Toronto DemoCamp 9 : back from the holidays

After a small pause, we have returned to another season of Demo Camps with Demo Camp Toronto o9, now on a Monday, and it’s back at No Regrets, 42 Mowat Ave., Toronto, ON, one last time.

DictaBrain – Rapid Voice to Text to Blog Transcription
in many ways underwhelming but only because I (and others) expected auto-magical machine transcription not human transcription (they said they where about to do a deal with India for the off shore transcription). Otherwise a great idea, well executed. Use a voice mail box (could you upload a mp3 file? Could be useful for getting transcription of conferences, podcasts, or videocasts) and then pick on the text off the website, making it seem magical.

InfoQ.com (presented by one of its community leaders : Floyd Marinescu)
Infoq is a web tech magazine, very very well done, with well though out Ajax, and Personalized RSS feed’s, throughout. And the content looks interesting and useful too! The only thing missing I could see was a share feature (del.icio.us it, Digg it, etc)

ConceptShare A new way to share and manage visual design concepts
This was this months out of the ball park hit! Slick flash interface gave it a responsive desktop application feel, made tracking design work (be it Mockup, Ad creative, BluePrint or other), and collecting commentary, as it evolved to the final design much less painful between parties with a minimum of technical skill. I (and other people) were muttering “I could have so used this for X” (I understand that the developers built this to solve the same inch for themselves, which is allways a good thing). Thanks for two thirds of the team making the long drive south! Their web site does a good start of explaining the problem they are trying to solve, but I would love to see a video showing the product! (Update : They have their own blog and have posted their own thoughts in the Demo Camp Redux)

(Free take away everyone: put your product demo’s and elevator pitches on YouTube, as well as own your own site.)

the eMail company showed Formulate for building online webforms, webpolls, surveys, etc..
very dry demo, very web 1.0 (no CSS, no use of AXJAX) but still fills a real need (creating web forms for markeking campaigns) and looks to have paid a lot of attention to details, even if the implementation is not leading/bleeding edge. Which may not be a bad thing, but beyond the functionality, it would improve usability (access to that functionality), and ,since it’s aimed sold to markets, eye candy is a good thing. Another short fall of the current implementation is that is lives on their severs. It’s a internal need that’s been productized (see scratching itches, above).

Pursudo– put yourself out there
the Upsace guys also built something to scratching their own itch in the Meatspace / Meetspace problem set. Sounds like it was build incredible fast, but does not look like it. Also included is a solution to interesting ui problem with the introduction of the infiante scroll bar (using ajax to continuously add content just below the current bottom of the page so that, as long as you have content, you can never scroll to the bottom of the page or need to go to the next page.

In general it wasa very good turnout (standing- and seating on the floor – room only); a quarter of them new folk. I was able to talk to quite a few of the regular people, and in general there seemed to be a lots of after talk. The talks varied in their interest to me, but that’s the way a ecology works : it can’t all be butterflies.

For More checkout the BarCamp home page as well as the DemoCamp Flick Stream, and DemoCamp Technorati tag trail, or where tags are supported.

Then we are returning to MaRS, 101 College Street West for Camp’s 10 (Oct 23 ), and 11 (Nov 20).

Update : The ‘normal’ process is write up my view, post, then edit (spell check for the 20th time, try to clean up the grammar), and read what others are saying. And so it was only after writing my, already delayed, first draft (uposted) that I read David Crow’s Open Apology, the Greg’s post and Thomas’s observations.

I took the Pursudo joke to be a elf-deprecating. (and I ‘ve made my own risqué joke above). It took me a while to figure out what the “chuckles” at the ad copy where about. I think I just rolled my eyes at the little frat boys and their jokes. I feel bad if some of Greg’s students where offended by their sexual comments. I am disappointed they they have judged DemoCamp by that alone, which I feel is very unrepresentative of the last 5 (out of 9) democamp’s I’ve been at. (Which is not to say we – I – can’t do better).

I do hope they will reconsider, and bring their friends. Speak up, and speak out if we offend. We need your voices, your diversity, yours opinions and energy you bring. And I hope you give Demo’s too! (The best revenge is living well) The DemoCamps (both on stage and off) have had a good diversity of languages & platforms, and ethnicity of the people (i.e. It hasn’t been a ‘white boys’ club), but it has seemed at bit heavy on the testosterone, although that was improving from a very low base. Perhaps something to work on, even if only by Rule #1 of DemoCamp: “Talk about DemoCamp”, and making sure more women are invited and feel comfortable enough to ask their friends (of all kinds) to take part in DemoCamp (in the audience and showing Demo’s) as well.