Andrew Rollins

I spent this last weekend attending Barcamp Boston 3, a two day grassroots technology event on Saturday and Sunday, as well as the Barcamp pre-event party at Betahouse. I put some pictures from Barcamp up on Flickr, and here are pictures from everyone.

Barcamp is best described by the following snippet on their web site:

BarCamp is an unConference, organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees.

There is no registration fee, but you don’t just attend a BarCamp — you can participate in discussions, demo your projects, or join into another cooperative event.

Topics may include, but are not limited to: open source software, startups, UI design, entrepreneurship, AJAX, hardware hacking, robotics, mobile computing, bioinformatics, RSS, Social Software, programming languages, and the future of technology.

Barcamp Boston is just one instance of Barcamp - there are other Barcamps all over the world. You can find them on the main Barcamp web site.

(For those of you who aren’t programmers, “Bar” in Barcamp doesn’t refer to a place where alcoholic beverages are served. It comes from Foobar, a common placeholder name in programming.)

For a list of sessions, I took pictures of the Saturday and Sunday session boards from both days. Flickr displays them out of order, so I marked them with numbers.

Sessions I attended:

• Saturday
  • Visualization at an Internet Scale by Matt McKeon from IBM’s Many Eyes project
  • Distributed Twitter by Joe Cascio
  • Git as a subversion replacement by Josh Nichols
  • Google App Engine by Shimon Rura and Brian Olson (shown in picture)
  • iPhone Development by Dan Grover
  • Viral Marketing by Matt Peters from Pandemic Labs
  • Open Source Backup and Recovery Discussion led by Joe Slag
• Sunday
  • Code Secrets
  • Build your own wireless router
  • Ubuntu Discussion
  • PHP Development Discussion led by me

Here are some links to products and web sites I learned about:

• Career Numbers - career analytics currently in stealth mode
• Wonder Warp - iPhone and Mac applications from Dan Grover. He did a talk on iPhone development.
• Draconis Software - web application development
• Diet.com - nutrition information with access to info over SMS
• My Punchbowl - party planning and invitations, fairly well known and funded. He hosted a discussion on hiring people in tech.
• Gigafloat - social messaging, link sharing, etc.
• Babbledog - social bookmarking and news.
• Many Eyes - data visualization research from IBM

This is just a small sample. The Barcamp Boston 3 wiki has a much more comprehensive list of attendees with links to their sites.

I enjoyed the event, met a lot of great people, and received many clever suggestions for my company.

Some events on the horizon include:

• Ignite Boston - sponsored by O’Reilly
• Mobile Monday Boston - mobile technologies and development

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Last week I went to the 17th meeting of the Web Innovators Group. It is a seasonal gathering of a few hundred people to network and watch presentations from web startups. Here is a list of the presenters from WebInno17. To get a better idea of what it’s all about, check out this video of a previous WebInno event.

Founders, employees, people looking for work, and all flavors of investors show up. I spent an hour or two just walking around meeting people. Startups always have at least one interesting story to tell.

As for the companies presenting, my favorite was Jack Cards. It was the one truly unique service. The business model wasn’t the same old “we’ll sell ads” gimmick.

The concept behind Jack Cards is simple: you tell the service the birthdays of people you know, they’ll mail you cards at just the right time. They’ll even send a pre-stamped and addressed envelope. Never forget to send someone a birthday card again! The service also works for anniversaries, mother’s and father’s day, and more.

PicMe’s photo browsing software also caught my attention for its ability to browse massive amounts of photos quickly, sort of like Microsoft Photosynth and Seadragon.

I’m looking forward to the next WebInno in July.

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Last night I attended the Boston Web-Based Business Startup Group, an informal Meetup.com event. About 11 people showed up, and the format was a roundtable discussion. We each took 10 minutes to explain what we do and bounce questions off the group. It was both informative and a good reality check.

I attended the meetup with the two guys from Pandemic Labs, a viral marketing startup, whom I met them through Henry. They turned out to be quite a hit at the meetup due to everyone’s curiosity about what they do and how it might help them.

With this event past me, there are numerous others that I plan on attending. At the meetup, Dale from Lead Gather informed me that The Web Innovators Group attracts a good crowd. The guys at Pandemic told me about the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange. MITX is a more formal organization with membership dues, but it sounds very promising. Lastly, I want to attend workshops and free counseling sessions offered by SCORE Boston.

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TechCrunch is having a meetup in Boston on November 16. I found this a little too late to actually make a point of attending it, and it seems to be sold out anyway, but this is interesting none the less. The event is sponsored by IDG Ventures Boston, a well-known, early-stage investment group in the area.

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