Our Friend Andy Mitchell, whose application Meecard won Sheffield Barcamp 2007, has launched an update to his popular GTDInbox tool.
So, a lot of my colleagues at PlusNet know that I like a jolly good knees-up, the occasional beer (ahem) and talking about technology, especially where it can enhance my life and work. The chance to combine all three is usually an opportunity not to be missed, and one such opportunity came up last Wednesday at Leeds GeekUp. More…
BarCamp Leeds was held on Saturday 17th of November at the Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. A BarCamp is an open, participatory workshop, whose content is provided by participants, often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. Wikipedia has a good description of what a BarCamp actually is, here
The Leeds event was a resounding success and was expertly organised.
The venue was divided into 4 presentation rooms of various sizes and the attendees were given the chance to step forward and do a presentation on the topic of their choice. We had approximately 30 presentations throughout the day on various topics.
PlusNet were sponsors of the event. We gave a couple of new iPhones to the best presenters; which seemed to go down well.
One of the key reasons I went along was to look at recruiting some talented software developers into our team in Sheffield. Over the course of the day I met a bunch of really good people who’ll be coming along to see us in the next few weeks and will hopefully be joining our team.
I’ll not go into huge detail about everything that went on during the day, you can see all the other blogs on BarCamp Leeds on the Technorati website, here .
There are also a bunch of Leeds BarCamp photos on Flickr, here.
PlusNet is committed to being involved with the local and national Community events such as this. We are regular attendees of the monthly OpenCoffee events in Sheffield and also the GeekUp events in Leeds. We consider it extremely valuable to be in touch with what’s going on out there in the community and are always happy to give others the benefit of our experience.
If you want to know what’s going on in your area, the best thing to do is subscribe to the Yahoo Upcoming service. This gives details of all the events in your area that you’d otherwise be unaware of. You can sign up for this service, here.
Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet
I have now organised the 2nd OpenCoffee Sheffield event for the 14th August at the Starbucks on Tudor Square in Sheffield.
More information available at:- http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/222862
OpenCoffee Clubs are a forum in which people interested in all things Internet can come together and talk shop, share ideas, exchange best practice and generally talk to like-minded people. Any developers in the Sheffield area that would like to meet developers from PlusNet to get an idea of what we do, how we do it and the environment in which we work are more than welcome.
Also, BarCamp Sheffield II will be formally announced within the next two weeks and anyone interested in getting involved in what promises to be a very insightful event is welcome.
Regards
Dean
So, we’ve cleaned up, shut down the wireless routers and projectors, stacked the plastic chairs, recycled the pizza boxes and beer bottles, paid the hotel bills, sent the cheque out and gone home to reflect on a fun and successful weekend.
BarCampSheffield really did exceed my expectations. How can an event with so little organisation and promotion succeed? I guess it’s just all down to the people participating in it. Just look at the great pile of photos (over 400 now!) that were being uploading during the day, or the positive blog responses that have sprung up over the past couple of days. You lot made it work, not us. All we really did was provide you a with a great big room to fill with your enthusiasm.
What has disappointed me about it though, was the turn out of people from larger Sheffield companies. Don’t get me wrong, we had the right number of people, (any more and we wouldn’t have had enough pizza!) but where was Technophobia, Insight UK, Magic Number or even HSBC, whose European IT headquarters are over the road?! What about students from The Sheffield University or the Sheffield Hallam University? We had more students from the Leeds Met than locally! (Admittedly, Dean did go up and blackmail them into coming!). I don’t get it.
PlusNet has spent a long time with it’s doors closed, looking inwards, presuming we are the experts, and not embracing the real internet/web community that lies outside of our walls. This year we’ve gone to FOWA, FOWD, Internet World, Usability in Practice and even SXSW and would advise any developer out there to stand up and go hassle their boss to get them tickets to one of these things. It’s amazing the amount of stuff you can learn by getting out of your environment and spending a few hours seeing how other people do it. Hell, I’m talking to Meecard and Thinkfold after their application demonstrations on Sunday about the possibilities of using their applications to help us internally!
Get it? You might even get customers!
Here is the round up from Day 2 of BarCampSheffield held over the weekend. 14 demo’s took place and the winner walked away with a cheque for £1000 to help get their idea off the ground or buy themselves some more equipment to expand.
Meecard - Best of Show WINNER!
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Andy describes meecard as “Neatly combines all your Web presences into one appealing little card - a snippet of youness on the Web!” and this world exclusive demonstration proved a great success with the audience. So much so, that Andy & his business partner walked about with the best of show award of £1000. Looking forward to seeing this launch in the next couple of weeks.
afeeda - Best of Show Runner Up!
