Wow. The scene is alive in Toronto. No Regrets was packed to the rafters with some of the best and brightest in the Toronto tech community. It was the final hoorah at No Regrets as the venue is changing to the MaRs facility. If you have seen any of the pictures there wasn’t alot of room for any extras. Hopefully the new venue will be better allowing for a more focused demo time. Less chit chat, that setting makes it too easy for people to strike up conversations. There seemed to be a real strain put on the wireless setup at Demo9, in fact so much so that a number of demo’rs had to use other peoples computers.

ConceptShare Demo
Anytime you demo …it is never easy. I think that there is a sense of vulnerability when you step up and face the crowd of what can be a critical group and bare your soul/product/baby. Add to the mix not being able to use your own laptops. While our Dell Xps and Macbookpro sat lifeless we hit the stage with another mans ride. I can’t remember whose laptop it was but it was great just to have a connected computer. I am not sure if anyone really caught the setup sequence but all we had to do to prepare for the demo was ensure that the flash player was up-to-date. So with out being able to test how things were going to run we launched in.

We were the third demo of the evening ….the mid way of the evening. It is a good spot as the crowd is still into the demos and are ready for more. So we launched right into the demo and for next 7 minutes we were front and center. We really wanted to ensure that there was a broad array of samples or real applications for ConceptShare. We were glad to see that despite the loaned laptop, overdrawn wireless connection that the speed of the application was still very apparent as it was blazing fast. (We had the question a few times asking if we were running a local copy …..no live.)
We had time for a few quick questions, we knew there were more but ….Dave and his timer cut us off. We hit a great demo ….and not because we were demo gods but because the audience got it.
Look back at the questions Jay posed to us:

What do you hope to get from the community?
I think we got lots from the community. Everyone we talked to was full of ideas. We knew going in that the product lends itself well to many different applications. We were very interested to hear how people could see themselves using the product, their current pains with the current way of doing things and stories of how this could have helped past projects. IT was really interesting talking to so many people. Everyone knew of someone that this could make their lives easier and more productive.

What will the community/audience get out of your demo?
We wanted the audience to see that there is a better way to move their ideas along. We feel that this will make companies faster and more innovative. We want to be able to help companies communicate their ideas better. whether it is across the office, to clients, to project partners or customers. We are really compelled to hear the stories of our users and how they are conceptsharing.

Long live democamp
I can’t say enough great things about the democamp experience. It is truly a welcoming event that brings together some of the greatest people in the industry. It brings them together because of a genuine interest in what is happening in the industry. They come together and offer great feedback for companies such as ourselves. It is incredible valuable to hear opinions and comments of the people that we regard as leaders in the industry.

There is something alive in Toronto
Toronto could become a hub in the ‘web2′ world. Silicon Valley north if you will, although I am sure there are those in Vancouver who would argue this. There is such a mass of people who are pushing the industry. There is a real need for this to develop more ….not solely for Toronto, but for the Canadian industry as a whole. Lets face it we are not from Toronto but we have been welcomed in to the industry and hope to be able to continue with our support for the growing Canadian scene.

Tracking the feedback
I have gathered the feedback that was put out after the event as i know there are many of the readers who wanted a compilation vs the links that I am famous for sending. We couldn’t be happier with the feedback.

Josh Wehner

Of the five demos last night, I was most impressed with ConceptShare, essentially a “BaseCamp for images” collaboration app. Much like BaseCamp, the idea is to share work-in-progress with a distributed development team, but ConceptShare is geared more to the design crowd than the developers.

The designer uploads a comp or concept sketch, and can open it up for feedback from management, other designers, or the general public. Somewhat akin to Flickr’s notes, these comments can include drawn notes or text, which become stuck on a given image. In other words, instead of saying “third paragraph needs work”, you can draw a bubble around the paragraph in question. I’ve done this by fax, and I would definitely prefer to do away with that.

They’ve also added a couple of slick features: Enter a URL and ConceptShare sucks in a screenshot; Workspaces can be opened to other Designers (so you can invite an “expert” to weigh on your work), or shared with the general public (for a quick, virtual focus group, say).

