Montreal Tech Watch

Evan Prodromou, Nicolas Ritoux

Nicolas Ritoux and Evan Prodromou presented vinismo.com, a new wiki guide for wines, which are classified by country and by varietals. Evan Prodromou started previously with Michele Ann Jenkins wikitravel.org, which had had great success, and he brings with him years of experience on how to start and grow a wiki community. Using a wiki for wine is a great idea, as there are many passionnate wine consumers and collectors, who are ready to invest a lot of their personal time contributing to the wiki. I also found it’s a great business idea, in the sense that this should get commercial interests soon. There are some contendors though, such as the trendy corkd.com, which is now part of the thunder show Wine Library TV. Finally, vinismo’s design, which was done by Marie-Claude Doyon is one of the best designs I saw for a wiki. It’s clear, the layout is great, and the logo has this trendy look withough going overboard.

Audience

Next, there was workcruncher, a small web application for managing to-do lists, by Heri :-) I can’t say much about it, because it’s still in alpha stage. Workcruncher is a new way to manage your tasks, as you are forced to make a new to-do list each day. It also doesn’t store more than 10 tasks at any given time. One big difference from backpack, basecamp or remember the milk is that there is a big focus on collaboration, as you can track what other coworkers are doing, much alike twitter, but for productivity reasons this time. Much more to come in upcoming weeks.

Heri

Carl Mercier and Mat Balez presented Defensio next. They made first bulletpoints on how the blogsphere is broken, much alike when Ben Yoskovitz wrote a post on why the online job market is broken, to introduce later standoutjobs. Defensio’s direct competitor is Akismet, and they are confident they can do better. The team says spam and valid comments are better presented, as there are different sections and you can see more easily what are legit comments. I don’t buy that, because Akismet could change their user interface any time. The most interesting part for me is if Defensio works, if there are no false positives and no false negatives. Early testing on Ben’s blog showed that it had a 99.5% success rate, which is great. So I guess it proves the point. It doesn’t seem that Defensio works with social engineering but rather with learning. And this is the most obscure part. I am thinking about neural networks but the backend is done with ruby on rails so I guess they must be using some other secret sauce.

A great product that can get (very) big

Mat Balez, Carl Mercier

The ever surprising Simon Law showed next how to make a clock go backwards. It looked like a crash course on Chineese manufacturing processes and electronics 101. Using a moleskine for drawing and a Canon digital camera to show the clock disassembly is quite original too. Simon Law presented in previous democamps on how to take photos with cheap digital cameras and also how to make an omelette. I think now he should make a videocast. I am sure it would be a hit.

Simon Law organizes democamp and barcamps too.

Next, Jerome Paradis presented an application done by his company. He uses .NET and google maps to show flight routes. I think it’s great on a technical point of view, first because the data is parsed from emails (!), not from some standard API as you would imagine, and also because the maps mashups is very advanced too: they have gone beyond the standard markers you are accustomed to, and you can manipulate the flight routes.

Jerome Paradis

More on democamp 3

• Marc-André Cournoyer
• more pictures

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