Boris is right that I’ve been living (well working) in a cave. Last night I ventured out and joined a diverse group of people at DemoCamp Vancouver. It was an excellent experience. I suspect the next one will be even more popular. Life outside the Cave is extremely compelling.
I didn’t know what to expect except a mix mash of different topics and presentation. There were four talks, voted digg style from a list of submissions. The top four got 6 minutes of floor time, 3 for talking, 3 for questions. However, most talks turned into 1 minute of talking followed by 5 minutes of questions.
The four talks that got ‘dugg’ the most were:
- Gaboogie – Web 2.0 conference calls.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1223216019753957674This was really interesting. Essentially use their Web 2.0 yummy interface to schedule a conference call. At the scheduled time it will call you. Straight forward and enough difference to be remarkable. Also with a name like Gaboogie… - Kelvin.23 – Local inventor/designer Kevin Royes created a 23 in one multi-tool. His tag line, “tools for urban living”. Essentially a screw driver, hammer, light, coffee maker, secret decoder ring, dog whistle, etc all in one tool. For those condo folks who don’t need a tool box. I liked that it was inspired by the VW/Audi switch blade key. Yay, veee-dub represent! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7295477801572759796
- The third presentation was by incen.tv. A peer to peer lending service. An interesting idea, I actually had a similar one last year: Community Sponsored Software Development. I actually think mine is a little more half baked than their’s at this point. Anyways, the idea is cool. Their presentation was lame, power point for 4 minutes with bad techno. Ick. Anyways enough hating… moving on.
- Sxipper. Made by Sxip. Company and their people are cool, smart and innovative. I can’t say the same thing about Sxipper. I did promise no more hating so I’ll try to be constructive.Sxipper is a great idea with a poor implementation. It is way too intrusive. Rather than putting partially translucent overlays on web pages, it should let me choose an identity from a menu and automatically fill in forms for me.Change the color for auto filled form fields (CSS ahem), just give a subtle cue that Sxipper helped me out. When I’m in work mode I should be able to choose my Work profile and it’ll use that identity data whenever a form asks me for something. When I’m
surfing porndoing online banking my privacy profile should keep things hidden and the cache clear.Take a clue from the NoSquint FireFox module guys! Simple, clean and useful.
All in all DemoCamp Vancouver was a fantastic experience. I’ll definitely try to make it out for the next one. Oh and I think I fell in love with WorkSpace! Big open rooms, plenty of light, smart people. I think it might be in my future.
[tags]workspace, democamp, democampvancouver01, vancouver, sxip, gaboogie, incen.tv, kelvin.23[/tags]
