Last night, Portland Web Innovators kicked off its 2009 gatherings with Demolicious, the quarterly showcase of cool new products.
Of the five demos, two were products we’ve seen before—but they’ve been retooled for the new year.
Akshay Dodeja demoed Mugasha. Originally developed during Portland Startup Weekend, the site has gone through several iterations in development—now it’s ready to launch in private beta.
If you’re into electronica, you’re going to want to check it out. What’s it do? Basically, it parses DJ set podcasts—usually one long multi-hour track with no song info—into separate song tracks, allowing user to play the songs they want to play and actually know which tunes they’re playing.
Taking a different cut on a previous iteration, Kevin Chen demoed a new version of Metroseeq, a mapping application that gives you the options to search for resources around a town, in-between two locations, or by marking your own route and allowing the service to plot resources along that route.
The new version of Metroseeq relies on the Google API and returns to the four closest resource for any search.
The other three demos showed off some new development.
Michael Kelly showed us Foodisms, an early version of a restaurant and food searching site with a twist: rather than searching by cuisine, you search by ingredient. Foodisms then looks for that ingredient and suggests a variety of dishes at any number of restaurants.
The current dataset is currently limited to 100 Portland restaurants (which, for Portland, is a narrow subset) but the foundational structure for the product has been established. If they can scale the data entry—dish by dish, ingredient by ingredient—this is going to be very cool indeed.
Scott Andreas shared Sunago, community management software for nonprofits—especially advocacy groups. Its mission is simple:
“We’re tired of companies charging exorbitant amounts of money for apps that, well, suck. We’d rather you to spend your money on your vision, not software. That’s why Sunago is free for small organizations, and affordable for larger ones.”
Sunago has already been deployed with several nonprofits and Scott is constantly adding new features.
Finally, Dave Miller demonstrated OpenLaszlo, an ECMAScript tool for building “rich internet applications” that will let the developer script structured content that can be compiled and deployed as either HTML or Flash—from the same code. Dave showed off some of the capabilities and demoed an app he had built.
Based on the beginning of his demo, I’d also offer that Dave is available to perform as a mime for your kids’ birthday parties or your next corporate function. Or not.
Demolicious was streamed live via UStream, but I’m not seeing an archived copy available yet. [Update] In the meantime, here’s some additional analysis and insight from David Abramowski.
If you missed the event, the next Demolicious will be April 1. What a fortuitous date for demoing.
Legion of Tech—Portland’s benevolent free-tech-event organizer—has been refreshing the organization as of late with new Board members and a new Advisory Committee.
