A few people here in Calgary have started this thing (actually imported this thing) called Barcamp. It’s a recurring event where fellow entrepreneurs, VC’s, techno-philes, etc just get together in an informal atmosphere (like, uh, a bar) and rap about the cool things their doing.
I attended the first one in March and it was great. It’s nice to be able to talk to VC’s in a relaxed atmosphere instead of some pressure cooker office. I was surprised to hear from Patrick Lor how very few people actually pitch their plan to VC’s. Apparently there are a lot of investors out there who are just dying for opportunities and receive very few, even when asking for them. Maybe it’s like “hot chick at the bar” syndrome and there’s a fear of getting shot down.
Well, SideFinder is coming along nicely, albeit a bit delayed on the beta release - sorry beta testers, it’s coming 
- so we’re starting to work up the courage to ask the hot chick to dance. We’ve decided to take part in Democamp and, yup, do a demo.
Some good ground rules here; max 10 minutes and no Powerpoint slides. The bad news is this isn’t very long to explain a product, but the good news is that I’ll be done early. Here’s my demo agenda.
Introduction:
SideFinder makes it easier to find and file your stuff.
There’s a lot of stuff in inboxes, most of us can’t find it and gave up on filing it, so the first SideFinder plugin we decided to build is for Outlook.
Key points:
- Unobtrusive interface - sidebar, no change to Outlook.
- Tags instead of folders
- Integrated search for both messages and tags
- Unify information stores (PST files)
- Mnemonic Search - use data to find meta to find data
- Business process examples; a) bug reports, b) email annotation
- Our vision - first Outlook then…
- files
- web favorites
- gmail, webmail
- Picasa
- blogs
- mp3’s
- social tagging integration - delicious, flickr, StumblUpon, etc
………………… unify information islands, all using the same interface.