Mashup Camp Europe!
This weekend Dublin had the pleasure of hosting Mashup Camp Europe for the first time ever. It was a two-part event divided over three days. The first part was Mashup University where organizations talked about their Mashup solutions and tools for customer. The second part was the "unconference" part where people came up with their own discussion topics, speed geeked and got a chance to win some great prizes with their mashup creations.
The University had speakers from sponsors like IBM, AOL, Serena, Yahoo!, Kapow and Microsoft. The Keynote speaker on Saturday was John Musser of Programmable Web. John has a great insight into what developers in the mashup world are looking for, and what to expect in the future. It was a fabulous talk and he had only arrived that morning from the west coast of the US! Dan Gisolfi and Bill Abt talked about the IBM Mashup ecosystem. Dan also showed me an example he had of Silverlight running inside of QED which was pretty cool! And also incredibly easy, which is exactly what is great about a lot of the things we saw this weekend - smooth and easy integration between varying technologies. What's not to love about that?! We also learned about Kapow from Andreas Krohn. This talk definitely had an impact as some of the applications showed off Kapow features in the Speed Geeking on Monday. Lastly Greg Cypes from AIM discussed how to plug in to the AIM messaging APIs and use OpenAuth for common identity.
On the second day of Mashup University, we had a video keynote from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which was very cool! Chad Dickerson from Yahoo! also gave a keynote, but his was live. He gave a great overview of mashups from Yahoo!'s perspective, and it was one of my favorite talks of the whole weekend. Chad really is a great speaker and gives the impression that Yahoo! understands the Mashup developer space and will continue to promote and prioritize it. Speaking of great talks, John Herren gave a hilarious talk on AOL's X-Drive API. He didn't speak, he stood at the podium with dark glasses (something about a late night the night before...) and let his text slides fly by. It was actually very funny and well-done. I really enjoyed it. We also learned about Serena Mashup Composer from Serena's Summer Ficarrotta, who also gave a talk during the Camp section about how to get started. Stephen Benedict from AOL chatted about using Open AIM and its JSON and URL-based APIs for seeing and contacting buddies online.
I spoke for Microsoft about Popfly and Windows Live Services. Popfly was a bit different from a lot of the frameworks presented because it can be used by anyone with zero coding experience. If you haven't heard of Popfly before, it is a mashup-building framework written in Silverlight, and it lets you drag-and-drop blocks of logic and connect them to create your mashup. It's so easy, my mom could do it, and when I go home next week, I promise to see that that happens. Because it's browser-hosted, you can basically create a mashup anywhere. There are already over 400 ready-made blocks to use, so there are lots of ways to get started right away. On Sunday I discussed Windows Live Services. This was also a different topic because it's not necessarily a mashup framework; it's more like pluggable pieces that are easy to drop into and extend your applications. Windows Live Services have had a lot of exciting releases lately, including mapping updates, messenger features and events launch. So it's actually a lot of fun to show off WLS because people don't realize how easy it is and how much it can add to a website or application.
The Camp started after lunch on the second day. Here's how it worked: people requested topics they wanted to see happen or discussions they wanted to host. Then they found spots for them on the calendar over the next day and a half, and everyone attended the topics they were interested in (or went downstairs and had coffee like some people... ;-) ). You can see some of the chosen discussion topics here. After lunch on Monday we had Speed Geeking, where people who had built mashups showed them off in seven minutes to a small group of people. We all had little wooden nickels to vote on our favorite applications. Dennis Deery did a great mashup for an industrial farm in the US bringing in data from field pictures, gasoline prices, pesticide treatments, weather, etc. I also really liked the iPhone-to-Popfly Flickr Carousel and the mobile phone to Linked In contact mashup. Unfortunately I didn't get to see them all as I had to catch a train, but the ones I saw were quite impressive for having only taken a weekend.
I have to say this was one of my favorite conferences ever. Since it was smaller, you got to know more people, understand their ideas better and just enjoy hanging out. It was great to finally get to meet Doug, Greg, David and Kathleen after a few months of e-mail and conference calls. They are really a very fun crew, and I had a blast with them. They worked really hard to put together a great event, and it ended up being a fantastic weekend. I am confident that they will come back to Dublin for another Mashup Camp soon, and I'm already looking forward to it. Thanks a lot to everyone involved - I really learned a lot!
* Pictures available here and here
