This TechEd season marks the tenth anniversary of DemoJam, the ultimate geek competition! In its decade old journey, DemoJam has given the audience some of the most exciting, creative and mind blowing live demos using SAP technology. As many of you may know, DemoJam was launched as a way to showcase how SAP NetWeaver worked.
In 2005, Boris Gebhardt and Markus Frick held the winning DemoJam trophy at Boston and Vienna, for their “Cutting-Edge ABAP Editor and Debugger.” The ABAP Editor and Debugger was based on the SAP NetWeaver 2004, which automated and customized syntax coloring, bookmarking and collapsible code views to help better organize and manage even the most complex development tools. The Editor and Debugger introduced code templates, dynamic content and auto-correct options that understood what developers are coding, which helped programmers avoid syntactical errors. This Editor was more sophisticated and provided state of the art user interfaces that included split windows, customized screens to compare different sections of a program and speed development and debugging. What Gebhardt and Frick came up with in 2005, may not seem as exciting as the demos we have seen in recent years; however, it definitely was a vision into the future.
DemoJam 2011 introduced Marek Kowalkiewicz’s winning demo, InnoBoard. When I saw the first sixty seconds of this demo, I thought to myself, what was so great about this demo that it won? I thought it was another application just like Skype and Face Time, but I was honestly too quick to judge. As I sat there and watched the remaining five minutes of this demo, I was surprised and amazed on how unique his demo truly was. InnoBoard transforms any whiteboard or wall into an electric whiteboard by using a smartphone and a projector. The technology enables participants to collaborate from different locations and brainstorm ideas onto the same whiteboard. For example, if I was using InnoBoard and I posted something on my whiteboard, it would start virtually appearing on other peoples’ whiteboards that were using the technology as well. InnoBoard is integrated with SAP Streamwork that allows users to save and access the results after the meeting. Kowalkiewicz’s idea may have seemed simple at first but towards the end, all that came to mind was that InnoBaord really put the “inno” in innovation.
After seeing Keytree’s demo of Store Trek, my definition of creativity had a whole new meaning. I love to shop but at times, I do become quite lazy to go to actual store but, thanks to Store Trek there is a solution for that. Using SAP HANA and SAP HANA Cloud Platform (formerly known as SAP NetWeaver Cloud), Will Powell and Nic Doodson created Store Trek, a combination of in-person and online shopping experience. They took an entire product database from a store and put it inside SAP HANA Cloud and stored it inside of SAP HANA. To make StoreTrek a virtual reality, they used a TV, PC and Microsoft Connect to view the store’s live products, compare sizes, see offers, and peruse the market. Since the product database is stored in SAP HANA, shoppers have the option of using SAP HANA Analytics to filter the products, allowing them to shop exactly the way they want to. This winning demo gave people the insight on how it would feel to shop in a 3D store without leaving the comfort of their own home which is definitely something to look forward to in the future.
Creativity is all around us, and most importantly within us. So don’t wait much longer as DemoJam submission date is just around the corner! DemoJam is accepting demo submissions until September 10th, 2014, submit you demo NOW!