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Dave demonstrated his feed aggregator which is both fast and easy to use. It can aggregate content from sites such as flickr, blogs and news sites into 1 easy to read news-reel. The site is currently in beta and is due to launch in the next couple of months.
ThinkFold - Best of Show Runner Up!
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Matt demonstrated a web app for outlining ideas and thoughts in realtime with others. Currently in private beta but looking to launch in the next couple of months this web application uses lots of javascript to make the interface very slick and fast.
Travel Manager
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Mike demonstrated his niche “CRM solution for the people transportation industry”, with a focus on how its possible to build a web application on a budget for a niche market and still generate decent ROI. His application includes CRM, document management built on Amazon’s S3 infrastructure, geocoded maps built on Google maps and asset (people & vehicles in this case) scheduling.
TrafficJammr
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Stuart demonstrated how using a bit of ingenuity and Map 24’s mapping solution he solved his problem of deciding which route to take to work in the mornings from Hull to Sheffield. Built on PHP, XSLT and the aforementioned Map 24 he built a near real-time mapping service to choose the route for him
QuotationBooks
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Amir demonstrated his website which provides over 40,000 quotes from a large number of well known figures in one easy to use interface. He demonstrated how he has integrated a number of other technologies such as spinvox to bring the written word to the masses.
theDiveBuzz
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Lucy demonstrated her niche web app for divers. Novel functionality included allowing divers to link to each other as “buddies” on each dive and share information / photo’s of the dive.
Facebook Friend Plotter
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Matthew demonstrated his mashup of facebook, google maps and google code to plots where your facebook friends are in the UK. A deceptively simple interface belies a good set of functionality.
Super Web Creator
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Michal demonstrated a new approach to Web based Content Management System using static files to create fast, easy to navigate and SEO friendly websites.
Twitcash
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Tom had an ingeniously evil idea one day, and built this web application “because he could”. With a tag line of “Damn, that’s evil.” you’d be hard pressed to find someone willing to signup to this service which allows you to sell you twitter contact list to the highest bidder and allow your contacts to be SMS spammed but all and sundry. Clever use of technology to show off Tom’s skills in all things mashup.
Dynamic website layout using file structure
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Caius demonstrated his proof of concept technology for building fast websites which are SEO friendly using only flat files and templates.
Regards
Dean
A(nother) new experience for me since joining PlusNet - which was attending a ‘BarCamp’ which I’d never even heard of until recently. I’ve already written one post on this for the blog, and have at least two more to write once I’ve collated my thoughts.
As a concept, the BarCamp was completely alien to me, but the 62 people attending the event made it a worthwhile 2 days. Dean has posted some statistics of the day and links to the pictures on his blog.
It’s been interesting being introduced to new ideas and technologies, and having some interesting conversations with people over Pizza, Beer (or not, in my case) and just generally chatting to people.
More thoughts later hopefully from myself and Kelly and Tam who were also at the event.
Day 2 has now finished. And what a day it was. Whats really good to know is that London isn’t the centre of the universe when it comes to great ideas and execution in the UK re: Web applications.
I’ll post a detailed report of each demo next week once I’ve collated all of the links / info and get you guys access to some of the new application due to hit the scene over the next couple of months.
Photo’s of the event can be found at flickr
Some facts:-
All in all - a very enjoyable event - and the first of many I hope.
regards
Dean
Over 60 people turned up for Day 1 of BarCampSheffield, with a good mix of technologists, business owners and students. The presentations (21 in total) were run along two tracks where campers could choose which one to attend.
Notable presentations were by Adam Bardlsey and Wojtek Kutyla - who won a slingbox each as voted for by the attendees.
Adams presentation was a live coding demonstration using Ruby on Rails - where in 30 mins (alright 29mins and 30 seconds) he managed to build the core components of the voting application for the day. Wojtek’s presentation covered usability and design.
There are plenty (over 200) of photo’s uploaded on flickr for those interested.
Day 2 is the live demo’s of applications / mashups and promises to be just as interesting.
regards
Dean
“Keep It Simple” is the name of the presentation that our very own Wojtek is giving at BarCamp Sheffield here at PlusNet. Hopefully he’s going to make the presentation available later. Update: Available here
Wojtek has been telling us internally about some of the aspects of this internally over the last week, and is now presenting it externally.
From the perspective of a developer rather than a designer, it’s quite interesting, as it talks about keeping the information simple, and minimizing the length of time it takes to do things and the information you need to remember.
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