False Positives

Tor Demo Camp4 was a great success with 150 signed up folks - and no doubt a few walkin’s ’cause it was full. The Demos was a great mix of differnet stuff, but all intesrting. The demo gods were kind (just as long a you didn’t want to use iPhoto!). The space at MaRs was very nice.

Highlights :

• SemaCode, a way to allow 2-d encoding of url’s to be read by camerahphones. I blogged about this on the old blog 2 years ago under QRCode, but is goood to see it’s still around, a camerahpone become almost common, and see this from the semacode designer himself, Simon Woodside.
• Then there was ‘Hacking of Disposable Digital Cameras for Fun and Cheap Electrical Shocks’. I’d hear about this, but it’s fun to see it live. It’s like watching a ProtoType of Cory Doctorow’s story
  Themepunks. THanks Randy.
• The Visual Search software by Idee was slick. I think the best part was when Leila Boujnane forgot to clear the sun flower picture, and typed “faces”, and it found all the sunny faces. It was a nice, unscripted(?) moment. I would be interesting to see this Mashed up with Flickr
• questionVille.com, soon to be open, is a Social Networking take on Answers.com (Questions and Answers), will various “Digg” like features (Voting), and very Ajax. It has potential. I don’t - yet- know what it was built with.
• Outmailer is an mailing programing written in the lastest and greatest Ruby on Rails. (And I currently am getting a lot of experience with mailing) . Although it does not yet have all the features I might want, it looks very smooth and painless to use. And they are getting a huge education in Rails! Lucky them.
• tag-Engine is a scripted templating engine built on top of PHP5 - wait a minute: a template engine on top of a template engine? Ok, the “PHP template assembly glue engine” looks to do try and make templating which is both simpler in syntax and at a higher level of abstration. (aiming at the excel crowd?) And it is look quite polished. Josh has picked a tough itch to scratch.

I’ll try to write up more when time, sleep wife/life allow.
They all had a lot of passion about what they were doing, and I’m not sure I would be able to Demo in front of 150 to 250 of my peers, or anyone for that matter.

I’m sure there will be more writing on these demo’s @ technorati under the tag democamp. Big Thanks to David Crow as (Big Giant?) Head of the Mob guy on all this!

Pirate Radio has some good sugestions for all.

..and the next DemoCamp (5) is called for Tuesday, April 25, 2006 (update you Google Calendar!) looking forward to Chris Nolan on the power of RJS templates.

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