{"id":1086,"date":"2008-10-30T23:38:14","date_gmt":"2008-10-31T06:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=1086"},"modified":"2008-10-31T08:57:29","modified_gmt":"2008-10-31T15:57:29","slug":"democamp-victoria-02-another-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2008\/10\/30\/democamp-victoria-02-another-success\/","title":{"rendered":"DemoCamp Victoria 02 another success"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, I am much too wired (and<\/em> tired) to be writing a summing up of tonight’s DemoCamp event<\/a> at Dave Chard’s Juliet Presentation Centre<\/a>, but here goes.<\/p>\n

Overall, the event had a more serious feel than the first event<\/a> back in April.\u00a0 Maybe people are feeling more earnest, given the economic climate (not to mention that now it’s Fall, and back then it was Spring).\u00a0 Personally, I also missed the scrappy energy that Boris Mann<\/a> brings to these events — he trekked from Vancouver to Victoria for the first one,\u00a0 but had commitments in Seattle this time around. <le sigh>\u00a0 And I missed Tris Hussey<\/a>, who moved away from Victoria this past summer and has taken his wonderful photography skills to that lucky town.\u00a0 Tris’s photos of DemoCamp Victoria 01<\/a> were terrific.\u00a0 Now, I think I saw some cameras tonight, but until I see the photos on flickr or …somewhere, I know they won’t be as good as Tris<\/a>‘s.<\/p>\n

But those regrets are small potatoes, not to be counted against the overall quality of the presentations.\u00a0 And I’m not just saying that ’cause I presented, too! \ud83d\ude09\u00a0 Nor does saying so slight the presentations of the first DemoCamp.\u00a0 Basically, I continue to be impressed by the quirky, but potentially completely solid ideas that emerge in Victoria.\u00a0 (“Potentially” because until an idea is executed and allowed to run for some time — months?, years? — as a business, you can’t really assess its viability.)<\/p>\n

Ok, so who presented?<\/p>\n

In order, from my notes:<\/p>\n

First up, Thomas Ahn of MAD Ventures Inc.<\/a>, who wanted to present to this group as a VC, heading a company that’s looking to fund local start-ups with seed money along the lines of the Y-Combinator<\/a> model.\u00a0 Questions to Thomas included, “what’s your chunk?”\u00a0 Answer: can range from 10 to 66% depending on the work involved, but typically hovers around 33%.\u00a0 Another question: how has your strategy changed in the past 2 months?\u00a0 A: Not much, as MAD Ventures continues in the Y-Combinator model.\u00a0 I was sitting there thinking, “builders, not traders<\/a>; that’s good.”<\/p>\n

Next, Andrew Wilkinson of Metalab Design<\/a> gave a really good presentation of Ballpark<\/a> (haha on you if you clicked through on that link), which is an elegant application designed for the smaller all-hands-on-deck business client who needs to be able to track leads, estimates, and cash flow for work projects.\u00a0 Ballpark is designed to give users a real feel<\/em> for where they are in the monthly\/ weekly cash flow.\u00a0 Very slick, very nicely done application.\u00a0 Great UI, too.<\/p>\n

Tim S. Lefler was next with an intriguing idea around microitems<\/a>.\u00a0 Now, this is something that’s for the collectors and traders and gamers out there.\u00a0 (I’m thinking, Netwoman<\/a>, you’d like this.)\u00a0 Microitems are virtual items (the sorts of things you’re gifted on Facebook or in Warcraft), but what Tim’s site does is provide a repository and management system for these gifts and trading objects, so that you can collect and share them freely, beyond the confines of walled gardens (like Facebook, etc.).\u00a0 I think this could really take off with a certain demographic.<\/p>\n

Ok, next up was Will<\/a> Whittaker<\/a>, who offered two possible demos, from which the crowd chose Pornsupercomputer.\u00a0 Ok, I did not fully understand this, and it wasn’t because of the porn.\u00a0 In fact, the porn (and traffic) was the part I did<\/strong> understand — and SETI<\/a>, too, for that matter.\u00a0 Will’s presentation started with a slide showing the text “My computer is bigger than yours.”\u00a0 Uh-huh.\u00a0 Turns out he had three obsessions or interests that kept the brain gears turning: porn sites and the tremendous amount of traffic they draw; the fact that google adwords or adsense is forbidden on porn sites; and the fact that SETI uses other individual computers for its own computing needs (i.e., SETI “uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.”)\u00a0 And Will had this brainstorm that it would be really cool if he could somehow mash these three aspects together — hence the Pornsupercomputer concept was born.\u00a0 He would pay porn sites to install a widget that would run on the porn site visitor’s computer every time s\/he visited.\u00a0 This widget would provide computing power to the supercomputer, which exists virtually.\u00a0 That’s sort of how I understood it, but it got pretty technical in the Q&A.<\/p>\n

