Just back from the it@cork conference. Great venue, well organised, good food and facilities. It looked like about 200 people attended.
Eddie Hobbs opened the proceedings and was very entertaining, as always.
It seemed strange somehow to see people like Hugh MacLeod, Marc Canter and Salim Ismail, whose blogs I read almost daily, presenting in a standard conference format. It also confirmed for me the depth, scope and quality of writing that can be found in blogs as against any other publishing or delivery medium. Hugh seemed a bit nervous or perhaps was just out of his usual context; he was at his best answering questions from the audience. Marc Canter was very entertaining and could have done with a longer time slot.
Salim gave an excellent overview of his work with start-ups; good advice about keeping development costs down; using marketing and PR; performance-driven compensation for founders and key employees; and speed-to-market. Salim could have handled a entire conference stream by himself. Tom Raftery has posted information on the upcoming BarCamp Southeast event on Salim’s latest venture, Confabb - built for almost nothing with usage skyrocketing!
Jeff Nolan, CEO of Teqlo, gave a very interesting talk on pricing and ROI for online businesses. I hope copies of this, and the other presentations, will become available.
Of the home-grown presenters, Conor Kenny talked about creating his family’s online book-selling business, Tony Kenny (no relation, I assume?) gave an excellent presentation on the benefits and issues around his experiences with open-source software in the public service. Eamonn Fallon gave a great presentation on building daft.ie.
Congratulations to all at it@cork for a very worthwhile event.
Technorati Tags: barcamp southeast, it@cork, it@cork2006
Tom, thanks for the great review - I’m glad you found the day informative.
I instructed the a/v guys to record all the sessions so I hope to podcast the sessions off the it@cork blog in the coming weeks. The slides will be available too.
You might add the tag it@cork2006 to this post and it will automatically appear in Salim’s confabb site in the conference news area!
That’s a good review of the day, brought it back to me!
Technorati seems to be having a hissy fit though because none of my photos have shown up there for the event and now even Tom’s posts have disappeared. (This may all be resolved by the time you visit the tag page so disregard if so!)
I wonder if that is due to the “@” character in the tag Donncha?
I figured it out. Technorati haven’t refreshed my feeds yet, they’re still showing posts from yesterday, but if I search for another tag I used on those posts they’ll show up. I only added it@cork2006 after Tom suggested it after lunch. Guess it needs time to catch up!