Interesting things from BarCamp Auckland 3

Bar Camp 3 - Auckland is over and I'm pretty sure that everyone had a great time, and learnt a lot!! Last year we shared a few of our insights from BarCamp Auckland 2 and this year I thought we would share a whole lot more from each of the sessions.

Firstly this was the first event where Txt Shopping Mall was seen under it's new name (it was 5556Mall). Txt Shopping Mall, a product of Serendipity IT Ltd, decided to sponsor the event to get a little bit of name recognition out there. I spent a decent amount of the day talking about what it is, how it works etc, so we thought it was good value for us and a good investment for the Auckland IT Community.

I attended a variety of different breakout sessions which covered topics such as iPhone Game Development, Web 2.0 and Social Media, Project Management Tools for Web projects, Marketing for Entrepreneurs, Small Scale Innovation and Database Driven Development. There were also a heap of Quick-Fire 5 minute presentations around lunch time which were great. If you want to check out some of the other sessions the Schedule is currently still available here.

Easy iPhone Game Development, James McGlinn, @jamesmcglinn

• Use Frameworks to do your Game development!!! These may include any of the following:
  
• Unity - 3D
  
• Torque -3D
  
• Shiva -3D
• Oolong -3D
• Cocos2d-iPhone -2D
• James centred on the Cocos2d-iPhone framework which can be found at http://cocos2d-iPhone.org. Coco was a Python framework that has been ported to the iPhone to aid in fast development.
• If you want an easy tutorial to learn how to do iPhone Game development with Cocos2d for iPhones you should check out this tutorial on how to create an androids game.
• Use Sprites in you iPhone Game development for graphics that move / flicker.
  

Web 2.0 & Social Media -Real Business results - show and tell, Russell Holland @RussellHolland

• ExecTweets.com has a list of top Execs that are on Twitter.
  
• Edelman.com has a trust survey which highlights the difference between Social sites that have trust and those that don't.
• Russell gave a demo of Debbie Cookies which found the top 50 female bloggers and sent them a nicely presented box of their cookies. What they found was reviews being written for them by these bloggers and the internet traffic and sale went through the roof.
• twist.flaptor.com has a great tweet graph
• Don't underestimate Twitter with people like Salesforce.com integrating twitter into their CRM product.
• Russell has his presentation on http://russellsays.com
  

Tools to track web (and other) projects - what do you use...?, Russell Holland @RussellHolland

• The best quote from this was calling printed paper "TreeWare"
• This was a great discussion session and was interesting that people wanted different measures to track things by. One guy wanted everything Time Based, another was Quality, and there were a lot of other mix & match indicators.
• Tickspot was a time based tool
• LiquidPlanner and Basecamp were 2 general tools
• There was a good discussion around CRM technologies with Zoho CRM, Sugar CRM and Javelin CRM being offered as good solutions.
  

Marketing for Entrepreneurs, Ben Young @bwagy

• Ben's Marketing approach is to Blog! Blog often, constantly, on topic. If you can achieve this then you are on the way to building a brand that people can rely on. For example on Ben's blog he has a blog post every business day with set topics for different days, if he's away or ill he'll let his readers know or schedule a post to go live on that day.
• Ben has some of his favourite blog posts now published in a book called 'The Best Ideas are Free'
• Leverage you Posts! Post a link on Delicious, Twitter, Facebook where ever you can.
• Ben uses TechRigy to track his brand and it's reputation online.
  

What is the right approach to small scale innovation?, Shaun Lee, @vegestoc

• This was a great session that I unfortunately had to leave early.
• Shaun spoke about the differences in Google's Extraverted approach Vs Apple's Introverted approach.
• John Ballinger (I think) said that for any new product idea in Google to progress to even Alpha stage it MUST have numbers to back it up, not just 'I think', or 'I feel'.

Techniques and Tools that assist database development, Kerry Sainsbury, @kerryland

• This was a more technical session which was great for me to end on.
• There was an introduction to the H2 database which has inbuilt web based gui and a whole heap of other nice tools. The creator of H2 has been key in building other well known databases.
  
• Power*Architect from SQL Power looked like a great Data Modelling / Profiling.
• The suggestion of Groovy + Grails for creating Java based CRUD functions.
• Hibernate has a generate classes from Tables function and generate Tables from Classes function.

I hope that some of this information is useful. If you want to correct or add anything, please leave a comment on this post.

Once again I'd like to thank Ludwig and the team for organising this great event.

Cheers,
Simon Collings