Day One of BarCamp Chennai was a cool affair. By the time Ranjith & I were there, Kiruba was making his 'Unconferencing the Conference: The Making of Barcamp' speech. After the brief ice-breaking period (where Kit Kats were thrown all around), we started off with the presentations.
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Ganesh presented Voice Snap, a voice messaging system which basically does asysnchronous voice storage & retrieval. The beauty is they can do it over the net, mobile & landline. Nice concept & seems there is some good adoption in India. Examples included Radha Krishnan, the mercurial Collector who uses it for receiving complaints from his constituency people, IOB (Indian Overseas Bank) using it for receiving customer calls, Indian Airlines using it for coordinating its Haj activities, professionals using it for legal/medical transcriptions etc.
Next up was Vinu who presented his personal/vertical news reader MyToday. Something like a public news aggregator. cool part is he has a Wiki where you can ask for your own vertical area which you would want to see of what the web's talking about. And another good thing about MyToday is that it has a mobile version.
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And then there was Vijay who spoke about his Project InfraNET. He has a big aim of giving all the citizens of India a number similar to the SSN. Nice thing is he's looking for students to code his project. Arjun Ram's news aggregator Taazza sounded well too. He is betting on his own algorithm that generates similar tags for like-minded news articles. The mshup with Google Maps was excellent. And there was Flickr integration too.
Could meet up with people like Prashanth Rai & J Murali during lunch. Prashanth's been a regular Zoho Writer user & it was nice hearing how useful he found Zoho Writer for all the collaboration stuff he's involved with. He promises to use Zoho Creator when he comes up with an application idea that he would really need. Murali who has his biweekly Netspeak column in 'The Hindu' (it would be great if 'The Hindu' archived all his Netspeak columns under a single page) was interested in Zoho as a whole - both in the technology front & as a company. As I was sick with cold, couldn't socialize much :(. Hopefully the situation will get better tomorrow.
Track 2 in the afternoon had Amit Agarwal's 'How to make money from blogs'. Think it was the presentation which generated most interest :). Being a full-time blogger himself, Amit had a few good tips to give of how to make blogging your profession. Though the bloggers were a bit apprehensive about making money from blogs (lots of ethical & moral talk), seemed everyone was interested in the concept.
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Couldn't be there for much of Rupya.com Ganesh's 'SEO & Google Adwords' as Charles presented Zoho Creator in Track 1. Many had their first taste of Zoho & Zoho Creator did invoke quite an interest with the participants.
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The above photos along with a few more can be seen at my BubbleShare account. Please pardon me for the poor quality of snaps as I'm new to taking photos.
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