DemoCamp4 – it’s alive!

[...] Lastly, it would be cool to do a more hardcore blend of demo + deeper workshop-style discussion and feedback. There were a number of keen minds in the audience and I know they would willingly give a few minutes of thoughtful feedback and coaching geared at helping the entrepeneurial- minded presenters bring their ideas to success. As currently defined DemoCamp isn’t the right forum/structure for it, though… not all presenters want “business help”, and I LOVE that DemoCamp doesn’t require ideas to arrive at the party all gussied up in a business model. That shouldn’t change. Mark Kuznicki alludes to the same issue here. I haven’t attended a Canadian Venture Forum event yet, but I suspect the thing I’m talking about lies somewhere inbetween. [...]

Mark
Yep, it was another really good democamp. I really liked Randy Glenn’s demo of the digital camera hacking too. The combination of ‘just for love, their’s no business model’ and hardware (as opposed to mostly software lineups) made it really appealing. Plus, I can only start to think of all the cool ideas that can become reality now people have access $30 digital video cameras. The Idee demos were super-impressive too, some genuine wow moments.

On the idea you mention Ruby on Rails reducing barrier to entry for software creation I recommend an article that John Lam (also a TorCamper) pointed me to that compares the power and speed of RoR to the birth of the transcontinental railroad in economic terms. Combine that power with some 37 Signals style fast and light development we’re in for interesting times.

DemoCamp 4 Another Success For BarCamp…

Self-confessed “strategy nerd” Mark Kuznicki gives us a nice DemoCamp 4 overview. See what the hackers and nerds are up to these days……

Hey Mark,

I’ve noticed that a few people didn’t understand the point of tag-Engine so I made a second effort and posted on the tag-Engine blog to try and clear some things up.

I only speak programmer but I tried to explain how tag-Engine would help in certain scenarios and why it’s really helpful and more flexible than more traditional template systems.

In response to your comments about democamp being first and foremost about technology and creativity, I completely agree. I was a bit worried about presenting when people started asking about the business model for all the demos because I definately didn’t have a business model. Tag-Engine is just supposed to help fullfill a need in a non-monopolistic sort of way.

Patrick – I’m with you on the exciting possibilities offered by the energy at DemoCamp. Maybe we could extend with a form of “speed-dating”: Demoers do their quick demos for the whole group and then go to tables, where they try to match their needs for critique/advice with expertise in the room. I’d be happy to do contribute my time to something like that.

Josh – I think you got some good feedback from better qualified people than I about whether there was a need for another template system. I for one will always argue that DemoCamp should be a safe place for interesting work, whether its a well-developed product demo, a prototype, a business idea, an open-source project or an interesting hack. Monopolistic business models are not the only game in town, and I welcome your contribution to the conversation. What’s your blog address? I googled “tag engine blog” and couldn’t see it.

DemoCamp 4.0 The Resurrection!…

As one might have gleamed from my write up of DemoCamp 3.0, I was half suspecting that the monthly “uncampference” would take a serious leap over the shark. I’m happy to say I don’t think it has, although it’s certainly n…

Mark,

I disagree with the notion that technology and creativity and commercial terms are mutually exclusive.

What’s the evidence?

Would it kill software developers to mention commercial terms? Are business models the new Kryptonite?

Last Tuesday evening was my first Toronto BarCamp, so as a newbie, I am still learning the rules. I recognize that my work as a management consultant biases me, yet even if that were set aside and I reverted solely to being a recovering electrical engineer, I was dumbfounded at the percentage of presenters whose software applications lacked a business model.

Why so many?

Mind you, I was not expecting a 4� 3-ring binder, crammed with a detailed market entry strategy to accompany each 8 minute presentation, but was it too much to expect that a developer who’s been labouring nightly for 3 months to develop an application, to offer a few comments on the potential commercial appeal of said application to his or her audience? Surely the thought must have crossed the mind while consuming cases of Red Bull.

