Alec Saunders SquawkBox

sex·ism – noun
1. attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles. 
2. discrimination or devaluation based on a person’s sex, as in restricted job opportunities; esp., such discrimination directed against women.   

I thought the DemoCamp presentation I did last night went pretty well, but was a little surprised to see this posting The Boys of DemoCamp Strike Again.  Sandy Kemsley found my scenario where demo-guy John asks demo-gal Jill for a date to be sexist.  Personally, I didn’t see it as discriminatory, nor do I consider dating necessarily a bad traditional behaviour to perpetuate.  After all, where would we be if didn’t occasionally find a mate and breed… extinct!

Nevertheless, as I commented to Sandy in her blog, I’ve worked with hundreds of talented female engineers in my day, and I respect them and wish there were more women in the technology industry. Women often bring different and valuable perspectives to problem solving.  I apologize to Sandy and any other woman in the audience who was offended last night.  No sexism was intended, and I am sensitive to having caused offense.  I will change the demo scenario before I do it again. 

ChaCha is a new web search service which pairs human guides with searchers to more precisely target search results.  With 29,000 guides, it uses human experts to augment the search engines capabilities.  The idea shows enough promise that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos put in six million of his own dollars.

A review of the service from the MIT Tech Review gives mixed results, however. 

Release your inner geek… VoIP-News has published a list of 25 Skype Hacks.  There were a few in here that I didn’t know about.  Cool!

Sometimes wishes to come true.  It was only a few days ago that I posted a rant about Yahoo’s decision to impose Yahoo ID’s on Flickr account holders.  And I was just one of the many voices in the blogosphere raised against Yahoo’s decision.  Anyway, it kept Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield busy for a few days as he made the rounds from blog to blog to explain Yahoo’s decision.

It seems that we collectively want to control our identities.

Moreover, it seems that a lot of people want to use OpenID to do so. 

After Stewart’s comment, I asked

Hey Stewart,

Thanks for dropping by and sharing this information. It’s very much appreciated.

Tell me, do you see the possibility that Yahoo might choose to step outside the current ID detente, and offer an open ID platform? Whoever does this first will break the stalemate.

I didn’t expect to hear back from Stewart.  And a week later, I sure didn’t expect that Microsoft would be the company to break the stalemate.  Shocking, but great news.  Now I wonder if AOL, Google and Yahoo will follow suit.

DemoCamp is coooool.  It’s slam poetry for geeks.  10 minutes to show your product, no props, no powerpoint… just you and the product.  At the end, questions and critique from your peers. Yee ha!  I think I like it even better than the original BarCamp format.

At DemoCamp 12 in Toronto last night, there were short presentations from:

1. Dave Humphrey, who talked about open source and education.  Really, what Dave did was to show off a whole bunch of his students great work extending Mozilla.   He’s proud of their work, and deservedly so.
2. Albert Lai, who gave a short Bubbleshare demo, and then answered questions about the acquisition of Bubbleshare by Kaboose.
3. Me, and I gave a speedy demo of Talk-Now.  Hearty applause, and questions about business model.  “How are you going to make money”, people asked, when I told them it was free.  Our model is going to be to attach other premium services, but Talk-Now will be free to use, and people will get tons of value from it.
4. Will Pate, who demoed (or attempted, anyway) to demo Flock, the browser being built on Mozilla with extra blogging and search tools built-in.  Lesson #1: Browsers are hard to demo when you have a flaky internet connection

And then there were numerous updates from previous demoers, as well as a lot of people simple standing up to say “Hey, we’re hiring”.  Oh, and did I mention beer?  Yeah… geeks, beer, and demoes.  It’s a rippin’ combination.

Kudos to David Crow, Jay Goldman, and Joey Devilla.  DemoCamp 12 drew a capacity crowd, and no doubt these three instigators played a key role.