João Moreno .com

Well, I may not be the best time manager of all time, but not even with David Allen’s l33t skills could I have posted more often on my blog, during my trip to Berlin. Now that I’ve managed to get me some time to regroup and write, bare with me!

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.

By the way, I’m posting all my photos on Flickr under the tag berlin. The ones directly related to the event are under web2expoberlin.

Well, let’s begin with the weekend, actually.

Our flight was Saturday morning and I managed to encounter Pedro Custódio (who will be speaking at the conference and got the same plane I did) and Alcides Fonseca (who was running late for his plane to Barcelona, to the TechED08). So, we (me and Gastão) arrived around 2 PM and being a bit disoriented, we took the first transport that seemed the right one to take us to the Hostel. Four hours, a MacDonald’s lunch and several means of transportation after, we got to the Meininger City Hostel. It’s pretty cozy and really good considering the cost.

We spent the rest of the weekend discovering Berlin. Saturday night we went to a nice carnival at the Potsdamer Platz, where there was a snow ramp that people could ski their way down in air doughnuts. As for Sunday, we massacred out feet and legs throughout Berlin. We saw the Jüdisches Museum first thing in the morning – and that kept us occupied pretty much the whole morning, it’s an excellent museum and it is quite affordable (€2,50 is the price for students). In the afternoon we checked out the Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag as well as the Unter den Linden avenue. We ended our afternoon with a nice hot chocolate and cappuccino in the Starbucks (apparently Alcides shared the same experience as we did, as it was out first Starbucks experience) near the Brandenburger Tor.

We took about 30 minutes to get from the hostel to the conference site, not very long. Conferences started around 9 AM, then there was this lunch hour and then some more conferences in the afternoon. I’d like to give particular attention to the presentation Creating Passionate Users, by Kathy Sierra, where she taught us to be more user-centric and always keep in mind a user driven application or service or whatever. She gave an amazing speech and really got the attention of everyone in the room for about 3 hours. Somewhere in the middle of the conference she would give nice tips on books to read, namely:

• Don’t Make Me Think;
• Flow;
• Computers as Theatre.

Finally, after that came the Tim O’Reilly welcome speech, when he began to speak his mind on Web 2.0, what is it, what people think it is and what it should become.

I still haven’t managed to solve the GPB / EUR problem. Here’s the situation: I’ve been charged the conference price in Pounds instead of Euros, as it was supposed to be. And I’ve not been the only one. In fact, today I spoke with Marcos, and he told that his problem has been solved through some heavy mailing pressure with the organization itself. I’m going to try to solve this issue tomorrow.

If all goes well, by tomorrow I shall be in Berlin for the rest of the week. As I said before, I’ll be attending the Web 2.0 Expo which is an Internet Technologies event hosted by O’Reilly Media, Inc.

I’ll be accompanied by a friend of mine, Gastão Cruz, and we will be cruisin’ throughout the city all week. Yeah!

Come back soon, because I’ll be blogging the whole event.

Auf wiedersehen!