BarCampChennai – Live Updates

BarCampChennai is under session and I’ll be attempting to live blog it. This is my first attempt at Live Blogging and will be updating interesting nuggets of each presentation rather than the whole thing. Watch this space for live updates on BarCampChennai.

BarCamp Chennai – Day 1
Kiruba just gave a small informal introduction and started off the session. The room is filling up and there is a lot of energy in here. Amit Ranjan from Uzanto Delhi is giving his experiences of conducting the Delhi BarCamp

Question: Why BarCamp? Shouldn’t it be called a DhabaCamp for Indian audience??

Ganesh Padmanabhan of Voice Snap is giving a presentation on voice mail application. Sounds really interesting. Check it out at voicesnap.com
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Vinu from Emergic is presenting on MyToday.com – “Do you have Firefox?”, he asks!!! He asks again -”Why dont you have firefox here?” :) We learn that the chap from JustSamachar.com was hired for MyToday.com – nice!
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Vijay of LeadStep talks on Project Infranet (Infrastructure Networks) – he’s looking at developing a framework for streamlining citizen data. It’s a debatable issue and needs to be looked into more deeply.
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Balaji talks on a simple file tracking system that can employ small scale industries to develop it. Interesting little experiment and I’d really love to see it work especially after having worked in the RFID scene for quite some time.
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Narain “mixify” of 360 Interactive talks about Web 2.0 or “Live Web”.
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Arjun Ram of Taazza.com, a news aggregation service in the making, asks “Where are the machans?”. Arjun is working on developing a news aggregation site that will allow you to narrow down your news to lower levels like, “I want to know whats happening in Besant Nagar or Mylapore”. Arjun also demos Taazza. *Interestingness*. An iPod Shuffle is in the offing for the best review of Taazza. Write your reviews and post your link on Arjun’s blog
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Suman talks on NPL – a new programming language that he’s developing that will enable you to visualize code. While the discussion is a little too technical for me, I take a break and apply the Law of Two Feet to check out the session at Track 2.
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Track 2 has quite a packed audience. Amit Aggarwal of Digital Inspiration talks on how to make money from blogging. “Its all about writing with passion at the end of the day”. Amit says that there is a lot of money to be made by just blogging. But is blogging really about making money?
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Back on Track 1, Charles from AdventNet talks on the ZOHO Suite of Applications. ZOHO is attempting to replicate the Office Suite for the web. They’ve got a really nice logo. The applications look interesting but they need to work on the user experience to attract more customers onto their site. Well, thats my 2 cents!
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Muthu from Sun Microsystems, Bangalore is gung-ho about xDesign (User Experience Design). Muthu has been working on user heuristics and usability ever since I’ve known him and is really passionate about it, which, is great!

Day 1 : Its a wrap!

BarCamp Chennai – Day 2
By the time I got here, a session was already in progress. The new Microsoft Office 2007 was being demoed and I did catch a glimpse of exciting things that are expected soon.
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Atul Chitnis talks about Mobile Computing. “Sending an sms using one hand will not get you into trouble in a classroom.” Atul evangelizes the use of mobile devices for computing and believes that the desktop is gonna be replaced by smaller devices for infotainment purposes.

BarCampChennai photos are available here

More updates to follow..