On Saturday I attended BarCampHyderabad2. Barcamp is supposed to be an unconference. But this one felt too much like a conference, except for the fact that participation was mainly individual driven instead of company driven. Considering that the Barcamp is more aligned with open source principles, it was ironically organized at Microsoft campus.
As usual I was late and reached in time only for the second talk. I was just in time for a talk on mobile computing from Atul Chitnis. He gave a good presentation on where mobility is and where it needs to go. His point was that we should stop thinking of PC and computing. I liked his presentation as he has a great way of putting things. His slide deck was interesting in the fact that each slide had only few words, but they conveyed exactly what was talking about. He made lots of snide remarks about Microsoft during the whole day.
After this there was a presentation by Asshar Farhan from Spokn. Spokn is yet another VoIP service. The USP here is that it can also run on a Windows Mobile phone. So if you have a data plan or WiFi connection (in case of dual mode), you can potentially save some bucks. They will publish their Lightweight Telephony Protocol under GPL. So you can start developing your own products based on that.
Apart from the sessions I also got a chance to interact with some interesting people. Got a chance to talk to Atul Chitnis, although with a few other people being part of the discussion. I also interacted with the Opera India operation head. Opera is setting up a center in
All in all it was an interesting and stimulating day.