Is it that BarCamp attendees disdain commerce or believe that being mindful of commercial terms as one explores one’s pet projects somehow dulls the creative edge? Or is it that attendees acknowledge its importance, but believe that they can neatly slot a successful business model into place AFTER their software application is built?

Don’t get me wrong, serendipity has a role. There is something to be said for unfettered, undirected research-for-research-sake. Over the past five decades, a number of useful things including the transistor, the laser, the mouse & graphical interface, etc. have emerged as inventions which found commercial application well after their creation.

But the famed labs which produced those inventions in the 1950s, 60s, 70s–the Bell Labs, the Westinghouses, the Xerox Parcs, with their massive budgets and their ability to undertake pure research, of academic quality, on an industrial scale—seem to have either disappeared or been radically downsized and/or become increasingly applied in their outlook. Research today, undertaken by their offspring, the Intels, the Microsofts, the Googles of the world, tends to be more applied–think small “râ€? and really BIG “Dâ€?. Maybe there is a reason for this trend.

Here are two propositions. The first is that Tuesday evening’s presenters at BarCamp reflect a breadth of fresh air, the ushering in of a more democratic and a more cost effective way (e.g. Open Source) to explore their pet projects. And in exploring their pet projects, the presenters self-actualize and that’s good enough for society at large.

The second proposition is that the presenters were symptomatic of something more troubling–a Canadian tertiary educational system which, with the noticeable exception of the U. of Waterloo, continues to pump “technologistsâ€? into the workforce. Technically competent, these technologists arrive with undisciplined minds and largely unskilled at the process of converting ideas into world-beating products, or raising money, or mediating customer needs, etc. Deliberately oversimplifying, this second proposition would see Canadian universities teeming with absent-minded, pipe-smoking, tweed-jacket-wearing Ivy Tower professors as opposed to the PhD-entrepreneur, the-Porsche 911-driving professor heroes that stride across the campuses of MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon.

Here is why we should all care about which one of the propositions rings most true.

At a micro level, what are BarCamp organizers and attendees to do and think when future presenters show up with yet another photo-sharing Web application or yet another search engine application that is, at best, only marginally better than the incumbent? Time—no—more accurately, attention, is a commodity and an increasingly scarce one at that. As BarCamp becomes more popular, there will be an ever-growing number of attendees and demonstrators. Inevitably, there will arise a need to ration demo space, to manage the “draw� on our collective attention. Commercial success—in the eyes of the BarCamp organizer and presenters—might be a useful, practical criterion, one among others, that could be used to organize future BarCamp.

Staying at the micro level, my mind harks back to the second presenter on Tuesday evening night, a digital camera hack from Disposable Digital Cameras, that claimed no discernible business model.

No business model?

Consider the following:
1. There are new populations, tens of millions strong in the emerging markets of coastal China, India, Brazil and South Africa, that are coming on-stream as their disposable income levels rise (Google C.K. Prahalad “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid�).
2. That for digital goods, the Web is the perfect platform for agglomerating geographically dispersed market segments–the proverbial ‘Long Tail’.
3. Bollywood (India’s film industry centered in Mumbai, formerly Bombay) already churns out more movies annually than Hollywood. Nigeria, yep Nigeria, also has a thriving film industry.

Now think about the disruptive effect that radically bringing down the price of digital movie making will have in India and Nigeria. OK, now let’s add in the heretofore excluded consumers in emerging markets such as Brazil and South Africa.

As I understand the presentation by Disposable Digital Cameras, cheap disposable cameras—hardware—plus their software = really cheap movie making. Sounds like a disruptive way of entering an uncontested market—selling to folks who are currently non-consumers. Clayton Christensen will be pleased.

But have we seen this movie (no pun intended) before? If we chat with Canadians over 70 years old, they’ll tell us that Japanese goods in the 1950s and 1960s were distinctly down market, synonymous with schlock. Akito Morita’s Sony, Toyota, Honda and other manufacturers systematically penetrated North American consumer markets (e.g. radios, televisions, autos, motorcycles), at the low end, took away market share and then moved up-market, leveraging scale economies, improving quality and raising prices.

