Barcamp Bangalore 6 Rocked
Barcamp Bangalore (BCB) 6 (18th and 19th April 2008) totally surpassed my expectation. I had previously attended BCB3 and BCB5 and I never found the sessions as amazing as this time. I had even mentioned this when I announced on the blog that I am attending barcamp. I am happy I was proved wrong!
On the day 1, I attended a session by Rashmi on how startups can use their marketing budget effectively. Rashmi has worked for PicSquare before and is currently working with CitizenMatters.in. She quoted a number of examples and answered a lot of questions from all of us (mostly people in startups)
The next interesting event was a demo of LifeBlob which is a *very* interesting social network. I hate to use that word because the minute I say social network you would think its one like others. But no one can be more wrong. LifeBlob is a great new way at looking at our lives, or timeline as they like to call it. Checkout their website. If you want an invitation, you can even buzz me and I will try to invite you into the system. Its amazing! The pic below has the lifeblob team (3 people in black t-shirts)
I met a couple of folks from Synovel who are developing a lot of interesting open source products which have had great reviews in the open source community. I plan to take an interview of these guys and put it up here sometime because I am really interested in knowing how they are forming a company based on an open source approach. They have already had more than 50K downloads for their product.
After this was a very interesting session on Entrepreneurship and what its not by Prof. Suresh of IIMB. Like one of my old blog post, Suresh talked of how entrepreneurship is not so well understood and is certainly not the most macho thing in the world. He talked of how few people realize how tough it is and that glamorization of it is misleading people.
There seemed to be a lot of sessions on marketing and PR etc and I attended another one by Ishwar. He clearly explained the difference between buzz, viral marketing and Word of Mouth. I have to admit here that I never knew that viral marketing and WOM are different. Where viral marketing can be spreading, say a funny video about a cat (could be nothing more than some fun), WOM is about talking to someone about a product that you are ready to vouch for. WOM though effective is ofcourse not the most effective way to scale up.
On day 2, I attended some part of the MySpace Dev Platform talk but then found it to be too obvious and walked out (and missed the t-shirt they gave later). I spent the rest of the day meeting Sharda, Ashish Sinha and some other friends. The day ended with some music played in the L-Cluster.
Tags: barcampbangalore, barcampbangalore6, lifeblob, lifeblob.com, entrepreneurship, marketing
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nice post. it was great meeting you at BCB6 too.