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.

I have recently been reading articles written by Frank Demmler. He’s a Prof at the business school of Carnegie Mellon University. He has seen the problem from all angles, having been in each position at one time or another and he shares his learnings in the series linked above. Be warned; some familarity with the ‘problem space’ and with the terms are needed, but Frank shares his personal learnings which will be a good refresher for veterans and a warning guide for wannabe-n00bs like me. Here’s an excerpt:

“One of things that continues to surprise me is that many board meetings that I have participated in or observed, have been largely a waste of time “


I concur!

This presumptuous title just came into my mind after reading over a few articles over the ol’ net. This may be obvious to some, but looking at some current headlines in the IT world, I can just feel something brewing; something might change the way we use the internet, in a big way.

The problem, briefly

What I’m talking about is the current controversy around net neutrality(NN). Although the repercussions were easy to see in retrospect, the need for the regulation of the flow of information over the internet is something that hit me in the head. It all makes sense! The gist of the problem is that one camp says there should be discrimination (which I will discuss later) over what kind of data flows over the internet, and the other camp that says that everything should be considered the same (hence the ‘neutral’ in net neutrality).

The current situation

The fathers of the Internet (by fathers I do not mean just Tim Berners-Lee, who btw is for NN, but rather everyone that contributed to make the net what it is today) never in any document discussed the issue. It has been assumed that the Internet was neutral up until now. Arguably, that is what has made the Internet what it is today:

1. Non-discrimination: Every bit is equal.
2. Interconnection: It is required for operators to connect to each other in many accessible points.
3. Access: Anything on the network may connect to anything else on the network.

Although those rules are not observed in all cases (how about firewalls, and how about traffic shaping?), these are the broad guidelines which depict the big picture of the internet. On a macro scale, it is all about those 3 rules. This is the internet we know and love. Without those, there would not have been as much innovation, and recently virtual democratization a.k.a Web 2.0.

The opponents & their plans

The people that don’t want NN to continue are mostly Telecom & Cable companies. As opposed to the highly regulated Telecom business, the Internet is the Wild Wild West to them. Their argument is… they provide the cables, why can’t they profit from it… more. One of the things they want to do for example:

1. Discrimination of bits, for example to favor VoIP because of latency sensitivity.
2. Toll taxes to access certain parts of the internet.
3. Priority to certain destinations over the internet.
4. Other regulations they might make up to “cover some losses”.

The list could actually go on, but enough said, basically, they want corporate control over what we currently deem a public common. The Telco’s have even gone to the extent of putting up bogus websites to try and attract some sympathy from naive internet surfers (when was the last time you heard that expression? =).

Some hardware companies have opposed net neutrality also. I do not know the reason, and I wouldn’t want to extrapolate, but I can see how money could be made with all the packet filtering and so on.

The Proponents

A strong group FOR net neutrality is the coalition of Amazon.com, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google. (It sure feels good to be on Microsoft’s side, doesn’t it?) Others are also for net neutrality, and in my opinion are fighting more for the ideology because they don’t have as many stakes in the game. (Imagine Google needing to pay for everybody that visits their website… of course they are gonna be for net neutrality!). And to mostly everybody’s relief, the groups recently won a battle. Interestingly, there is a little group in Sweden called Piratbyrån who are advocates of piracy.
They use the non-discrimination rule (same as in NN) to say that pirate websites should be allowed to run because bits are bits and shouldn’t be discriminated against.

My conclusion

Morals aside, I totally understand the point of view of the Telcos. I mean, they have a point with latencies and optimizing performance and all that. But the problem is… Telcos are corporate entities. They use the greedy algorithms hardcore. Come on… They are in there for the money, to have something good to report to the investors and to show revenue, profit and growth. On the other side, many of the proponents are ALSO undeniably driven by the same reasons.

In the middle you get the little buggers(Piratbyrån) that use that are the modern equivalent to the hippies (nothing wrong with hippies, I love them), and who may be a little bit too idealistic.

The theory at last

All this stuff above was to explain my unified theory… a lot of rambling eh? So here we go:

1. The main people FOR NN are awfully lot like what would be the centre-wing. (My very bad description of a mixture of moderate right wing and moderate left wing, combining the efforts of Mr Corporate guy and Mr Sort of Grassroot guy).
2. The people AGAINST NN are akin to the right wing (To describe something like right + extreme right, in french political terms). Funny enough, in the recent legislative showdown, all 13 who voted against NN were republican.
3. The little hippies are like the green party. In Mauritius, they would be akin to the MR, if you know what i’m talking about.

I’m a young fellow with a knack for the moderate-idealistic view, so I’m in category number 1.
Who are you with?

I was watching a 20-minute video documentary over at YouTube and I found it rather interesting; it was about a beat called the ‘Amen break’.

It is a 6-second drum loop and is arguably the most important 6 seconds in contemporary music. To summarize the doc, these 6 seconds have been used as-is, modified, disassembled and recomposited into hundreds if not thousands of other songs. Whole music genres have been based on those short 6 seconds: Jungle and Drum n Bass. The beat has penetrated mainstream pop-culture and has been used in TV commercials, hiphop and even pop music. How much money did the Winstons (the original creators) make off it? Nada and zilch.

Seeing there was some cash to be made, Zero-G Sounds has apparently appropriated the beat a few years ago. Now this raises a few important issues:

• How were they able to appropriate some sound samples that were either in the public domain or otherwise widely available for at least 15+ years?
• Who actually owns the copyright for the sound? The owner of the rights to the original song (from 1969) or Zero-G?
• Can we copyright a subset of something not ours and make it our own?

I won’t be able to answer those questions and depending on whose lawyer we talk to, we’d get some legalese mumbo-jumbo interspersed with ‘i own you’, ‘pay me’ and ‘i’ll sue your bum’. What I’m interested in discussing instead are the repercussions occuring if Zero-G had a time-travelling machine:

Imagine they went back to 1969 and copyrighted those 6 seconds. Would Jungle and Drum and Bass have happened? Would this beat be in popular culture as it is now? I can answer that, and the answer is ‘probably not’. A whole underground sub-culture flourished from this blatant copyright violation, culminating with the Britney-Spears-kind-of music engineers going to the next level and using the coveted beat.

People stole these 6 seconds from the Winstons. Big Deal. Studios have been booked, CD’s have been pressed, records have been sold. At the end of the day, the record companies were laughing all the way to the bank. In effect, money has been made with something similar to open source in spirit. Result of the rip-off: the world has become a culturally richer place and some individuals actually got fatter in the wallet!

Although copyright is VERY important, Amen break is the living example of how open source WILL make the world a better place.

Some companies like ID Software have been notorious in offering their code to the public a couple of years after their games have been shipped. The internet is based off open source software. The list goes on with examples that open source things CAN make money.
Other companies should take note, especially publishers, record labels and the like; if they try to ignore their instinctive greediness (geekiness: by greedy i mean the algorithm family) they could actually walk away quite a lot heavier in bills if they’re smart (Novell & Red Hat are good candidates). After all, greedy algorithms do not return the most optimal solutions in most cases.

On your next fun project (be it music, pictures or code), you can share your stuff while still protecting yourself using the creative commons. Open source is good, open source is fun.
Amen, brother!