comments and support all kinds of files for upload. They are currently going into private beta and are pondering what the pricing is going to be. THE NEWS: It might go from free trial services, $12 small company accounts, $59 for slightly larger ones up to $99. SOLD!.

the eMail Company

You’d think the eMail Company is one that offers hosted email or something. Maybe not, but at least I would. What they do in fact is email marketing. What they propose is a web app with 3 distinct components:

1. Forms, the stuff users fill out on the internet with checkboxes, input fields, radio buttons, numbered, bulletted. The kind of stuff you’d find at tickle and the like, or applicant screeners for job applications like Taleo.
2. A form creation tool, for creating those annoying to fill pages. There are extensive controls, from HTML input types to CSS styles.
3. A dataview section with statistics collected from the forms, with bar charts, histograms and pie charts.

They propose a service that can create extensive and complex forms with branching capabilities out of the box, complete with data viewing. I can see the value in building such an application, but I think it could use some AJAXifying goodness. It works as of now, but it could be made prettier as well. In any case, they came for feedback, and I’m sure they came to the right place to get some.

Pursudo

Pursudo is the craft of love of the guys at Unspace. Rabid RoR fans, they go as far as saying that nothing they do could’ve been done without Rails. That’s a very strong statement! Although I believe Rails is amazing, I also believe some other people are trying hard and are actually coming very close, check out TurboGears, and Django. Anyhow, this project has been made in a total of 3 days of design work and 10 days of development. Not Bad!

This project has absolutely no profit motive and has been made out of fun. With the aim of better matching people than regular matchmaking websites, Pursudo aims to make people meet by doing things together. Selecting people by City, Gender and Age, the list of people can be filtered to a user’s preference. One thing to note is that the list of people can become longer as you’re scrolling down, something a computer geek might smile at because it could hypothetically allow a bored user to scroll down infinitely.

I guess a good way to describe this website would be: “An ode to Ruby on Rails”.

Epilogue

It was nice to be at DemoCamp again. The exchange of ideas, the conversations, people you meet every month with this common interest for anything new on the computer horizon. I had a good time chatting with Scott, Brian, Sutha, Jay, Colin, Slava, Alan and briefly with Ian. Although I couldn’t stay very long, I realized again how events like these are breeding grounds for innovation. No wonder all kinds of *Camp are springing up; like CaseCamp for marketers and CopyCamp regrouping musicians, artists and lawyers for discussions on the topic of internet-age copyright.

Viva *Camp.

The third TorCamp un-conference

Background

To learn, meet people who share different interests, contribute, and push yourself and your thinking.

Event Info

Registration

The registration page is up. As with DemoCamp8 we’ll be using the Wild Apricot system again. You can access it here:

http://barcampearthtoronto.camp9.org/Default.aspx?pageId=1663

For more information and also to add your name to the list, visit the wiki.

Here we are for another awesome Democamp! Here are the 3 musketeers cracking jokes at the audience. A special word has to be said for David Crow, as mentioned from Michael McDerment, who organized the very first BarCamp here and who is single-handedly responsible for putting Toronto on the Web 2.0 map, so-to-speak. Bravo muchachos. That said, there is an upcoming BarCampEarth which is basically a series of BarCamps around the world held everywhere within 2 days, from August 26-28. Sadly, there is no BarCampEarth Toronto, and since this is a community thing, something should be done. It can’t be the same people organizing everytime, so step up people and give a hand in organizing this event! Without any further ado, here are the demos:

Wild Apricot
The first demo was about Wild Apricot(WA) and the goal was to get known (and of course for feedback). A rather tasty fruit and a funny name, WA proposes an easy to use and easy to configure web-app targeting associations and non-profits. It makes setting up a website for organizing events as painless as possible; amongst the list of features supported, there are registrations, optional individual payments (if the event organized isn’t free) and much more. The company’s been developing web-apps for 6 years now and their mantra is usability, and it shows! Their website says it’s 5 mins from the moment you sign up to the moment you use it, I say its 3!

It is build in .NET, sports WYSIWYG editing, and using some more AJAX sauce to make the application more intuitive. An event can literally be published with 2 mouse clicks and a few key strokes.
The presenter wore the company colours (quite a sight and deserves a picture) and generously offered the attendance free apricots.

It was a good presentation, the web-application seemed to be very polished and this looks to be a great solution for less technically abled people. A nice way to begin this democamp.

Jobloft.com

Next, we had the pleasure to hear from the guys behind Jobloft.com, a startup founded by young and enterprising Ryerson students. Also built in .NET, their web-app uses the Google maps API and other technologies in combination with job postings to create job hunting 2.0 for young people.

Focussing on 3 specific sectors (retail, food and hospitality), they aim to be THE place for teenagers and young adults to look for jobs. Special care has been taken in designing the interface, borrowing features here and there (the left menu when searching inspired from Amazon) to create a much simplified interface as compared to the likes of Monster.ca and Workopolis, which cater to a much larger variety of professions.

The founders took around 8 months, from September to May to bring this beast from paper to release. And right now, they have 36 signed employers offering jobs, over a variety of cities in Canada. They provide features such as SMS messaging, RSS feeds and plan to offer community-building features in the future.

The startup is apparently receiving some praises from employers and appears to be a simpler, more effective job posting service than TheBigOnes at this targetted demographic. One example of that is as follows: a job hunter enters a home address then selects a job. Using the Google API, the distance to the workplace from home is displayed, as well as the route to get there; teenagers would, in my opinion, choose a job based out of convienience rather than make a career out of it.

Now my question is: What is the growth potential? Is this section of the job market always expanding? What is the business model? In any case, kudos to those guys, having started the company with seed funding from their relatives, on a tight budget.

