Montreal Tech Watch

DemoCamp fourth edition was at SAT Friday, 17th of August.

Note: I tried to take a couple of videos for this edition, please excuse the jitteriness, I guess I will have to take a tripod next time

Simon Law was the host of democamp
The first presentation was by a team from Categorical Design Solutions who developed a “scenario editor” for the web called BrainCuts. The idea is to append concepts and relations to web objects so that they get understood by computers

The categorical design solutions team presenting BrainCuts

The semantic web, i.e getting machines to understand human-produced content, is an issue as old as the Internet. Currently, the “cool web geeks” are all about open content, microformats and the Atom format, but, frankly, nobody has yet the answer, and I am open to BrainCuts. Now, they tried to put Braincuts in the “web3.0″ movement, whatever that is, with other “trendy” words, and I am not sure that was the right way to present it. What I know though is that BrainCuts, the end-user interface they developed inhouse, can have huge opportunities if used for the mass market, for instance. It produces multimedia content (sound, movies, pictures…) with standard technologies like XHTML and javascript, and is an open and readable format unlike flash for instance.

DemocampMontreal4 - BrainCuts
David Xu presents PodBean

The next presenter was David Xu, who is behind PodBean, a website for podcast producers and listeners. He went through the website’s features, and from what I get, his vision was to make it the Youtube for podcasts. This is impressive for someone who is studying at the same time at McGill university. Podcast producers can have a blog where each podcast is featured, they can monetize episodes with premium subscriptions and get a share of the ad revenues. Like in Youtube, podcast users can subscribe to channels and see what are the popular shows.

Now, from my experience, I know this represents a hell lot of work. It seems it was started august last year, and it has grown now to videos as well. One advice though: I would highly suggest David to put some real info in the website’s info. There is an address in Delaware, but it’s the same thing as a postal office box in the Bahamas.

DemocampMontreal4 - PodBean

Audience of Democamp4

ClixConnect, presented by CEO Mitch Cohen

Mitch Cohen was next, and he made a demonstration for the first time of ClixConnect. There was previously a post about the service in Montreal Tech Watch. ClixConnect allows online retailers to provide direct customer support to their website visitors.

Mitch Cohen said how clixconnect was born and what was its market. He showed how a javascript popup would get the customer to chat with a real human. Apparently, 80% of visitors would ask basic questions while the rest would ask for information that would need more research. Someone commented that this might be intrusive, and might be perceived as “stalking” visitors, and Mitch said the key is how you approach them - ie suggest help and recommend instead of pushing sales to the customer’s face. I was not entirely convinced previously about clixconnect, but I think now I am.

Democamp4 - ClixConnect
Josh Nursing presenting IronRuby, and alternative code editors for Ruby on Rails

Josh Nursing presented next what he did with Ruby. First, he went through IronRuby, an implementation of the programming language for the .NET framework. I first thought this was really useless; it’s like say teaching ballet to prison inmates, two conflicting philosophies for opposite usages. But I then thought of Silverlight, the new platform from Microsoft, and it struck me that it can be a big deal. You could use Ruby to make a silverlight application without (re)learning C# or another proprietary language from Microsoft.

In the presentation, Josh also presented alternative IDEs for Ruby, with E text editor for instance, a Textmate clone for the Windows platform which copied everything, from its pricing to the bundles system.(alternatively, if you are on windows, I also suggest Notepad++ which is lightweight and open source). At the end, Josh presented what Microsoft is doing for Open Source, but I have to say I don’t care at all. This all marketing, if they support or fight the movement is pretty much irrelevant to me.

Democamp4Montreal - IronRuby - Josh NursingOverall, I liked Josh’s presentation, it provided an alternative way of seeing Ruby outside of the Mac/Rails/Textmate world.

Daniel Haran presents url_pipe

The last presenter was Daniel Haran, who worked on url_pipe since he left Québec city, a few weeks ago. It’s a geek version of Yahoo Pipes, where you would use commands to chain RSS feeds. He presented for instance how url_pipe can transform a RSS to another feed with geographical data and then feed to Google Maps, which will show the relevant markers on a map. The audience for url_pipe is of course developers, and the next logical step is an API. I don’t know if he has the back-end servers to support all the requests people are going to throw at url_pipe, I guess we will wait till he makes the service public.

Democamp4Montreal - Daniel Haran presents url_pipeMore:

• More pictures of DemoCampMontreal4
• Marc André Cournoyer Report
• Denis Canuel’s Report
• Mitch Cohen’s Report
• JF Couture’s Report
• Gary Haran asks a question to the tech community in Montreal