After Will, we heard Hossein Dadkhah<\/a> (can’t find too much information online), who presented an idea around lifetime<\/em> business cards.\u00a0 It’s a pretty simple concept, but ingenious.\u00a0 Hossein rightly pointed out that unless you’re willing to spend a lot of money, the quality of most business cards here (locally) is pretty poor.\u00a0 At the same time, he’s familiar with locales where you get high quality cards for much less.\u00a0 He also thought about how it’s small businesses that really need super-good cards, but that these businesses are often also in flux, changing their addresses, phone numbers, and so on.\u00a0 Each time, they’re obliged to have new cards printed.\u00a0 So his idea (and apologies if I’m telescoping and\/or bowdlerizing it too much) is to take the best of quality (but low-cost) cards you can get abroad and putting that together with a service to provide fixed id telephone numbers, email addresses, etc.\u00a0 In other words, you pay for a business card that’s really high quality, but you’re essentially paying for things like having a toll-free number so that you don’t have to get new cards everytime you change your phone number or move your office, whether across town or somewhere completely new.<\/p>\n

Next, I presented MetroCascade<\/a>, the online local news aggregator built for this community specifically, but with the agenda to take over the region (Cascadia) and then …bwahahaha.\u00a0 Well, something like that!\u00a0 It’s currently hosted here, and still in beta beta beta, but once we get a designer to work on the UI (including how to get some of the features I want — where on the page to put them), we’ll go completely live.<\/p>\n

Stephen<\/a> Albinati <\/a>was up next, presenting zumer<\/a>, which I was familiar with, but didn’t fully understand until after Stephen’s excellent presentation.\u00a0 Here’s an article from UVic’s Martlet, New website rates consumer products<\/a>, which also explains it well.\u00a0 Basically, “Zumer empowers you to make informed decisions about which companies get your money.”\u00a0 It “allows individuals to go beyond the marketing spin and research the social and environmental impact of products they buy every day.”\u00a0 So what this means is that as the database gets built up — and zumer is relying on universities and graduate students to populate it, and also uses companies and their audited materials, with the goal eventually of letting users flesh out the data, too — registered users of the site can assess products according to their personal criteria.\u00a0 If you’re socially conscious, or if you’re environmentally conscious, you can set these concerns as parameters in your profile.\u00a0 Then, next time you’re shopping for sneakers, you can use your mobile device to input the brand and instantly pull up a score or report card for the shoes you’re considering for purchase.\u00a0 Albinati<\/a> took a lot of questions about how zumer proposes to ensure the integrity of the site, so that corporations can’t “game” the system.\u00a0 But overall, he’s confident that transparency and the initial base of contributors (university – affiliated) will keep things honest.<\/p>\n

Finally, rounding things out was a potentially very intriguing idea by Morley (don’t have more info, sorry), who used to be a small business owner who then went back to school, studied programming and design (?), and is now an accountant.\u00a0 Morley was basically seeking creative programmers who could work with him on an online accounting system.\u00a0 He spoke briefly about the poor quality of what’s available in that field at present, and that a really ace bookkeeping software, tax return filing program, and financial management software system would meet a real need amongst small business owners.\u00a0 It was clear that his ideas captured the interest of many in the audience, but at present he didn’t have a model to show us.\u00a0 This meant that it remained a bit too abstract: Andrew Wilkinson, for example, managed to snag our interest because he showed his application in action (it was a real demo of the product).\u00a0 Morley talked about the ideas, but I want to see what he can show us in terms of a prototype or even just a mock-up when we have our next DemoCamp.<\/p>\n

Right now it’s up in the air as to when the next one can take place.\u00a0 Dave Chard’s Juliet Presentation Centre will soon be closing, and his new presentation centre in the Juliet itself will be too small.\u00a0 Either we find another helpful soul like Dave, who is concerned about Victoria’s downtown and who understands the synergy that’s created for it when events like this take place in the heart of the city, or we all go back to hibernating in our respective silos.\u00a0 Let’s hope we find another champion of downtown with some square footage to spare for the city’s tech creatives.<\/p>\n

Edit, 10\/31: Trying to make sure I got the demos reasonably right while writing this up last night, I failed to mention that Mark Lise<\/a> again did a great job emceeing the event and that Jessica Pryde<\/a> again kept us on track for time. Thanks to all of you who made the evening a success!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ok, I am much too wired (and tired) to be writing a summing up of tonight’s DemoCamp event at Dave Chard’s Juliet Presentation Centre, but here goes. Overall, the event had a more serious feel than the first event back in April.\u00a0 Maybe people are feeling more earnest, given the economic climate (not to mention […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2426,3274,1418],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democamp","category-democampvictoria02","category-victoria"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}