Igor’s blog

Today I presented a similar presentation to what Mike, Pardis and I presented 2 weeks ago at Eclipse DemoCamp.

I managed to squeeze our 15 minute presentation to under 5 minutes (I don’t know exactly how long I took, anyone keeping the time?), which was a bit of a challenge. I’ve got to admit that I almost got a heart attack right before the presentation. After bringing up all the software that needs to run, I tried to create a new assignment (because I had wiped the DB) but nothing happened. Queue panic attack. Literally nothing worked. Full stop. After some useless clicking around I was about to give up. As a last resort I decided to switch browsers and try with Camino instead of Safari. Insert long sigh. Turned out that for some magical reason authentication stopped working with Safari (even though it worked perfectly an hour before). Lesson: never wipe the DB right before the presentation, have everything exactly configured an hour before.

Overall the presentation went really well and I got very good feedback from people in the audience. One of the criticisms that I heard was that I never said what problem the software was trying to solve. Fair enough, I think that would be a good point to add to this presentation. I was kind of disappointed that only one question from the audience was asked. I guess for next time I present I really do have to plant people to ask at least one or two questions.

Overall the demoes were much better this time than the last few times that I attended. I was very impressed. The demo of ShapeShop was pure amazing. I remember trying to play with 3D Studio MAX and Maya in high-school and even though I could figure out some stuff it was really inaccessible. There was just no way I could have come up with anything more than what a retard-3-year-old would have doodled on a piece of paper. I think that software like ShapeShop could play a similar role to what digital cameras have done for hobby photographers. We could potentially see people start doodling 3D models and being able to form communities like flickr, but for 3D models. What about iStockPhoto for 3D models

The HealthSpoke demo was pretty interesting too. The demo looked pretty slick. But I have pretty big concerns about doctors sharing patient records. Forget sharing. What about even storing medical records off site? I don’t remember the latest on this but I’m pretty sure there’s legislation that deals with this specific issue. When the presenter said “according to my interpretation of the law…” I got the impression that they didn’t really look into it. Of course if this is mostly targeted towards alternative medicine providers and personal trainers, then no worries; but it shouldn’t be marketed as a system for medical doctors then. The other problem I see with this idea is importing data from legacy systems. Read: paper records. For this to be even somewhat effective doctors would have to import thousands of patients’ records from pen-and-paper systems into the system. That’s just not going to happen. I remember thinking of this kind of easy-medical-record-keeping system for a startup several times over the past few years, but the problem was always of how to get the existing information into the system.

The other thing that I really found interesting yesterday is Mark’s mention of FixMyStreet. Which is a website where people can report problems (like a bug tracker) and it is linked on the backend with the city’s systems and lets them find and prioritize problems. Crowdsourcing city inspection! Genius!

All in all a great DemoCamp, too bad I won’t be able to attend the next few, but I look forward to attending them again in the summer.

democamp, democamp16, torcamp, utest

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