DemoCamp 19 (million) Toronto

Posted on March 3, 2009 by Thomas Purves

DemoCampToronto19

[liveblogging as we go. here we go…]

DemoCamp19 5 min demos, because 5 minutes is long enough. DemoCamp is like open mic night for high tech. At the lovably seedy Imperial pub.


Austin Hill demoing Akoha, telling us about a card game that makes the world a better place. This app has come a long way, facebook like interface with friends, wall etc. You play cards that involve other people, like take someone for a drink, and then you pay it forward by giving them a card for them to push forward. There are leaderboards for cities, people and groups. You can even suggest or design missions. Apparently they are not supposed to be “dirty” (what’s wrong with dirty eh? wouldn’t that be half the fun?). But you can link your decks to a charity of your choice and help them raise money. You can see your karmic connection and the impact of your missions. they are building a school in nepal based on 25000 missions are completed.

Why not virtual/mobile cards? Cards are more common denominator. Is a tactile card more meaningful?

Revenue model? pay for cards, corp sponsors for decks (like a GE green deck) and premium services

Chris, backtype Shows you all the conversations about a url. Aggregates and crawls comments and commentary around the world. Now demoing backtweets it will tell you all the twitter activity relative to a post, or a story like a NY times story, even if the urls are shortened. Also cool is back alerts that lets you subscribe to a search. All built on AWS (amazon web services) so it scales. They are making money through a commercial API, but at the moment not a huge priority. Most of the app was built over the summer, buy these two pretty young guys. And it’s pretty sweet piece of technology is the general consensus.

Scott is showing Dex is a personal CRM/contact manager that aggregates all the folks you know (and you get to say how important each friend is) and it crawls the social web to keep track of what their up to. So the idea is when you move from company to company in your career you can take your personal CRM with you rather than leave it with someone else. Track leads and deals etc. Gives you a kind of personal metrics / business card that you can point to that says the size/value of your book your history deals.

Matthew from Foodea At first glace, Foodea is classic democamp demo, here’s a vertical special interest social media rails site I made in my pajamas. Essentially a social recipe site with the ability comment, edit, upload photo/video etc and the ability to export ingredients to a shopping list (not a bad idea). All ingredients also hyperlinked to the “pantry” area of site where they have a wikipedia like section dedicated to food ingredients.

Oooh ImageSpark is a T&L. They couldn’t get a ffffound invite, so they invented their own alternative. For images and designs that inspire your work. I am so wanting this. You can also create a “mood board” related to, for example “all things helvetica”. Great firefox plugin to just right click anything on the web and send it to impagespark. This is one of my faves. I’d like to work in a place that used this.

[pizza break!]

Albert who is a grand daddy of democamp is presenting kontagent a viral analytics tool for facebook. Focused on game developers. There are game developers out there, secret developers, recent Waterloo dropouts, making seven figures on facebook games. You can filter by age, gender, geography. You can measure k-factor which is your viral coefficient, you can track your acceptance rates by invites and invite channels to rapidly do AB testing. “It’s amazing who subtle changes in your applications can massively changing the virality of your application”. Very sophisticated, compare cohorts against virality, engagement and churn.

DemoCampToronto19Leigh Honeywell – presenting the awesomeness of Hacklab.to Open tuesdays, python thursdays. It’s cheap! $50 a month for unlimited hacking. I have visited this hacklab. I approve.

N8RTXT is a location aware haiku service that texts you haikus about where ever you are. Tailored to place and season and covering almost all of Canada, uses plant and animal databases, urban mapping and urban/rural distinguishment. In the backgroud it downloads a google satelite image and does a color analysis to determine what sort of environment you are in. And time of day, because for example racoons are tagged with “nighttime”. The phone number is 416 662 3408 text a postal code or “queen and ossington, toronto”.

And now the poor battery is fading. Too close for missiles, switching to beer…

Posted in Archive, democamp | Tagged | 4 Comments

the music industry is only a $22 billion or $23 billion business worldwide. You can easily calculate how much it would take for all users to raise enough money in the network to pay for this.

Posted on February 27, 2009 by Thomas Purves

band1

I’m torn about this, the future of old old media in the digital world. What should we do with all the old and wonderful dead forms of media, culture, journalism that we used to print on flattened wood pulp, or encoded as 1’s and 0’s but shipped around by truck(!) on laser engraved spinning and brittle little plastic discs.

Should we let the chips fall where they may? Let all media adapt or die the way it always has? Are there some, however, we’d hate to do without? I worry, for example about professional journalism, I worry about books and long form fiction. Some folks who’s name rhymes with “CRTC” are also worried about some idea called “Canadian Content” (what does that even mean anymore?).

Of all the media, music has been the first to go. And in some ways it’s the easiest. For all the fuss, do you realize that music is actually a pretty small industry? The creation of music hasn’t slowed down a bit mind you. But if what we’re worried about is the industry of music and fairness of compensation to creators, what could we do?

23billion isn’t a lot on global terms in the scale of telecom. If there was, as some have proposed, a way to tax telecom you could pay for Canada’s entire music industry for not that much impact on your monthly bill. Bear in mind that the total size of the music industry in Canada (about 600M CRIAA, 2006).

I almost like this idea except for a few quibbles: What is the magical means by which said money would be redistributed in a way that would be both fair, and culturally productive? If we do it for music (which by the way is already making not such a bad go of it online, and we’re still early days) what about about all the other media?

Does everybody deserve a digital bailout? I don’t think so. It’s already but only 2009. We need more time to find out who makes the leap and who doesn’t.

Title from this conversation on the Ecomm interview blog: Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard on Telcos/ISPs and Content 2.0.

Of course, except that this system doesn’t work. Clearly, the faster and the cheaper that people connect on mobile devices; this kind of sharing of content is going to absolutely explode. That’s actually a good thing. But, if nothing else can be built on top, then you won’t see any way of monetizing this outside of the network, itself. I always say, “Essentially, the future of content is the crowd and the cloud”. In other words, it’s the people using it and the cloud where it sits. If we can’t interconnect the two and create, essentially, a new logic of how the whole thing turns around, like Google has created their own advertising logic and Twitter will probably create their own logic, as well. If we can’t do that here, then the value just drops dead, left and right of the system.

Posted in Archive, media | Leave a comment
design1 design2

Michele shared with me this great thought about design. That the way to evaluate a designed object was not by how good it is, but only by how bad it was or wasn’t. In this case a cell phone. The proper way to think of whether your mobile suits you is this simple metric: how many times a day / a week do you feel the urge to smash it with a hammer?

In today’s world of ever more complex designed technology (and associated fragility) a good or successful object might be defined as one you only feel such hammercidal tendencies some of the time.

Intermission:
byepolaroid

I’ve long had (since I was young, and trying to keep up with “smart” kids in class) similar suspicion about the definition of human intelligence. There’s really no such thing as a perfectly smart. The term really doesn’t even make sense. It’s more a matter of failing to be particularly dumb with any notable regularity. It seems to me that all of us people are just not dumb (or not unreasonably slow) with varying degrees of success and consistency. How many hammers per day are you?

photo credit: GoodbyePolaroid

Posted on January 21, 2009 by Thomas Purves | 6 Comments