Democamp9 Review

By: Colin Smillie
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:07:30
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DemoCamp was back on in Toronto last night. It was again at No Regrets which is a great location to have a beer and watch the demos. As always it was pretty full and standing room only for alot of the demos. I think ConceptShare won the award for traveling the furthest, apparently it hasn't started snowing in Sudbury yet either. The line-up last night was as follows:

1. Dictabrain

Dictabrain provide dictation services through your cell phone and wins the award for the most ackward product name. It uses a Astericks implementation with a web front end that can transcode the voice conservation into text. The process looked pretty easy and the demo involved transcoding a voice recording for a blog. The actual transcoding is done by a human so its fairly work intensive and will probably never be free. It might have some good applications for lawyers and environments where dictation is more common. I would think that most bloggers will be fairly comfortable typing up their posts themselves.

2. InfoQ.com

InfoQ is a community portal for developers to that focuses on a variety of popular languages/frameworks. Its a very custom environment and uses a number of interest interface innovations. For example developers can easily turn off all threads related to languages that don't use, like Java. The site also features a nice presentation system which syncronizes the video with the presentation slides so its easy to follow along. The interface also uses a number of Ajax forms to make it easy to use but the design didn't seem all that polished. For its target audience it seemed like a very advanced community application, it will be interesting to see how it can evolve relative to other open-source tools.

3. ConceptShare

ConcepShare was absolutely the best demo of the night. The team had a good idea of what they want to present and a very slick product. ConceptShare can be used to share any visual idea and get feedback from other people that may not be readily available for a design review. I could see this being very useful in alot of environments and all has the benefit of allowing concepts to be tested with a good level of feedback. The application is developed entirely in flash but was very responsive has alot of community features. They have also provide the ability to for experts to register with the site and offer design review by invite. This would be great for start-ups that need to get their concepts reviewed by a wider audience. Overall a very impressive tool and a great demo.

4. The Email Company

The Email company provides a number of online forms for email communication. The service is run as an ASP but the interface looks quite dated, none of the forms were stylized and looked quite date. The service can also be used to run Surveys where minimal programming is required. Overall a fairly dull service that needs to be modernized with some newer technology, like RSS etc..

5. Pursodo

Unspace presented its Pursodo project as a tool to connect with people of similar interests. The site can be used as a dating service or an online events system. Unspace is a big Rails development group so it feature Ruby heavily has an innovative scrolling system to avoid paging at the end of the listings. Overall the presentation was quite funny but fairly dull in terms of a product.

ConceptShare was really the best demo and I couldn't really stick around to network. Next month Democamp is back at Mar on October 23, 2006.

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