David Abramowski

No it wasn’t an April fool joke.  The Portland Web Innovators really held their quarterly Demolicious meetup on April 1st.   It seemed that nearly 100 people gathered at gracious host Jive Software to see demonstrations of some of the latest projects here in Portland.

Kicking things off was Benjamin Stover & Jason Grlicky with I need to read this They sum up their application with a rather easy to remember phrase - bookmarks meet to do lists.  The problem they are solving revolves around the multitude of information that we read every day on the Internet.  Blog posts, articles, web pages - through out the course of the day we literally stumble upon too much material to read in the moment.  INTRT solves this problem by allowing you to single click a bookmarklet in your browsers bookmark toolbar.  That quick action will save a link to a post, article or information you found.  I just started using it and I find it very handy.

Next, I had the opportunity to present my current project MioWorks.com. The business problem that drove the development of MioWorks revolves around the challenges of synchronizing & collaborating with clients in the small business.  MioWorks is delivered as a SaaS application and provides a small business with several applications rolled into one.  The business gets an on-line contact manager or simplified CRM that centrally manages information and helps the team stay in sync.  On the other hand, MioWorks provides a customer portal where every contact in the CRM can now collaborate with the company in a one-on-one manner.  From asking questions to making requests and even downloading/uploading files.

Following me was Richard Fobes with Vote Fair Ranking The problem being solved by VoteFairRanking is related to surveys, polls and voting.  According to Richard, VoteFairRanking analyzes not just the top choice but the second, third fourth choices.  This allows VoteFairRanking to provide a better picture of not only the top preference but also second, third, fourth and so on.

Next up was Sam Grover who introduced Avatari, an application that allows you to quickly change your avatar on Friendfeed and Twitter.  Sam started the project as a way to learn how to write a Cocoa application.  Sam would like to extend the application to other services like Facebook but he must wait until they publish an API to allow his application to communicate with it.

Lastly Jason Glaspey gave us a demonstration of BlackTonic App.  The problem being solved by BlackTonic is the ability to remotely present to a client and control the pace of the presentation.  They are focusing their efforts on the vertical they know best - creatives and designers.   We have all used the cumbersome web presentation software in the market today and it looks like the BlackTonic team has found some secret sauce.  The presenter can control the presentation via the web and it doesn’t require any software download or installations for the remote users.  As a matter of fact the remote users can be on desktops, laptops or even iPhones.  All the remote screen change at the same time and screen size is automatically adjusted.  It’s a slick application.  The guys from Blacktonic have left the demo up for a few more days so you can see it.  Go quickly or it will be gone!

If you are interested in how to join Portland Web Innovators visit the web site or look for the next meeting on Upcoming.  You can also look for #PDXWI on Twitter.