BarCamp Chennai is on !!!

I am at the ChennaiBarcamp and its the second day today. The first day was great and the second day has started even better..keep you posted on this.

Day 2 :

- Demo of 2007 MS Office Suite : This was a demo of the yet unreleased Office 12 . The demo was quite good and one can’t help but feel sorry for Microsft employees - they work for the biggest software company in the world but the netizens of the web2.0 era don’t miss out on the slightest of oppurtunities to rip them apart. That apart, some of the features demonstrated were quite cool and it seems MS is attempting to undertake a fairly radical rejig of their user interface.

- Mobile Computing- Moving Beyond PCs (Atul Chitnis) The speaker is a celebrated open source evangelist (read LINUX geek) and is incidentally, a very accomplished speaker. However, his presentation was about mobile computing as a alternative platform to the desktop. He argued that the mobile platform requires one to first dump away the hstorical baggage of the PC era and look at the mobile platform from a completely different mindset. A great session all in all !

- Podcasts: On the brink of a new media revolution - (Sujatha Jagannathan) - Podbazaar : This was a cross continent leap for BarCampChennai. The speaker is a founder member of PodBazaar, a podcasting portal aimed at South Asia. She was at her residence in California and conducted her session (voiceover) through Skype while her presentation was being projected in the BarCamp venue. It worked out without any glitches and is a indicator of the shape of things to come in terms of future remote sessions at such events. She basically gave an overview of podcasting and its role in a news & entertainment centric society.