DemoCampMontreal3: Defensio, Vinismo and the web as platform

DemoCampMontreal3 already has great wrap-ups by Marc-André and Heri, so I won’t re-hash things here. What struck me was the change in the type of applications shown. Of 4 applications, one was fairly simple (Workcruncher). All the rest were either mash-ups or mashable.

• Vinismo is a semantic wiki with a creative commons license, and an RDF API.
• Defensio’s spam filter is delivered through an API.
• Jerome Paradis‘ Allo Stop for jet planes uses a google map to display information that was extracted from various sources, including a mailing list.

Good APIs and data licenses are good first steps for business cooperation. The more startups like Vinismo and Defensio, the more niche plays like jet-sharing become easy to implement. We need more mashable startups, and I hope these are a sign of more to come.

Today’s O’Reilly Radar has a blog post about Wesabe, Making the web into a banking platform (whether they like it or not). It has some provocative insights, go read it.

I’m looking forward to the next democamp. Jonathan and I should have url_pipe ready by then, tackling another way to loosely couple data providers and consumers.