TorCampDemoCamp 6 : The Demo Gods bite back

May’s Demo Camp, which would be DemoCamp 6, was back at MaRs, after last months Demo Camp 5 being at a UoT location (see More Geek Show and Tell in Toronto … trademark pending!).

Lots of new people coming out to check it out. In the previous months things have gone very smoothly, but it was a little differently this time, starting out with the last minute illness of Our Fearless Leader Mr. David Crow. Then we started having problems with the hookup to the overhead projector. Without Davi’sd special magic it refused to talk to various PC and MAC laptops. (No truth to rumours that Joey (deVilla) and Jay (Goldman), whom stepped in as MC’s, were responsible for David’s “absence”.)

Update : I’ve since emailed with David and he has blogged about his Heart Attack!. He is doing much better, and is taking care of himself. Please make a feel and speedy recovery David!!

Joey (he of the accordion) and his Boss Ross (Ross Rader ) demo’d Tucows (not just your software downloading site!) their two latest products (currently in beta), a Ajax Webtop and a Feed caching datastore. The first is code named “Skydasher” (a Transformers reference), in some ways is “just” a personalized home page, all dhtml and ajax’y, but really a complete productization of what many of us have built once or twice ourselves; completely customizable and brand-able by a ISP to rollout to there customers as a personalize startup page. FeedCache is again “just” what is says. With “Feedcache: Developer Edition” have provided a a web services interface to a user-populated cache of RSS feeds that developers can use and implement in their applications. I’m thinking “roll your own Blogins RSS reader”, using the Tucows engine and building a better ui, or a replacement for FeedBurner.

BlogScope is a slicing and dicing analysis and search engine of Blogo-sphere chatter. Think of in as Data mining for Blogs, or maybe BI (not Business Intelligence, but Blog Intelligence). I assuming it’s eating standard feed data (Hey Nilesh, talk to Joey!), so it should also be able to eat and digest other feeds from the mainstream media, stock price feeds or AT&T’s call detail record (CDR) database (http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/faq.php). I would like to see a personal version that I could point to either a much bigger source (beyond blogspot), or much smaller like my own feed roll.

This is where the overhead projector became demonical possessed, which required some patience and juggling.

Joshua Wehner, bravely stepping into the breach, showed off a web application (Rails based) to solve a personal itch: parsing a huge CSV file and coordinating amongst a group of friends (and friend of friend) of the presentation schedule for a gamming con. (the result of 20 hours work) With very little additional work, this could rolled out to the general attendance of the con, or other conference organizations with lots of value add.

Anand Agarawala then presented his BumpTop, a 3d desktop interface using the unreal physics (gamming) engine. Again a very slick piece of software, well demoed. The idea of bundles and piles of files being physical manipulated was well though out.

Update : BumpTop has made it up onto Gizmodo and now SlashDot (and lots of technorati chatter. Congrads Anand!

Unfortunately we did not get to see the semanticPAL – learnable natural language user interface – demo. Hopefully, next time.

And then we wwent out for a drink and chit chat which is where I got to meet a real live MaRtian.

Links are showing up via technorati under demoCamp6 and DemoCamp. plus Joey, the newly bathroomed (and fellow ‘dinosaur’) Greg, and Jordan Christensen has a good detailed write up (I may have been right behind him as he live blog it).

Can we standardize a tag for these? maybe TorDemoCamp? Shall ping David on this.