A fascinating array of new applications, ranging from a web site allowing private pilots and other airport nuts to share their enthusiasm and knowledge, to a sophisticated new system to reduce intellectual property contamination while writing software code, were demonstrated to a standing-room-only crowd last night at Ottawa’s ninth DemoCamp.

A new twist on the well-established forum for code jockeys and entrepreneurs to show off their latest projects was its move to the second-floor Velvet Room in the Byward Market, a literal and figurative step up from the grotty basement venue in which it had appeared in the past. While there were a couple of glitches, most notably a speed-challenged internet connection, the new room was a great venue.

As an inveterate traveller and wannabe pilot, my favourite demo of the evening was David Megginson’s Our Airports. David’s information-rich web site, clearly a labour of love, features details on virtually every airport in the world, with the site’s users adding their own particular insight, everything from the cheapest aviation fuel and reviews of the customs facility to where the closest java can be obtained, the latter being critical information for what David called “coffee-starved” pilots.

You don’t have to be a pilot to enjoy the site. Anyone can join, create a list of all the airports they’ve ever been to, and plot those airports on a map of the world.

A presentation by SIMtone CDU of what it called a “virtual personal computer” had at least one member of the audience scratching his head. I missed a good bit of this first demo but others clearly were wondering about its utility. The concept seemed sound and a logical extension of utility computing. Put everything — storage, CPU, applications, printing, the works — in the cloud and allow access to it from a browser, soft client or hardware terminal. Problem is, you need a computer to access your virtual computer which kind of obviates its value proposition.

Protecode, an Ottawa company that rolled out a few months back, demonstrated its intellectual property management system that allows every piece of code, whether originally created or imported from some other source, to be reliably classified and tagged, with code that might create IP contamination issues down the road flagged as soon as it is imported. The benefit, its developers argued, is that the exact provenance of every line of code is established.

An interesting application, Stockify, allows value investors to calculate whether a stock is fairly or over-priced, or represents a buying opportunity. I remain a bit confused by the application’s ability to amend an inputed growth rate for the company being researched, with the tool altering the growth rate both historically and going forward. I have promised to get together with the developer to further thrash out our competing math theories.

And, finally, PicSphere appealed to the former commercial photographer in me with its nifty browser-based application allowing on-site shooters to swiftly organize and offer for immediate sale the pictures they take at sporting and other events.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,