This Saturday saw the new building of IIM-A host BarCamp (tag : BarCampAhmedabad ). The program began at 10am, although I arrived as late as 10:45 am. The event happened at the CIIE building (Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship). During my Ahmedabad days, I had been here a couple of times. I had attended something called an IdeaCamp here before. Similar in structure to a BarCamp, but a new initiative. Kunal, CEO, CIIE- Ahmedabad was actively involved in it then. Kunal was present here as well, but was not so much in the fore-front.

So, as the format goes, people could come and write their names on a whiteboard outside the (un)conference halls. And then speak in the hall, addressing an audience that consisted of students, entrepreneurships, nerds, weirdos and bloggers.

So we had Sanjay Banarjee talking of the entrepreneurs, their thinking, and how to go about being one. Soon after, there was Ankur Shukla who started off from a small city like Jabalpur and had made a profitable software company Kudos Infomedia. The company runs several ventures (websites) like KoolKampus.com, Kyapoocha.com, KoolKareers.com.

Vinita Shetty talked about mobile governance. The idea is to utilize the mobile phone as an important tool, to interact with the government. So no need to go and register a problem. Just pick up your cell and well, call.

Sunanya, an engineering student from NIT-Surat presented and interesting model on how to enhance the credibility of an author in places like Wikipedia. The points presented were actually very good and 100% implementable. I would strongly suggest Wikipedia to have them in their design.

Tapan Shah later presented a session on creating Facebook Applications. Although the session was less than what I had expected it to be, there were quite a few take homes. He correctly pointed out that gossip is one of the biggest draw on the social networks. The code shown afterwards did not mean much to many who were sitting there, and for the techies, it was no more complicated than a fairly complex object-oriented problem. This however was a good subject which holds a lot of promises. I would suggest Tapan to investigate about the marketing and advertising aspects of Facebook applications and present the next session on it.

The event venue was fully wi-fi ready and I could see bloggers sitting with their laptops and Live Blogging about the event. An interesting coverage can be found here.

Event planning team included Tapan Shah, Netra Parikh, Prashant Zaveri, Kunal Upadhyay.

The BarCamp Ahmadabad wiki can be found here.

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