FileMobile

FileMobile‘s introductory description doesn’t do the app any justice. The presenter first explained that it was a nice way of sending your media from your camera phone to your blog. It turns out from the demo that it’s much more than this; it’s actually a full-on multimedia sharing application.

One part of it is a media management program. As far as file input is concerned, it allows file uploads from computers or directly from the cellphones as well as on the fly webcam feed recording. Built in flash with FlashCom (now Flash Media Server), it allows all sorts of video broadcasts. Sporting features like picture re-sizing, simulteneous operations (resizing an image while uploading files etc), it is a decent media management software, but online.

The second part of this app is its ‘sharing‘ component. We were treated with live demos(this one features Fabian picking his nose). The app can create entries automatically in the blog engine of your choice, automatically detecting them. In addition, community features are offered, allowing fellow FileMobile members to browse your stuff, if you set them to be public. We had the opportunity to take a peek at this feature, and we got confirmation that there IS a use for all the camera-phone to FileMobile account transmission; the first 3 cameraphone pictures seen were boobs.

For Mac and Linux users out there fearing compatibility problems, the app is meant to work on your system. Boob hunting has never been made easier.

Languify

Originally an experiment from John Phillip Green at Nuvvo, this framework has been developped by a fellow U of T and Greg Wilson student, Nicolaas Handojo.

They demo’ing for 3 reasons:

1. Usefulness: To find projects this could be used in.
2. To raise awareness of its existence.
3. For feedback.

In a nutshell, it is a mechanism to get any UI translated in any number of languages (spoken, not programming languages). Taking input from any .yml, .NET .xml files or in .csv‘s, the framework can substitute the UI’s language through an easy to use interface. Through the same interface, the text-to-be-translated can be viewed and translated on the fly. The translations can be stored in a database or as a flat file, in the above mentioned input formats. Languify was built using Ruby on Rails.
This tool might prove to be useful for applications like Jobloft.com which hasn’t been built with internationalization in mind.

The demo showcased a choice of languages consisting of Japanese, German and English, so for those who might ask, yes unicode is supported. Hurray for 2-byte characters.

Michael McDermot

Last but not least, Michael McDerment from Freshbooks.com came to do a presentation on how to measure the success of a web-based service. Bending the no-powerpoint rules, he used html slides to discuss the problems web businesses face concerning sales.

He adapts the sales funnel model to web services, the top being visits, followed by trial then ending by purchase. If visits are 100% of the incoming traffic, trials go down to 10% of those people followed by only 1% that actually purchase the service. And THAT’s considered good.

The classical problem is this: How to increase sales? Some splurge more on marketting, generating more traffic.

What Michael suggests is to first use a more sophisticated funnel model. The following one is more realistic, with current web services now offering trials and free limited usage:

Starting at 100% with visits, 10% at trial, 9% at login to trial account, 5% as active users and 1% at purchase.

Notice how he added the ‘login to trial account’ phase. The solution he proposes is to analyze where people are lost in the funnel model and attempts to minimize this number. As far as FreshBooks is concerned, he found that he lost 60% of the people that signed up for a trial to the actual trial login process. Only 40% bothered to go in and fill all the forms before being able to log in. A thoughtful change to the sign-up process for trials fixed that problem for Freshbooks. The moral of the story is this: expand the funnel model, find the ‘limiting factor’ and swiftly fix it. In his case, it was a usability problem.

We only got to the actual theme of the presentation in the last few minutes; Google Analytics, while good at providing high level data is not so good at providing more detailed info. Amongst the data to watch are: login/logout rates for a single user, which page are being accessed more frequently and of course finding and eliminating limiting factors. Another way to test the service is to use the classical usability tests: using random people to go through a task, asking questions etc…

Conclusion

This was yet another exciting democamp, with very polished applications. The next democamp might not take place at the end of August because it coincides with BarCampEarth, but more details are to be posted. Until then, see you later!

This is the next iteration of DemoCamp (Read this first!).

Demo Schedule

We will have 5 demos:

1. WildApricot
2. JobLoft.com – Google maps-powered job board
3. Filemobile Power tools for bloggers, letting users videoblog and moblog with ease.
4. Languify A not-yet-released tool from the Nuvvo team & NicolaasHandojo to manage translating your user interface to new languages.
5. Mike McDerment (FreshBooks.com) – How to Measure the Success of Your Web Service

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.

Next week, on Tuesday 4th of July, the Toronto Democamp 7 will be held at No Regrets, 42 Mowat Avenue, Toronto.
Sign-up instructions found on the Democamp 7 page.

Democamp is the show-and-tell extention of BarCamp.

“BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.”

For people who don’t know what DemoCamp is, it is a good day to get introduced to this special monthly event. Those that do know what it is, sign up already! DemoCamp is one of those things that make me happy and proud to be in Toronto. We have a very active techie community and this is an excellent place to meet up and get to know people.

The demo schedule:

1. Portal Prophet Platform Demo from Domainer Inc. – Kristan Uccello
2. FeelingBullish.com Financial Social Networks Demo – Josh Blinick
3. Paruba.com Tagging the e-commerce web – Teehan+Lax
4. The Glove: 3D info visualization – Cameron Browning
5. Special Guest Appearance: Perl 6 – Damian Conway all the way from Monash University.

Yes, this week’s special guest comes all the way from Melbourne Australia. On a slightly related topic, Damian Conway will be speaking about “Perl, as well as modern archaeological techniques, bidirectional cross-dressing, Ancient Greeks hackers, and a host of other improbable topics.” at room BA1180, Bahen Centre, from 18:30-21:00, July 5th.