MontrealDemoCamp3 follow up

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Yesterday I went to MontrealDemoCamp3 with Daniel and Gary. As usual the room was full and the demos were amazing!

Vinismo

Nicolas Ritoux and Evan Prodromou were first and presenting their project Vinismo. It’s a wiki about wines. Already in french and english. They’ve put lots of content in the wiki: the rules, community page, help pages, etc. and left the fun part, filling the wine description page, to the users. It was built on the MediaWiki engine, upgraded with some plugins to allow OpenId authentication and semantic markup on wine description pages.

They clearly won the public, especially when they announced they brought 6 12 (surprising, I’ve only seen 6 of them… thx Even) bottles of wines to celebrate their launch!

WorkCruncher

Heri was next, with WorkCruncher. It’s a todo list manager merged with Twitter style sharing features. But the main “feature” that caused lots of controversy was that WorkCruncher deletes all your items at the end of the day. So you start each day with an empty list. I’m really not convinced this is a good thing, as a fan of David Allen GTD, your list should be there to free your mind. But Heri says he’ve been using it for some time and it truly boosted is productivity.

A private beta if going on, register at http://workcruncher.net/.

Defensio

Finally! I got the see Defensio in action! Carl Mercier and Mat Balez were presenting their WordPress plugin and comparing it to Akismet. It sorts spam by Spaminess, so it’s faster to find false positives (good comments marked as spam). They showed some stats from Ben’s blog which I don’t remember and have no idea what’s the average efficiency of a spam filter, but it was like 98.9% 99.5% (even higher then I tought, thx Carl).

But! The greatest surprise to me was that, the WordPress plugin is built on top of a clear and simple API. Which is by far better then Akismet’s. You have choice over XML and YAML for the output format and it’s free for small project. So blog comment spam is only their initial target. I can’t wait to see with what they come up next: Facebook wall spam filter? Twitter spam filter? Rails plugin acts_as_defensio (oh that would be cool!) ?

Building a counter-clock

Simon Law was next with a live performance.
He tried disassembling a clock to make it go backward. Simon explained some details on how tipical today clocks are built compared to earlier, more expensive clocks. It didn’t worked, well almost. He fixed it during the following presentation and it worked. It was a breath of fresh air from the typical style of presentation. It was, like he called it, an artistic performance. Really great and entertaining!

Private flight planner

Jerome Paradis followed. He presented a project aggregating private flights data onto Google Maps. You could see the travel paths of each flights, planned ones in blue and live ones in green. He got the data out of emails… that’s right emails! Seems that people using this have a strict jargon when writing them, so he’s able to parse all this and end up with some useful results. They’re planning to make this a public service soon. As of now, this is strictly restricted to rich people using private jets. In which case, Jerome said, this service can help them share flights with other business people, save money and make some more by meeting other rich people. Great, where do I start ?

Also, I had the great pleasure to talk with Martin Dufort from Kakiloc, Mitch Cohen from ClixConnect, Mark Schanzleh and Amélie Racine from StayNomad, Philippe K. Chrun from MyCarpoolStation, Alexander Fedorowicz from Oracle and several other ones.

If you missed this one, be sure to put DemoCampMontreal4 on your agenda right now! Daniel will be presenting, you do not wanna miss that.

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