SubscribeDemoCamp Guelph Round-Up
Published by cornelius on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 in Miscellaneous.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.
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July 19th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Hi Cornelius,
I’m glad to hear you had a good time at DemoCampGuelph. I just wanted to let you know that we have a breakdown by country in a pie chart on the right hand side of our contact us page in you are interested in learning where most of our users are located. http://www.freshbooks.com/contact.php
If you have any other questions about our service, feel free to shoot us a note any time.
Cheers,
-Daniel T.