It is a typical evening for most, for me it is time to jump in the car and head down town. My excitement builds with every kilometer I travel, I let a small laugh escape as I pass all the people leaving town at a constant pace of about 5 kilometers per hour :). Rush hour I really do not miss that since working from home.
I finally reach my destination and I am surprised to find a parking spot so close the the venue! My heart is racing now, what am I to expect at the very first Demo Camp Victoria? I do not expect it to be very busy, maybe 10 or 15 people at most since most of the events I have been to have very few people, they just don’t seem to be able to make it for some reason. Well am I surprised at this event! There must have been near 50 people crowded in this small, and slightly awkward venue.
Most people are huddled around the wine and cheese, I figure I can slide in with them and show off my Songbird sweater :). I make it about 5 feet when I am stopped to talk to people already, this is where I spend all of my night, not more than 5 feet in the door and only a 3 foot radius! I end up talking to a few friends and get introduced to a bunch of new “techies” (My apologies but I am really bad at names!). After what only seems a few minutes and ends up being half a hour we start the Demo Camp Victoria. Mark Lise steps up and introduces the event and makes a quick agenda, it was very well done for a first run.
This is where we sign up on a sheet to give our 30 second blurb about what we want to demo, I tried to get half way and ended up second on the list. No one seems to want to start writing at the top of the page? Flock nearly misses out by being distracted by others, some ones evil plan is working ;). Mark surprises us by going from the bottom of the list making Songbird second to last, oh well. The demos went pretty well, lets see what I can remember.
There was Flock, they did a demo of some stuff that is coming up in the new 1.3 release, unfortunately it did not go very well since they forgot to connect to the internet before the demo. How do you demo a web browser with out the web?
One that was a bit interesting was the loaning system, they have borrowers and lenders and get rid of the bank in the middle. The lenders put up some money and it gets allocated to borrowers with out either knowing details about the other, and of course this is a unsecured loan. Interesting concept but a little scary for me on the lender side.
Another cool concept, but not much of a demo was the “strength monitor”, a device that monitors an athlete and sends the data to a laptop using blue tooth. This allows a coach to monitor the progress of an athlete during exercising. He was here more for help with how to take his product to the next level then really demoing, but it generated interested.
A fun demo was Joshua McKenty and his BuyLater application, he explained how he spent 6 months and his life savings on a brillant application (Bounty Up) that went no where. He then came up with a application that took a night to code called BuyLater that was a great success! Amazing how that works. Also I would like to say kudos to him for giving props to Jesse Andrews of OverStimulate.com who developed the WiiMe app that BuyLater is based off of.
Of course there was our demo, the best of them all but then I may be more bias about that. First we showed that Songbird is a Media player and has similar concept to iTunes or Windows Media player, then we showed off the feathers concept and generated a lot of interest in how you could make your media player look how ever you wanted so simply. We then advanced to the concept of being able to play the web, not just your library and how web sites can (with permission) access your library and interact with the player.
After the demos were over I attempted to move to the large crowd but was not able to make it very far. I met a friend from college I barely recognized and was asked lots of questions by people there. One that was quite interesting for me was DailySplice which is a site that takes a list of your favorite podcasts and splices them into “shows” that you can then sync up with your iPod or listen to on your computer. This allows you to get all your news and bundle it together in a half hour or hour (or what ever length you want) into a single audio file. What came of this is the fact that they need a media player to play and sync these shows, so what better application than our Songbird!
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