This is the first technology conference I attended. I have always found keeping up with latest technologies difficult. In many areas academic research is lagging behind the 'wonderful, powerful, and not necessarily pragmatic' technological solutions that are out there.
All the talks were informative, and the demonstration by Cordys was excellent.
My 'take-away' from this Barcamp (in a random order):
1. liked the point by Rajan — about 'attention' — getting users attention in this 'mad, mad, mad world of web' is critical. In future, you need 'innovative' advertisements to lure users in. What any company is doing with respect to advertisements in WWW space is miniscule compared to what can be done. Check 'Minority report' & '6th Day' for how advertisements are placed (though not in www space), try to get innovative from there on.
2. Opportunities in Web 2.0 — they are there — coordination solutions, and getting people to work effectively 24×7 in a seamless manner would be great. Think of this new wave of point, drag & drop software development. It is not infeasible for a developer in India to write a piece of code and go home, and a developer in Europe further works on adding on to that code, and a developer in Americas tests and commits in 24 hour cycle. So, get away from 'personal' code development to seamless uninterrupted 'group' code development. Like call center, anybody can followup on your service request. Immense possibilities exists in other domains, as well. What could be lacking is a seamless customizable user friendly environments to make this happen.
3. 'Web 2.0' – this was an introductory talk by Ramesh distinguishing Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The core components of Web 2.0 were presented, and onus of how and what each and everybody can do in this massive web of 'ability to make impact (or just grab attention)' is elaborated. This is where notion of 'ranking' is needed. Unfortunately, graph oriented ranking approaches may not work getting semantics driven ranking. Think of 'ranking to 10 movies you have seen' versus retrieving top 10 files using keywords based search.
4. All the technologies, XForms, Tangible User Interfaces (the idea itself is great, but making it happen is what MIT is good at), AJAX, UI tool kits, and other technologies currently in use in various products.
I am looking forward to the next Barcamp to be held in Hyderabad.
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