March 5, 2008

BarCamp Miami, FOWA and More

Last week I’ve been on Miami ready for some Web 2.0 action in the BarCamp and on the Future Of Web Apps event held over there. Here It was a very interesting event for us, because it was the first time we would show some of the stuff we are working with Popego to a more international crowd. 

BarCamp Miami 

It was very well organized. It was my second expierence at a BarCamp (the first one was on Buenos Aires) and I must say that there isn’t much difference on the contents and quality of the presentations. Many of the things that were buzzing on the air during BarCamp (“openID”, “widgets”, “web standards”) weren’t a novelty.

This kind of events helps to validate some of the things you constantly read at blogs online. The value is on getting to meet interesting people and being able to see what kind of projects they are working on. 

 

I made a presentation (with demo) of the current version that’s live of Popego. I think it made a good impact because I’ve got a lot of feedback and suggestions for our idea. For instance Kevin Marks, the OpenSocial evangelizer of Google seemed interested on our project. And yes, we are very interested in OpenSocial’s API. Make sure have a look to his conference about the social cloud.

Future of Web Apps  

On Friday the 29th, a whole day of conferences from web luminaries began. Here’s a brief summary of My Top 3:

  • Leah Culver from Pownce highlighted the need of having a good API on your web app. She even made a public apology for not implementing a solid 1.0 API for Pownce and announced a new version of it right there. Guess we’ll have to check that out for Popego.
  • Gary Vaynerchuk from Winelibrary.tv is something special. You must see him on his podcast to know what kind of guy I’m talking about here. He took the stage and started “speaking from the heart” (sic) about how much he cares about his community. He gave good advice on being out there answering questions and mails 24/7 to start building a community around your service. He says he answers all his mails.. I’m tempted on giving that a try.

Face-to-Face Networking 

Finally, one of the best things of this events is getting to know people that are as passionate and enthusiastic about their ideas like we are.  

Martin Añazco & Diego Meller (Livra), Esteban Sosnik (our Angel Investor), Santiago Siri (Popego) and Elliot Adams (CDBaby). 

I must say that I had a ton of fun and it was great being at the conference with Diego Meller and Martín Añazco from Livra and Devego. These guys have been on the web business for 8 straight years, surviving the bubble burst and being innovators on the market research field. They have some exciting projects on the oven and you might want to keep a close eye on them. 

Also Elliot Adams from CDBaby joined us on a dinner. One great thing Elliot told me was that each time he looked for programmers to work with, he always likes to see people that have interests that go beyond the mere writing of code. Being his service a very useful tool for musicians, it’s no wonder he’s also a DJ.   

Finally, there were lots of colleagues from LatinAmerica. No wonder Miami is considered the latino capital. Dani Undurraga of Needish, a very cool app to connect needs with solutions was very enthusiastic about how much he has learned on the workshops. And Nico Orellana of Webprendedor was blogging and connecting with everyone out there. Nico has some exciting ideas to promote statups in Latinamerica and is preparing a big event in Santiago de Chile.  

Just being able to hang out and chat with experienced web developers from leading companies made the whole trip to Miami very valuable. 

Kevin Rose (Digg) was wearing a killer shirt that night.. ok, you’re guessing right, but the plain green was screaming for it. Needless to say, Kevin was pretty cool to talk with. 

Hopefully, I’ll see you on the next web conference! 


(*Written by Santi Siri, founder of Popego).