Congratulations to all who were involved in setting up and running Barcamp Dublin. It was probably the most enjoyable conference I have been to in a long while - mostly because the format really encouraged folks to get engaged and interact. I have been to far too many talks where everyone sits back and just listens - it's so much more interesting with a bit of participation! :)

I went along to:

• Sean Mc Grath. Jython for fun and profit
• Sean O Sullivan, A look at the Voice 2.0 landscape
• Darren Barefoot, Social media marketing, or how I learned to love the mob.
• Paul Campbell. The choices that lead to Rails.
• Uldis Bojars, Using Semantic Web for Social Media Sites

All excellent talks given by enthusiastic speakers - and brilliant for getting an overview of areas I don't get to see that much of in my day to day business. Of course, I missed a whole load more I would have liked to have seen too. 

I was half thinking of putting up a talk on how to get cheap/free software from Microsoft as Joe has often told me that we need to tell more people about the partner programs for start-ups and small businesses. But in the end, I thought it might qualify as a product pitch - so I just posted some info here instead. Besides, I didn't really want to miss any of the other sessions... :) But if you are interested, the next post tells how to get 5-15 people licensed for Office, Windows, Exchange, CRM, SQL, dev tools and more from only 320 euros (program fees just to cover postage and media of the kits and all the updates). 

Congratulations again to all involved in bar camp - I am looking forward to the next one already!