I’m just going to talk about some conferences that made me tick and not all of those I attended.

First things first,

The Messe

The event site, called Messe, was astonishingly big. As we got in, it seemed like a pretty decent event location – and it was. The only major disappointing aspect was the catering. At lunch time we were given these little white bags that contained 0.5L of water, a sandwich, an apple and a candy bar. I’ve never been to any event of this kind, but concerning the price I was expecting something better a little better. It’s been heavily discussed.

There were always 4 to 5 conferences at the same time, that evenly split the audience into tracks:

• Design and User Experience,
• Development and Web Operations,
• Fundamentals,
• Marketing and Community,
• Strategy and Business Models.

I spent most of my time in the 3 first.

There was also free and fast wireless for all and several places to sit down and charge your laptop. There was also a room dedicated to sit down, relax, have a nice conversation, enjoy your lunch or even finish your university work. Argh.

Tuesday

I arrived late to the Moving from 1.0 to 2.0: Philosophies and Structures for Change conference, where Fred Oliveira moderated Leisa Reichelt and Matt Patterson through a pretty generalist conversation around Web 2.0 concerns. It seemed pretty decent.

Next, came Christian Leybold, from BV Capital who made a presentation called Business Models for Web 2.0 Companies and showed us how to make money on the web through advertisement. And apparently it’s not about the money, but the users: ultimately it’s the raw traffic of your site that reflects on your income, so that should be your major concern.

The Beauty in Standards was a great presentation by Jeremy Keith of whom I immediately became a fan. His simple yet efficient presentations reflected his ideas on web development: it must be beautiful in every way, be that code, graphics, formats, etc. He introduced the catchy though rather meaningless term Hijax to refer how Ajax development should ideally be planned and implemented.

Wednesday

This day couldn’t start any better. Once again, Jeremy and his super presentation skills enlightened the audience this time about Microformats, on Microformats: The Nanotechnology of the Semantic Web. I was already familiar with Microformats, but this was a pretty cool presentation.

And just as the day was closing, Pedro Custódio broadened our views in order to focus on a more community oriented development. His presentation was really cool and was well backed up with lots of example sites and applications that supported his views on users and communities on the Web.

Thursday

The last day was the lightest. The conferences ended around lunch time and we didn’t even stick around to watch the keynotes. Berlin’s just too beautiful to be wasted, so in the afternoon we went walking and shopping in the big city.

I’d just like to point out Dominik Grolimund’s presentation which was about his company’s new product, Wuala. Dominik is from Switzerland, he’s a former exchange student of TU Delft (to which I am applying the next year) and works at Caleido AG which is a small start-up in Zurich. Their product is a way of storing and sharing files on the web but using the common users’ computers as storage. I like to call it persistent P2P. He presented it so well that made justice to the application itself. I think these guys are in a really good direction, and that we’ll hear a lot from them.

Ubuntu 7.10

★★★★★ Hey gang!

You have got to try the new Gutsy Gibbon that just came right from Ubuntu’s magical headquarters. I’ve been a Ubuntu fan since 6.04 – before that I was a Gentoo hardcore user and I’ve got to say that right now, this is THE best Linux distribution around.

I mean, the community is great as well as the official support. And they always put together such a nice image and corporate presence that has kept them unite and made them evolve smoothly into Gutsy.

I’m right now on my laptop (a Toshiba Satellitte M40-145, with a dreadful X300 ATI graphics card) and the LiveCD just fully booted up with Compiz and WPA without any need for configuration (these were major problems on several laptops about a year ago). It also comes with full NTFS access, a great desktop search app that provides you local and web search and custom actions and also a X configuration app as well as dynamic screen configuration that allow you to manage screens and screen resolutions on the fly.

Overall, this is a great update to Ubuntu that will surely leverage even more the strength of the Linux community.

0.3

This hReview is brought to you by the hReview Creator.