Can Disposable Digital Cameras find a company, somewhere in the world, to manufacture under contract a cheap disposable camera? You bet! Across China today there are probably 100 entrepreneurs with the acquisitive mindset of an Akito Morita, circa de 1955, AND under utilized contract manufacturing capacity at their disposal AND cheap engineering talent on tap AND a bottomless supply of labour capable of doing the most minute, the most intricate, manual tasks. These folks are lean and hungry and accustomed to staying up nights figuring out how they can further assault global markets with their goods. Say Disposable Digital Cameras were to marry low-cost Chinese manufacturing prowess with a Tucows-like distribution model for the actual delivery of their hack application, and then take rifle aim at the emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa. I believe Disposable Digital Cameras will have a recipe for some serious coin—er, make that yuans, rupees, and rubles, etc. Please, tell me again with a straight face that there’s no business model to this hack!

Finally, we should care about which proposition rings most true because at a macro level, entrepreneurship remains heavily vocational, complete with a disturbingly high failure rate, but it remains essential to Canada’s productivity levels and our standard of living. Many know that 80% start-ups less than 5 years old fail. However, what’s less well known is that most new ideas also fail. According to The Economist, March 9, 2006 of 1,091 Canadian inventions surveyed in 2003 by Thomas Astebro of the University of Toronto, only 75 reached the market. Six of these earned returns above 1,400%, but 45 lost money. If you combine the two, i.e. the prospects for new products put out by new companies, they are harrowing. Indeed, you’re operating at the riskiest part of the economy. If we as Canadians are serious about narrowing the growing productivity gap with the U.S., then we need to improve both the quantity and quality of entrepreneurs that we generate. We need to produce more folks who are comfortable innovating in a commercial environment. BarCamp is a great place to start. Again, I am not advocating turning presenters into venture capitalists, I am suggesting that presenters have some familiarity with the language of VCs. After all, we can’t depend solely on our tech giants—case in point, CGI announced yesterday that they’ll be cutting 1,000 jobs in 2006.

By regularly encouraging our best technological talent, at an early age to be mindful of the commercial appeal of their applications, the discipline of that way of thinking will imprint and we will gradually raise the bar. Look at it this way, if the folks presenting at MaRS on Tuesday evening can’t speak intelligently about the commercial aspects of their very own ideas, who can? From where will Canada’s next generation of startups emerge? There is a lot to be said for exposing 3rd and 4th year engineering and computer science students to an introductory marketing course, if only so that they can learn how to recognize and structure a problem. Listen to the interdisciplinary seminars Stanford puts on for their engineering and business students (http://edcorner.stanford.edu/podcasting.shtml ).

Jerry,

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I agree with much of your perspective on the need for technologists to improve their business skills. That is one reason why I devote some of my time to coaching students at UofT. I just don’t think that DemoCamp is the right format for getting into the details of business models, markets and strategies. I am thinking of ad hoc workshops self-organized after Demo, with needs and expertise matched up through a form of “speed-dating”. Creativity and commercial interests are not mutually exclusive, but not every worthy project has an immediate commercial outcome. Open-source projects are the case in point. Thanks for your point of view, and please keep coming out!

[...] Liveblogging from iSummit: Read David Crow now. Read Jerry King’s comment here. [...]

[...] I would like to point all iSummit attendees to pay attention to the emergent community and agile innovation approaches coming out of the web development community in Toronto and elsewhere. DemoCamp is one spinoff of the BarCamp unconference phenomenon, which began in Toronto with TorCamp. It is a nascent community of software innovators, programmers, geeks, entrepreneurs and other interested parties that is completely self-organized way that follows agile principles. DemoCamps have been happening more or less monthly and attendance has been growing at an exponential rate. The future of DemoCamp is being discussed right now: here, here, here and here. [...]

Mark – The tag-Engine blog is…

http://tagengine.blogspot.com