Minndemo 23

I went to Minnedemo (#23) downtown on July 14.  It was at the Pantages Theater in downtown Minneapolis.  I wasn't so sure I wanted to go because it was closing in on RAGBRAI, but I finally decided I enjoyed the presentations enough I'd make it work.

Presentations included Toursler, which is a cool use of virtual Google-map style functionality to allow tours of high end houses synced to floor plans.  The dev presenting is obviously into the tech as he was already playing around with VR and demo-ed how they'd used a bit of machine intelligence training to get the computer to identify rooms by aspects of the photos (toilet = bathroom) so they could eliminate a lot of the manual tagging. Gave me some ideas I need to explore.

I found Townsourced less interesting.  The point of a local board, such as you find at your coffee shop, would seem to be that it's local.  By allowing individuals to cross post to multiple community boards, that breaks the metaphor (in my opinion).

Genovest is a stock analysis (but not purchasing) tool.  I think the crux of it is visualization meets investing.  There's a lot of math under it as well, but the output seems to give you visualizations you can use to investigate.  This got me to wondering whether there are investment tools/games for kids.  There does appear to be an official app - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stock-market-game/id702878174?ls=1&mt=8 - although I haven't used it so I don't know whether it does some of the same visualization tech that's part of the newer app experience.

HabitAware is AMAZING.  You can smell the clever idea w/o significant complexity in their application.  They've taught a bracelet to record gestures.  Then, when you repeat that gesture, the bracelet will give you a warning.  Don't like a particular way you gesticulate, you'll get warnings.  More importantly: nail biting, skin picking, hair pulling.  The inventor created it to help his wife who had constantly removed her eyebrows via plucking.  Now she has eyebrows.  

DiviUp - you buy a coupon/deal and you get savings, a charity gets a cut, and the business gets a little more business.  Groupon with a conscience.  It's a good idea, but those sorts of coupon/rebate/deal apps wear me out.

Kinetic Data.  Well...if you understand this diagram you get it.  It simplifies a lot of backend processes with an easy UI.  We considered variations on the same process for some contract handling work I reviewed.  Their reference to Salesforce and LDAP makes this very much a similar architecture.

And the best...Chicken Scoop AI.  These two came out on stage and gave a presentation on training cameras to identify chickens and present charts/data/visualizations on their activity for purposes of tracking the chickens' behavior, eggs, etc.  Very interesting where they pointed to a chicken that was probably dead (yes sad, but interesting from a data tracking perspective).  Here's a slide that gives you a small sense of their humor.