Dev::Blog

I finally made it to a DemoCamp at No Regrets! I missed a few in the summer, largely because I didn’t feel like going out to King West. Of course, I had to wait until a freezing cold day with strong wind to brave the trek, and predictably, I got off the streetcar too early (hint: if you’re going West, it’s after the bridge. A few stops after).

I love No Regrets.

The venue was a lot smaller than MARS, but the fact that we didn’t have to move from the demo to the bar was huge, with much less drop off at the end of the talks. It’s also a bar where most people are standing up, which makes it a lot easier to join conversations. I must have talked to 20 people last night about all kinds of projects.

OK, the demos!

• Dave Humphrey gave a talk about Teaching Mozilla Development. I misunderstood (because I didn’t really prepare or even read anything ahead of time) and thought it would be about how to contribute to Mozilla, and that did get covered a bit, but it was more interesting to see the wide range of contributions his students have been adding to the system. Mozilla is the kind of app where at first glance I think it’d be pretty closed to additions with a clear path going forward and established contributors, but Dave really showed me how wrong I was.
• Alec Saunders (?) from Iotum demoed his Talk Now application for the Blackberry. I’m always stoked to see mobile apps get demo’d (Alec used a webcam of some sort to display the phone screens), but this app confused me a bit - it’s something so people can signal if they’re available to talk or not, but it’s being deployed on the device that people get because they’re absolutely desperate to be available all the time. Still, nifty stuff, and I look forward to seeing it roll out to more platforms.
• Albert Lai gave an update on BubbleShare, which was recently acquired by Kaboose. Key message: the amount of due diligence applied to vetting a purchase doesn’t scale linearly with the size of a transaction, and in fact there’s not much more work to clear something 10 times as big.
• Will Pate gave a demo of Flock, which I’d heard about but hadn’t actually tried. I don’t get to spend a lot of time on Macs these days, but it’d be interesting to try it out just to pick up a few new ideas.
• We also got some updates from previous DemoCamp presenters, some of whom are doing really well. In particular, Freshbooks went from 7,000 accounts to 130,000 in the past year. Mike apprarently gets email reports about this stuff every morning, which is something I really want to do at the office.

Other thoughts:

• I’m amazed and astounded that a sound system made of podcasting gear and PC speakers could actually work as well as it did. There was a bit of clipping and distortion, but I could understand everything that was going on.
• Traci Lords and heart attack jokes will never stop being funny.
• People need to bring business cards so I can follow up on the things we talked about, unless of course that was a variant on the thing where the girl gives you a fake phone number (not that that’s ever happened to me). Oh well, I’ll just have to catch them at the next event.
• Mobile Monday was on the same night. Apparently they had a bunch of VCs there talking about how to make money. We mostly talked about how much it sucks that you can’t get an affordable data plan in Canada (and no, I didn’t start those conversations, but they were frequent.)
• I don’t know where the idea bubbled up, but it seems that the pattern is that when you’re making something for yourself to use, just open it up to the world. That’s not a bad way to get started.

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