The Webbie

I left with my friend Amol on the night of 18th this month to a city which SIMPLY ROCKS…

Ahmedabad and its people are amazing, high-spirited, fundoo and really chilled out.

We reached Ahmedabad on the morning of 19th to attend BarCampAhmedabad held at Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship(CIIE) in the new campus of IIM Ahmedabad, the first to be held in Ahmedabad and Gujarat.

It started off with the intro where the offline wiki was built up with two threads of sessions.

The sessions I attended were:

• Prof. Sanjay Bannerjee: The Mind frame of an Entrepreneur , What it takes to succeed as an Entrepreneur? The essentials, the dream,the strategy.
  I missed out on half of the session
• Ankur Shukla: Gave a session on his Entrepreneurial journey from his college days to now.. a 1.8 cr firm Kudos Infomedia
• m-Governance
• Ruchit Surati: Demonstrated an application to control and access a mobile phone over the internet.
• Raxit Sheth: MyKavita.com teaser
• Sashi from NirmaLabs: Motivational Marketing
• Tapan Shah: Facebook Applications

For pics and presentations of BarCampAhmedabad, check out:

• http://www.slideshare.net/tag/barcampahmedabad
• http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=barcampahmedabad
• http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=84164&id=638475579

People I enjoyed meeting in BarCampAhmedabad:

• Ankit Shrimali
• Shalvi Agarwal
• Ashwin Madala
• Sashi
• Ruchit Surati
• Netra Parikh
• Ankur Shukla
• Akash
• Aditi Gupta
• Vinay Modi
• Tapan Shah
• Vijayendra Haryal
• Adel Anwar

More about the remaining part of our trip on the next post… Want to keep that separated from the BarCamp post actually.

How would you define the experience of a kiddo engineer in his final year meeting people too a many, most of them placed well in the industry? That is what defines my experience at the BarCampMumbai2 last Sunday on 14th October, 2007.

It was to be held at IIT, Mumbai, a place of technical exotica.

I got to the place with Saumil on Saturday, 13th to volunteer for the event.

A few things were discussed. The banners were put up around the campus. An IRC Channel was setup. Will have to say the preparations were amazing.

Thanks to this, I got to meet some amazing people, viz. Abhishek Thakkar (have met him before though), Raxit Sheth, Aditya Mishra, Arpit Agarwal, Murli Ramkrishnan, Pooja Palan & Vaibhav Jha.

Finally, it was D-Day and I got there really charged up. I with my Somaiya mates and later joined by Pooja, put up directional arrows to geographically relocate people from the main gate to the precise venue. With roundabout 300 people present, the BarCamp had to be hectically awesome. And that is what it turned out to be. Due to 40 registered sessions on the online wiki, it was decided to be broken up into 4 threads.

The Introductory Session was taken up by Aditya, who made it highly interactive, like a BarCamp is meant to be. Experienced campers explained to the newbies what it was going to be like.

What followed was an innovative time slot allotment method. Campers interested in giving sessions put up their PostIts in their chosen time slots on the white board or Offline Wiki as it was called. Followed by that, everyone briefly explained their sessions.

And eventually the gun was triggered and the BarCamp begun.

Enough for now. I will follow this up with a continuation post.