Tag Archives: web

barcamp tampa bay 2013

Annual Gathering Introduced Major Digital Upgrades

Barcamp Tampa drew over 800 pocket protected members of the digital tribe to USF Business School

donuts — the key to endurance

Dawn had barely broken when the digital cognescetti began descinding on the registration desks outside the University of South Florida’s School of Business Administration for the daylong techno conference known as Barcamp. Dawn of the dead, more like it.

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Veterans of previous Barcamp events came prepared to deal with the Endless Donut Buffet lest the sugar blues overtake them halfway through a .js preso. Antidote: coffee pipeline direct injection.

First timers – including a non-profit wondering where he might find technology mentors for the inner city youth he counseled – tried to interpret the deliberate disorganization that is the hallmark of Barcamp, with varying degrees of success.

The 2013 edition, while perhaps not as feature rich as previous years, nonetheless offered nearly 800 attendees a broad and varied palette of back end, front end, and outside the lines content, much of it from an entrepreneurial perspective.

apps, plugins, hardware and plenty of code

Apps were big on the agenda this year, including the primo EXMO iOS/Android event scheduler. EXMO is one of those things that having used it once now seems like an essential for any multisession event, conference or seminar.

Still in beta, the little app that could kept up with an on-the-fly schedule update that’s the hallmark of Barcamp, letting attendees focus on what was happening instead of where. It’s the digital solution to the sometimes frustrating analog scheduler Barcamp uses, a bulletin board and post-it notes for attendees to schedule and presenters to signup for sessions.

This year there were some 15 tracks in hour-long chunks that began at 9 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m., in a nearly constant state of flux. That’s a lot of speakers to try and keep track of, and EXMO did a great job without the slightest hiccup, subject only to the 10-minute window needed for updating.

Blogging seemed a popular topic this year. My first session was an introduction to SEOslides, a dandy WordPress plugin that, as the name implies, allows bloggers to create a presentation within WordPress that is SEO friendly for every page and which – bonus round – links directly to your blog.

So take that Slideshare. Frame driven, this plugin is easily shareable and that’s a big plus when it comes to stats. A/B testing? Yep, and that’s just the beginning. It easily imports your PDF presentation, so authoring can be done with a variety of applications.

Still in beta, and as might be imagined the free version comes with a few key features disabled. If presentations are a big part of your workflow, the annual buy in is $200 and comes with a ton of extras.

quadcopters ready for takeoff

I’m still not sure what quadcopters had to do with web tech, but if I didn’t know anything about them before I sure do now thanks to Greg Wilson, Adobe’s head of CC outreach.

Greg rounded up a fleet – well, two – of these four-bladed oddities from DJI for a show and tell that included in the classroom hovering and an outdoor flight well above 800 feet.

Fundamentals of flight, advantages for aerial photographers, and a look at the possibilities made for a fun session that makes owning one of these devices tempting indeed.

By the time the last speaker in the last classroom turned out the lights, you could measure the knowledge dished out in tonnage. Barcamp is a rare altruistic opportunity to sample trends and techniques in the most informal of environments while allowing developers, site opperators, and anyone with a passion for digital and a viewpoint a forum to pitch their opinion.

china’s syndrome: getting past the past

conceptions about china may be incomplete

When it comes to opinions, those regarding China by Westerners seldom rise to superlative. From child labor sweatshops to cheap plastic trinkets to shoddily constructed knockoffs to IP piracy, the average take is commonly one of polluted cities and human rights abuses. Apple’s iPhones aside.

SapientNitro Global Marketing Strategy VP Freddy Laker tackles the existing memes with a compelling view of an alternate digital universe that’s on track to provide over half of all online content by 2015. More revealing is his take on the web landscape trod by Chinese, with same as, yet different, versions of familiar check-ins like facebook, Groupon, twitter, etc.

Does the electronic firewall separating the PRC from our digital daily life matter? Apparently not, as the Chinese entrepreneurial spirit has spawned look-alikes in a stunning variety of flavors, all without missing a beat.

This slideshare adaptation of a 2012 SWSWi preso “China – Will It Redefine Our Digital Landscape?” is a half-hour peek into a world I didn’t imagine existed. Bonus footage: Laker’s unique strategy for assimilation into China’s culture. Hint: TMZ meets ET, hatches HuffPo hybrid.