Barcamp Bangalore

I love meeting up with intelligent and tech savvy crowd. Barcamp is one great place, where you can meet up with passionate folks, diligent coders, and some entrepreneurs who make the horizon look smaller. Barcamp bangalore was announced a couple of weeks back, and the decision i made to be there, makes me feels so better now. I have been to previous barcamps and i would call bangalore barcamp 7 (bcb7) one of the best barcamps ever. Barcamp 3 is still numero uno.

barcamp bangalore 7 (bcb7)

Location : Bangalore (INDIA), IIM-B
Date       : 13sep, 14 sep 2008

While most people are prejudiced that barcamps are for techies and the ajax and the java crowd, the trend is changing a lot. The sessions are no longer classified upon technologies (ajax, python and ruby), but it is more professionally organized into Technology, business, social and arts. This classification has brought inside barcamp a great platform for those non techie folks to participate and collaborate ideas with the tech savvy geeks.

Do i have to be a techie to participate in Barcamp?

Not any more! As the classification is more sensible (read previous paragraph) , it places technology as just a tool to implement the ideas. You can always listen to ideas from other people or even suggest some of your own. Moreover, it is a unconference. If you do not like a session, you can always walk away to a session that interests you better. I have compiled a list of a few interesting sessions that i attended, and also heard about. It is not possible to attend all sessions at barcamp, because most sessions occur in parallel. You may realize that most of the sessions below do not involve any technology.

Next Generation Networking

This session talked about the 4G networks and related hardware, and the preparations going on for the development for the same. A very interesting session. It primarily focused on the SSX3000. In a end user perspective, it is all about high speed broadband on your mobiles. Imagine 100MBPS on your mobile. Waiting for 4G.

Google Open Social & Shindig – OpenSocial Container

With the number of social networks captivating people, growing everyday, open social proves a great way to get logged on to each network with the open social ID. These two sessions on open social gave an insight of developing social networks that can make use of open social. The second session also gave a detailed study of the two frameworks available and how to transform a new network to work on open social. They also claimed its very secure (read next session )

Breaking Google Open Social Applications

Parasuraman, a security expert and researcher has found a few apps lagging behind in security. He used one of the biggest social networks ever – orkut – to inject scripts and fake users into giving their google passwords in a newly devised style of phishing page. Clearly one of the best sessions of barcamp bangalore, and adding to this, he had a live demo!

Firefox indic localization

Mozilla was one of the sponsors for bcb, but i never found a mozilla employee nor a banner. There were however a few developers and plethora of enthusiasts of firefox. This session dealt with customizing firefox 3 in more indian languages. There was also one another session on browser war. Chrome is not yet there, firefox still rules.

Python 3000

This session talked a lot about the changes in the python programming language. It was more for geeks and i would have appreciated if the speaker had dealt the session in a different perspective, since most of the folks in the session had neither seen python 2.x as well as python 3.0

RSI – What a Pain in the Wrist

Intimidating stuff for all those geeks. Guillaume Marceau has a lot of details about how typing in wrong positions and weird time spans can injure your wrist. He also came up with a lot of solutions including a curved keyboard and speech synthesizer software.

Commercial Photography: Soul Selling

Mahesh Shantaram is a freelance photographer. He held a couple of talks on selecting cameras and how to do some basic and ethical editing using GIMP or photoshop. Mahesh is a wild life photographer, and he showcased a lot of his good work and helped curious listeners to enhance their skills in photography.

iReboot – Experience your dream job

This was one of my personal favorites, and i was excited to hear the innovative idea. Ireboot lets you reboot your career by giving you a unique chance to work in your dream job, hands on for a couple of days. For instance, you could do designing advertisement hoardings, or work for a media for a couple of days. This can help you visualize the pros and cons of your dream job, or even appreciate your current job better.

Out of ordinary : CYCLING TO WORK

This was one session that caught the attention of all the eyes in barcamp. There were a lot of enthusiasts who took it a joy to drive to office everyday by a bicycle. Of course, these cycles were high tech and could cost you more than a bike. The talk comprised of the advantages and green environment, and also the few disadvantages.

Make money blogging

I presented this session on how to make money from blogging using sponsored content, the advantages and the disadvantages of the same.

PARAGLIDING

I missed this session, i suffer from acrophobia. But i included this session to give people an idea of the multifariousness of the sessions at barcamp.

You may find the list of all sessions in bcb7. BARCAMP 8 preparations are already underway, and it is a great platform to advertise your service /product /website, or even get feedback. There are a lot of entrepreneurs and geeks hanging aroung every where. You also get free lunch and a free tshirt (as in free beer). DId i say registration was free?

Enthralled by bcb7 ? Sounds like you missed something ? Participate in barcamp bangalore 8 and make a difference. (bcb8 – barcamp is a open community upshot)

Would appreciate digg love!!

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