I paid my first visit to a DemoCamp today. Once I had negotiated my way around the hookers and beggars on St. Laurent I was most delighted to discover the Demo Camp experience included a working bar. I found myself a bar stool with a good view and ordered up some liquid refreshments, ready for the show.
I think the DemoCamp concept has a lot of merit. It is nice safe place to get some initial reactions to a project and potentially a great meeting place.
I thought the http://vinismo.com/ project was very interesting. It looks great, has great potential to fill a big void in the Internet.
The guys at Defensio did a good presentation (despite the slides!), and I wish them the best of luck. The more I think about this product, the more ideas I come up with. I do hope they do two things with it:
- Expand it to handle email spam
- Provide it as a self hostable solution
I use SpamBayes in Outlook to kill spam and it works well for me, but in a small office it would be very convenient to have the spam filter deployed in a single location as a callable service. The Outlook add-in would only have to make a web service call to the service instead of having to do all of the analysis on the client.
Heri showed his WorkCruncher application and I do believe that there is a valid product in there. Heri just needs to have a bit more confidence in the positioning of the product and stop telling us what it can't do, and stop comparing it to other products like BaseCamp and BackPack. What I got from his presentation is that WorkCruncher lets you prioritize your day's tasks, mark them off as they are completed and at the end of the day you can see if you achieved what you planned. Allowing you to reorder tasks, and add new "emergency" tasks would defeat the purpose somewhat. The objective is to see, at the end of the day, how accurately you were able to plan. If at the end of the day you have not completed any of the tasks, but you worked your butt off all day, you know there is something wrong with your planning process.
I think being able to integrate with a long term planning tool would be a major enhancement to WorkCruncher. I'm not sure about the need for being able to assign tasks to other team members. I don't think that is necessary. I also would see this more as a desktop tool than a web based one.
Simon.... You have guts. You pulled it off though.
Jerome showed a cool project that I could waffle on for a while about, but considering it is a private application, I'll spare you my ramblings and get back to work.