Had a great time at DemoCampMontreal2 tonight. There were a ton of people there, the demos were great, and the bar at the SAT was open for business, so it was possible to drink beer and watch demos.
There were all very solid projects with lots of interesting stuff going on. My favorite aha! moment came from Hugh McGuire showing off Collectik, his new social-podcast-aggregation platform, when he demo'd how he uses the site, and I realized that that's how I want to organize my podcast listening, too.
I also liked Kakiloc, a location-oriented social networking site. They let you tell your friends what you're doing and where you are, and the friends can see it on the Web, by SMS, or through IM. Sound familiar? Yeah.
Kakiloc's advantage is that they have more geo-oriented interface, and some extremely powerful rules that trigger activity when you (say) get close to someone in your circle of friends. However, I think in a world of Worse Is Better Kakiloc is going to have a hard time making a sale. Twitter already has the mindshare in this market, and the network effect makes it more valuable for people to stay with the popular platform.
I also really dug the films from OpenSourceCinema.org, although they skirted the "demo" concept pretty scarcely. One thing that was neat was that the OSC Web site was built by a real-life barn-raising: Sylvain Carle put out the call for some help, and people convened on his house to build the Web site. Cool idea.
All in all I had a really good time. DemoCampMontreal2 worked out well.
tags: DemoCampMontreal2 kakiloc collectik opensourcecinema
Bait and switch
So, on the way out the door to DemoCamp, I grabbed a handful of loonies out of my bedside change basket for the parking meters downtown. When I got to SAT, though, I realized that the "loonies" I'd brought were in fact Sacagawea dollars. I'd gotten them as change from the ticket machines on the Las Vegas monorail. Doh! Fortunately, downtown Montreal parking meters take credit cards, so I was OK.
tags: loonie sacagawea parking meter monorail
Feisty
Upgraded to FeistyFawn on Wednesday. Worked fine, nice smooth upgrade (who expects that?). Nothing revolutionary, but the software works well.
tags: feistyfawn ubuntu upgrade