This Saturday I had the pleasure to attend Bar Camp Orlando. Its part of the Unconference Bar Camp series that is currently going around the world. We’ve attended BlogCamp Switzerland last year and it was a blast.

Below some of the more interesting talks, as with all free wheeling things, some stuff is cool and some stuff is just useless.

Natural Language Modeling

Mike Blake from apptrain.com talked about OO programming based on Natural Language. This is a topic that since the raise of Web Development has not have too much traction. Once could say the Web killed OO. His slides can be found here.

Izea

The new venture from PayPerPost, the self proclaimed most hated company on the Internet. Nevertheless they seem to have money to waste and are definitely moving fast. They have a bunch of new tools and sites online or in beta. One cool tool that stood out is a new buzz analyzing system for blogs. Based on the language they can detect if people are writing positive or negative about a product.

They are hiring too, but I guess I stick with Supertext for the time being

Morph Exchange

Built on the Amazon Cloud especially for Ruby, this platform enables you to scale out your Ruby application quick and painless. No need to buy expensive servers and you can scale up AND down.

Lovd by less

Yet another open source Social Network built on Ruby. The guys didn’t really go into the differentiating factors to other Social Network, but the demo was cool and if you wanna build your own Social Network, this is worth a look. Besides, the guys seem down to earth and are willing to consult you for a fee.

The bigger discussion was about the login to their other little tool called More Honey. Instead of using OpenID, you can just login using your Google account. They then use the Google API to validate your credentials. I think this is a cool idea and maybe a better step towards Single Sign On than OpenID.

.NET Meetup

C# and ASP.NET was definitely under represented at the BarCamp, all the hype was Ruby and PHP. Not that everybody was all that happy with those too technologies either. But Microsoft is still not really the cool kid on the block.

Unit Testing is for weenies

Yes, unit testing is important, we all know it by now. And it apperently saves a lot of time. Unfortunately, all examples always cover the simple cases, you never really see how people test applications with lots of DB and user interactions. Nevertheless I will have a look at Selenium, which is a testing framework for Web Interfaces.

All in all it was a cool day, I met some nice new people and expanded my horizon a bit. It’s always good too see what the world outside of ASP.NET is doing.

I already signed up for the next Bar Camp:
iPhoneDevCamp in New York! Stay tuned for Supertext on the iPhone.

Please help us to win the nomination for Crunchies 2007. We are no quite expanding internationally, but it would definitely help to get some exposure now. Don’t you think?

About the Crunchies 2007 (from TechCrunch)

The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.

You can vote for us by clicking on the buttons below and then just type supertext into the textbox and confirm your nomination. It takes 3 clicks and you will make us very happy.

OR

Thanks a lot! Maybe you will soon read about us on TechCrunch.

Update, Dec. 20, 2007:
Vote has been closed. Seems like Supertext did not win

37signals is a very successfull Startup from Chicago. Instead of trying to compete with more features, they compete with LESS features. This way they can keep the system simple, fast and cheap.

They also wrote a book about and published it themself. With over 20’000 copies sold for $20 they most likely made more money with the book than many other Startups with their business model.

We at Supertext really liked a lot of their ideas and applied during the development of Supertext.ch. My speech was about a few good points that we got from this book.

My slides in PDF

We are glad to see that some people liked my presentation:

A day at BlogCamp Switzerland

Of course, my Partner Rinaldo also had a speech on his own about Text Quality.

Technorati tags: blogcampswitzerland, supertext, gettingreal

Leumund.ch is considering to start a new Business with Blogs. Not much there yet, but they lauched blog2.biz with a little teaser page and a few references to other cool companies. Including Supertext of course! Besides that Plugster, Blogwerk, Bkanal, Namics, Infamy and Mitra are mentioned too. Very smart move indeed, then without any advertising cost or big payouts to Trigami he got the blogsphere buzzing about him. Me writing this post is the best example…

Now, not sure what he actually intends to do. Making money with blogs looks like a pretty though business in a croweded space and with Trigami there is already local competition.

I guess only time will tell.

A few days ago during lunch we run into the makers of Trigami a Pay Per Post type of business. But they were not in Technopark to open an office here, but to organize the upcoming BlogCamp in Zuerich.

If you didn’t already sign up for BlogCamp, you should. Looks like it’s going to be an awesome event.