Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I had the great fortune to be invited to demo at DemoCamp Montreal 2, which happened last night.  It was a great event, and the SAT is a wonderful venue, including an open bar!  Thank you to organizers Austin Hill and Fred Ngo for letting an interloper from down the road in Ottawa present.

Talk-Now was the first presentation.  I gave a seven or eight minute demo, and then answered a bunch of questions on topics ranging from business model to privacy.

Next up was Hugh McGuire, and his project Collectik.  Collectik is a system for finding, sharing and organizing podcasts.  Hugh wanted something akin to Bloglines, or Juice but with podcast specific features, like synch with ipod and play a podcast in a flash player.  So he built it.

It’s neat technology, but perhaps the best part of his talk was his “Lessons learned”.  These boiled down to two things: 1) you can’t fix UI problems by adding functionality, and 2) people won’t necessarily do with it what you designed it for.   

He also talked briefly about business model, and the three that they’ve used with Collectik: 

1. if you build it, Yahoo will buy it.  That got a good laugh.
2. Adsense.  Does pay, but not much more than hosting costs.
3. Turning the engine itself into applications for specific users. ie. Vertical marketing, rather than the horizontal podcast organization play.

Next up was Martin Dufort and Alain Lavoie of Kakiloc.  I’ve written about them before, but it’s always interesting to see how their product and concepts are evolving.  For those who don’t know, Kakiloc is a mobile social networking system.  It lets you maintain your contacts, discover new contacts, and interact with contacts all in a mobile setting.  It’s like LinkedIn married to location. 

The process is pretty simple to get started.  Invite some people, create some “places”, which are descriptions of places on the map, and create some triggers and policies for them.  For instance, notify me when Martin is within 1 km of my current location. 

They’ve built PC, phone, SMS, and IM interfaces, all of which have a slightly different place.  They’ve also added Twitter-like functionality by allowing you to specify “mood messages” in addition to location.  

It’s a cool concept, and it may really start to shine as new phones equipped with GPS hit the market.

One of the niftier ideas of the evening was filmmaker Brett Gaylor’s Open Source Cinema.  Brett’s a documentary filmmaker, making a film about copyright in the digital age, using open source principles.  All the footage is on his site.  You can view it, remix it, contribute new footage, and comment. Everything is available under a Creative Commons license. 

Very cool.  Go check it out if you’re at all interested in videography.

Last demo of the evening was Anad Agarawala’s Bumptop. Developed for Anand’s masters thesis at the University of Toronto, he and his team are now working on turning the concepts into a business.  This demo generated a lot of ooh’s, ah’s and laughs.  Words can’t really do it justice, so here’s the video.

Following the event, Austin Hill had a great party back at his place (thanks for organizing!), where you could bump into the likes of Garage Canada’s Tom Sweeney, and various other Montreal enterpreneurs.  I spent a good chunk of time chatting with Shai Lipkovich about n-Tegrity, a startup building a biometrically enabled personal data manager in a USB form factor.

Other bloggers writing about DemoCamp Montreal: Patrick Lor, Marc-Andre Cournoyer. 

The BBC is reporting this morning that the World Economic Forum has said that the US has lost its position as the worlds primary engine of technology innovation.  A cluster of European nations, led by Denmark, has pushed America out of the #1 spot, to a distant #7.

Countries were judged on technological advancements in general business, the infrastructure available and the extent to which government policy creates a framework necessary for economic development and increased competitiveness

What's up?

Well, the writing has been on the wall for well over a decade.  

The annual battle with Congress over H1 visas takes place against a backdrop of short sighted politicians arguing that "US jobs should stay in the US", while resource starved technology companies sound the alarm that they need more people to be competitive. US schools aren't training people with the needed skills to supply tech companies, and Congress is unwilling to allow those skills to be imported. Ultimately Microsoft, as an example, established an Indian development center, because it became impossible to bring more Indians to the US. 

On the infrastructure front, the US lags Europe in wireless networks, and other parts of the world in high speed networks.  It's unbelievable, isn't it, that in the place where many of these technologies were invented, they are not universally available.

And you know what, Canadian readers?  Compared to the US, Canada is even more backward, lacking easy access to early stage capital resources, lagging the world (not just the US) in wireless adoption, and with backward infrastructure monopolies.

Hmmm… my mum's Danish.  Perhaps I should be applying for an EU passport.

The folks at SightSpeed have just released a pretty cool, and pretty quirky website.  Vlip.com lets you quickly record video clips, or Vlips.  You can post them, watch other people’s Vlips, and reply as well. Billed as video blogging for the rest of us, it has the feel of Speakers Corner translated for the internet age; a democratization of the television camera, if you will.

Here’s what a Vlip looks like:

Interestingly enough, there are a number of these instant video sites out there today. For instance, the folks at Blogtv.ca have been pitching me on their site for several months now. Their concept? You can record your own live show and broadcast it to the net. There’s a pretty reasonable selection of videos there now, including some unusual ones like the woman who has recorded the whole process of getting a tattoo. Like Vlip, Blogtv.ca shows are easily recorded and uploaded using your webcam.

Neat stuff. It’s certainly easier than recording video using a camcorder, although you forego any post production to gain that ease-of-use.

I wish Peter Csathy and the Sightspeed team luck with this.

Wow. 

I just finished a Skype call with Jim Courtney using the new Skype Beta 3.2.  The sound quality is stunning.  Using only the PC microphone and speakers, there was no echo, full duplex sound, and excellent quality audio.  Moreover, the new codecs are super CPU efficient.  Even while running Windows Update, and an Outlook email download, there was no discernable loss of quality.

I am gobsmacked.  The biggest feature in Skype Beta 3.2 isn't payments or any of that other stuff.  It's sound quality. 

FreeConferenceCall and others like it may become a relic of the past, it seems.  AT&T is now blocking access to FreeConference's 712 area code numbers, claiming that terminating a call on a bridge is not call termination. 

Utterly bogus.  If the call was being made on an INWATS or a 900 line, they would be Johnny-on-the-spot to claim a share of that termination revenue.  You can't suck and blow at the same time, Ed. 

The real impact, however, is going to be to drive users of these services to free or low cost VoIP-based services instead.  Expect more conference calls on Skype, Jajah, and others as a result.