The interface was a fullscreen Flash app, but it was surprisingly snappy on the pub’s usually sluggish WiFi.

Tom Purves

I was blown away by the conceptshare demo. Concept share is a way to collaborate on visual documents. It’s spectacular in its execution. Having spent the last two weeks playing endless e-mail tag with a designer and team members trying to finalize our firestoker branding, I want this software and I want it yesterday.

The conceptshare demo alone was worth the price of admission for me and I hope that the controversy doesn’t overshadow the high value of this demo.

Olivier Yip Tong

ConceptShare

After seeing such a cool demo, we didn’t expect to be wowed again by another one. Enter ConceptShare. These are the 2 people that came all the way from Sudbury, a.k.a. the boonies. It is a web collaboration tool for basically everything that has some visual element to it.

ANOTHER collaboration tool you might say, NOT SO they say. Rather than calling it an online collaboration tool, Scott Brooks prefers to describe it as a tool to get feedback and to share ideas with people working on the same project. A very humble description, as I think it ’s FRIGGIN AWESOME.

It allows users to annotate, comment and draw on pictures. Of course, you can add people from your group or choose people that have made themselves available for consultation as “experts”. The users can circle things, point at things and write little comment bubbles, read what other people said, chat live, and read chat logs.<

This is AWESOME for working with customers, as it cuts down on the MOUNTAIN of lost email, pdf’s and *shudder* FRICKIN Word documents all over the place. (!! PLEASE NOTE: Word or any MS fileformats are NOT exchange formats!!). For technologists this is awesome, considering the lack of people skills we have, to discuss UI with other people.

They’ve also got an impressive and fast image scaling feature with little resolution loss which has to be seen to be fully appreciated. They have RSS feeds for comments and support all kinds of files for upload. They are currently going into private beta and are pondering what the pricing is going to be. THE NEWS: It might go from free trial services, $12 small company accounts, $59 for slightly larger ones up to $99. SOLD!.

Greg Wilson

- ConceptShare’s was great—I really want a chance to play with their stuff

- I’ve already apologized to Bernie Aho for not making it clear that he and the ConceptShare team did *not* offend anyone — it was the comments from bystanders that did that. I thought their demo was great, and if they weren’t in Sudbury (which, in the minds of most U of T students, is full of cannibals and grizzly bears ), they’d already be flooded with resumes from my students.

Colin Smillie

ConceptShare was absolutely the best demo of the night. The team had a good idea of what they want to present and a very slick product. ConceptShare can be used to share any visual idea and get feedback from other people that may not be readily available for a design review. I could see this being very useful in alot of environments and all has the benefit of allowing concepts to be tested with a good level of feedback. The application is developed entirely in flash but was very responsive has alot of community features. They have also provide the ability to for experts to register with the site and offer design review by invite. This would be great for start-ups that need to get their concepts reviewed by a wider audience. Overall a very impressive tool and a great demo.

ConceptShare was really the best demo and I couldn’t really stick around to network.

Ian Irving
Conceptshare- A new way to share and manage visual design concepts

This was this months out of the ball park hit! Slick flash interface gave it a responsive desktop application feel, made tracking design work (be it Mockup, Ad creative, BluePrint or other), and collecting commentary, as it evolved to the final design much less painful between parties with a minimum of technical skill. I (and other people) were muttering “I could have so used this for X” (I understand that the developers built this to solve the same inch for themselves, which is allways a good thing). Thanks for two thirds of the team making the long drive south! Their web site does a good start of explain the problem they are trying to solve, but I would love to see a video showing the product!

Jorge Aranda

Concepthsare – A service to share visual designs (web pages, advertisements, logos, anything), annotate them, and get feedback from experts. One of their goals is to shorten the feedback cycle between designers and clients, by sharing the designs through the net. The service seemed very polished and very convenient. Great stuff -the best of the night, in my opinion. And I can see how software development teams can also use it to speed up requirements elicitation and prototyping.

cheers till the next democamp
Scott

Flock

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