From 9 to 10 it was coffee time. The new Nespresso machines look great, but I still prefer the taste of fresh coffee beans. If you think however that Senseo tastes good, Nespresso is 10 times better. Anyway, in discussing Mobile Vikings over 10 cups of coffee, I missed the presentation of Beate on Google Analytics. Also time to mention the other sponsors: Stefaan Lesage, Tom Klaasen & Koen Van der Auwera for food and drinks, Zeropoint IT for the Wifi, chocolateque for the sweeties, The ParkingLot for the T-Shirts and Nucleus for general support.
Bert Timmermans introduced us to the new world of offline web apps on Safari. Where Google tries to introduce a separate off-line framework called Gears (and even introduced an own browser called Chrome in an effort to accelerate the spread), Apple opted for extensions right in the Webkit browser engine. It feels a lot like initial Javascript, Jscript, ECMAscript and VBScript efforts: Similar concepts, but a nightmare as long as they are not standardised. Luckily it looks like both Apple and Google are trying to join their efforts in standardising offline web functionality in HTML 5.
Around 11AM the PR story of 3 marketeers took off. PR people placed themselves as product placement in the room. It feels kind of pushy in a room full of people who are used to take control as prosumers. I didn't get the impression that the communication agencies are ready to tell their customers they need to let go of control. I think Joseph Jaffe was right when he said "Don't charge your PR agency with Social Media".
@Tijs made his presentation in 10 minutes and used it to recruit iPhone developers for Dockyard. There are a lot of people trying out Cocoa development on iPhone, so it makes sense to try to unite them in a workshop. One of the Dockyard applications resulted in a discussion about the legitimacy of screen-scraping data from public websites and remixing it in your own app. People are frustrated that the data from The Belgian Post, railways and public bus transport is not available to developers.
The tweetshirt of @Steffest is nearing its second version. He gave a marvellous demonstration of how to generate images with a breadboarded LED matrix and a standard Arduino embedded development board. The idea of interactive clothing spawned a lot of creative thinking in the audience.
Our Mobile Vikings warriors @ingo @jgeskens and @gvangool presented the functionality of the Django based Mobile Vikings site. A lot of interest and some good feature suggestions too, altough some people were a bit too curious with regard to our relation with KPN and our international expansion strategy.On some questions I only could answer with "no comment".
For my own presentation I opted to demonstrate the capabilities of the Microchip DSpic microcontroller in a GPS based autopilot for RC airplanes. Although the audience was technical, this topic was a bit over the top.To put theory into practise, I gave 2 demonstration flights after the presentation. Luckily I didn't crash in the confined space of the parking lot.
The rest of the afternoon I didn't follow any presentations but just hung out with all the cool people present and enjoyed a few more cups of coffee. Since @topanga wanted to videotape (I know, a Flip Mino does not use tape) all participants,I also declared my summary of the day:
The best barcamp so far:not too luxury, not too basic, with just the right amount of people, coffee and sunshine. Thanks Anne & Co!
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