Apr 08 2008
Barcamp Sydney 3
I spent a good portion of the weekend at Barcamp Sydney 3. This was my first Barcamp and first time to really jump in boots and all in the tech community in Sydney outside of the office (having come up for air from a very intense last 12 months). Here’s my observations from the weekend:
- Twitter was massive. There were several of us tweeting incessently from the event, especially @NickHodge, @trib, @bananasontoast, @eskimo_sparky, and @kcarruthers amongst others.
- The Data Portability session co-hosted by @liako was probably the keynote of the Barcamp. Lots of great discussion. I think the topic really struck a chord with the attendees.
- Good Barry presented on their 5 startup lessons, main tip that stuck out for me was “don’t fine tune too early”. Too true. While I believe in measuring, you’ve also got to know when its too early to let rigour stifle something before it really finds its way.
- Richard Hayes presented on “talking to rich blokes” (or something similar) - basically funding/pitching 101. Good mention of Sydney OpenCoffee Meetup, which I had already planned on attending. Also mentioned Startup Kitchen (can’t google any webpage), based in St. Leonards which sounds like an interesting “Y Combinator” style incubator. Richard also mentioned “Women on Boards” to tap some top talent as well as “Information Memorandum” for early stage rounds.
- @trib talked about his passion - social tools, language and enterprise 2.0. Great talk (and great slides @trib!).
- An interesting presentation of Project Pier which looks like BaseCamp, but you install it on your servers.
- @liako presented on the Semantic Web, giving us a history of the Internet from the alphabet to Gutenberg’s Bible to HyperText. Seemed to me that one of the biggest challenges with this would be the old bugbear of trust/reputation.
- Finally, on Sunday afternoon there was a pitch session where local startups could get up and make their pitch. Apart from one very good pitch by Richard, the rest confirmed my earlier post (Do Australians suck at pitching?). Some weren’t even pitches at all.
All in all, the weekend left me feeling positive about the smart people in the tech industry in Australia and where it is heading. We still have a long way to go to being competitive with places like Silicon Valley. We need to work together more collaboratively as a community (entrepreneurs, innovators and angels/VC’s). We need training/seminars to help entrepreneurs develop their business plans and pitches. We need forums (like a Barcamp) where entrepreneurs, innovators and angels/VC’s can mingle like happens in the Valley.
