Sasidhar | Blog

Barcamp3 Hyderabad was held on 16th December 2006 at Infosys Hyderbad.

Topic was Web 2.0 Communities.

That was the schedule. Lots of speakers, all good topics, all web 2.0 related. Bring it on baby !

Ramesh kicked off the Barcamp talking about web 2.0 in general. He spoke about how web2.0 is all about collaboration more than participation, the viral element involved, and how simplicity rocks.

He spoke about its popularity and success over the dotcom burst saying, this time around, there are no rules and thats a winner concept in itself.

Barat Varma from Dimdim. Dimdim is an opensource conference tool. Its like view.com and livemeet.com and webx.com, but with a opensource twist to it. Bharat also mentioned, Dimdim being more webapplication than a client based one. Which means, no download/installation necessary for a participant in a conference. Sounds good to me. Will try it out and post about it later.

Deodhar Ganguli, CEO of Dimdim. He answered most of the questions about the product, its release dates, market research done, and scope for this product. Sounds promising. I really like the concept too, apart from the usability.

Next was Kapil Mohan, from Slideshare, who gave a brief but interesting run though about the product. He explained the technical details of how their servers are setup and the growth they are expecting.

Did I tell you I’ve been using it since quite a while now?

At the end of the talk and the questions, there were some Slideshare Tshirts up for grabs. Couldn’t get any for myself though. Maybe I should get in touch with Kapil or Vishu, who was also attending and actively participating at the camp.

Janakiram from Microsoft spoke next. Although it seemed to me that the topic he choose, which as IM bots, has been in use for longer than I can remember, its just been packaged in a different model. Nice and shiny ! He spoke with confidence that no one else did though.

He encouraged techies to download the sdk’s and make more gadgets,and more plugins using their APIs. Overall,very interesting.

Jay, also from Pramati spoke next. This was probably the most Unconference that was present during this Barcamp. Heated discussions about web based and client based applications.

He kept suggesting that we should get back to desktop as the main source of data gathering, and use it as a medium for sharing. He argued that using online services is not reliable, and how we get locked in and lose our data.

Knowing that the gathering was of people interested in Web2.0, might not have been the best of topics to talk about, but again, it definitely helped people get their ideas and views in perspective.

More updates to follow.