A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

Today I attended the DemoCamp Guelph which was again a nice opportunity to meet with some web development and technology interested people. After several Barcamps here in Waterloo this was my first DemoCamp and the first time in Guelph. It was a nice atmosphere and we had some good discussions about various topics. Here are some snippets and thoughts about some of the demos.

There was the demonstration of Freshbooks, an online invoicing and time tracking service which is a very useful tool for freelancers and small companies who are regularly concerned with things like these and want to automate the whole process. Watch this video for a good explanation. Their presentation focused on the new reporting card feature which allows you to compare your invoicing data to the data sets of thousands of others working in the same area of expertise. Opening up their databases, which are normally completely locked by the service providers, to allow these kind of comparisons is a big advantage for this service and the user acceptance is giving them right. Freshbooks with over 200.000 users is pretty popular and growth opportunities are great. On their website I saw some marketing slogans that the service is used in over 120 countries but I could not find quickly detailed information about international usage. If everything goes as planned, I will give it a try back in Germany.

Norman Young talked about disruption in the market space. He mentioned some disruptive technologies and products like the Model T by Ford or the telegraph. It is pretty obvious that there are always disruptions in the market but the question is how to predict, create or react on it so that you can gain competitive advantages. Norman recommended the podcast Capturing the Upside and the book “The Innovater’s Solution” by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen.

Another pretty amazing application was shown by Chris Thiessen. zoomii books allows you to find books online like you are used to it in a bricks-and-mortar book store with its book shelves. The key thing was the user interface that allowed you to zoom in fluently into a specific book category which is represented as a good looking shelf with book covers of various books of this category. It was very well done and I can see a lot of users being interested in finding their readings in this non-conventional way instead of the typical search / recommendation approach that everyone knows from Amazon. The used data set for the book covers is a small subset of Amazon’s offerings. The user interface can still improve a lot, especially the start page and the page for the book details. This will be essential to make users happy to use this service on a regular basis. By the way, another startup using the Amazon Web Services. The zoom technology reminded me a (very) little on the video I will attach at the end of this post.

To make the list complete, there was another demonstration of Castroller which allows you to manage your podcasts, Blogthot a Twitter clone and Avery’s amazing Delphi database-backed UI creation demo. The latter one was neat, because I created a similar interface by drag & drop with Delphi in grammar school 9 years ago. If the result would be a web application with web service integration I would use Delphi again.

Today I went to another interesting talk in a series of distinguished speakers here at the University of Waterloo. Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of the well-known C++ programming language, spoke about the future of C++, its new language features and how the standardization process is slowly progressing. He made clear that C++ is a systems programming language and has a very strong focus on performance. With billions of C++ code lines already written it is nearly impossible to come up with major changes that would ignore downwards compatibility.

I would love to see a systems programming language with a nice syntax and a high expressiveness where the compiler logic is becoming more powerful and the language syntax clearer and more concise. Why that? Recently, I am getting more and more interested in the Ruby programming language which is a dynamic typed, pure object-oriented, multi-paradigm programming language which was invented with a focus on supporting the programmer’s needs and not the machine’s. Of course, the application scenarios for C++ and Ruby are totally different but is this the only reason why writing C++ or Java is much more painful than writing Ruby? Think about productivity and having fun while programming. So, if you are not planning to write real systems software, e. g. an operating system or hardware drivers, you should consider more and more dynamic languages like Ruby or Python which become more and more popular for application development, scripting tasks and web development. At the end it is always a preference choice, but knowing some more programming languages should be essential to compare and judge.

There was the question by one of the listeners if C++ should become a more or better “teachable” programming language. More and more universities are switching to solely teaching Java. C++ is over 20 years old and there is still no or only a little experience how to teach it right and make it attractive for students. It should be important for everyone in computer science to make programming more attractive. A good way to do it, is to start teaching programming principles with easy to learn and easy to understand programming languages or start by building quickly real applications instead of explaining for hours and days the first “Hello World!”. At the beginning you need motivation as a student to create the necessary enthusiasm to dig deeper into the topic. Diving deep into pointer and memory issues in C/C++ is fine at a later point when you already know where the use case is and how it makes sense in the overall system. The ETH Zurich seems to have some success with there so-called “inverted curriculum” where students build complex applications while learning to program.

By the way, I started programming at the University of Mannheim with Scheme, a Lisp dialect, but now they changed the programming introduction to Java. I don’t know any student who said after one of these courses, he really loved it and wants to do some small application or scripting stuff on its own. It is simply too complicated and not obvious how it can be useful. With the Ruby on Rails web framework you can write your first “manage my courses” web application in the first 2 weeks and Ruby would also allow you to do live programming as an instructor during the course!

This video definitely includes some good tips, especially the suggestion to integrate unintentionally the logo of another VC company in your slides. Be cool and jinx Web2.0. I guess it really worked in some cases.