I have no idea now when I’m going to get to my more detailed summary of yesterday’s Zend events, but before I begin to parse all of the news from today’s Microsoft/Novell announcement, here’s a quick summary of day 1 of the inaugural Startup Camp. Put simply, it’s been just what I expected: well worth the time.
Like its Mashup Camp progenitors, Startup Camp is run in the increasingly common unconference style which, if you’re not familiar with it, is more or less organized chaos. Rather than attending sessions determined and scheduled months in advance and delivered by a single speaker, you go to discussions determined and scheduled that minute, led by one or more and participated in by all. After speaking to folks from the past few Mashup Camps, I get the impression that preferences regarding traditional conference versus unconference are sort of a tastes great / less filling thing – there’s very little middle ground. As has been made obvious in the past, when it comes to this approach I’m a tastes great guy. How could I not be, after all, given that I’m a believer that the group is almost without exception smarter than the individual.
As you can see from the session listing, there were a number of interesting topics to pick from, so the choices as far as what to attend were not easy.
I opened camp in Room B w/ Jeff Barr and some other Amazon folks who led a discussion about “Web Scale Computing.” While the discussion was rather Amazon specific, lingering over EC2 in particular, I think that’s at least partially attributable to the uniqueness of what they’ve put forward. Virtually provisionable environments for startups at easily absorbable costs; as I told Jeff later in the day, I think they’ve actually got the hardest part of the equation – the infrastructure – figured out (it’s Xen based, for those that would contend it’s not ready for prime time). What needs improvement, and is still a barrier to entry, is their documentation and toolset. There’s no denying its significance, however, as folks like Christopher continue to demonstrate. So this one was interesting.
From there I headed over to a session on open source in startups which featured commentary from the likes of Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg, Google’s DeWitt Clinton, Reductive Labs’ Luke Kanies, Sun’s Tim Bray and about a dozen other interested (and insightful) parties. Discussed were topics like economic models behind open source, the business of profiting from open source, the business of consuming open source, how to build open source communities (some great points rom Matt there), and more. My favorite session of the day, unsurprisingly.
From there it was off to lunch, where I learned a great deal about the changing Chinese economy from one of the folks at my table: I had not realized at all the citybound internal immigration issues the country had, nor the economic surplus the middle class there is amassing. Fascinating stuff.
Unfortunately for the speed geeking session following lunch, I was given the opportunity to speak with Microsoft and Novell about their news, and a few minutes after that was more or less innundated w/ inquiries on the subject. Not to mention demands for an immediate Q&A; these things take time, people 😉 I did manage to see a few of the startups – like the interesting GoodStorm who we’ll undoubtedly be setting a store up with shortly – but I’m going to have to do some cramming during tomorrow’s session to make up what I missed today.
The afternoon saw me in “Data Interoperability, Identity, and open standards” as led by Brad Topliff and Kaliya Hamlin – where I was frankly still a bit distracted by the Microsoft news and some resulting IM conversations – but featured some interesting OpenID, i-names and so on chat. It’s no secret that identity is a looming problem for the web application space (not that the rich clients have a perfect solution), so it’s gratifying to see the gradual maturation both of the technical solutions and the understanding of their applicability and place in the world.
The last session of the day was Amazon, Google and Microsoft (Yahoo’s been strangely absent today, at least in the sessions that I attended) asking what they could do better to help startups. Suggestions were: make it easier to interface with you (the web folks could use some lessons from the enterprise crowd here), better documentation (a real pet peeve of mine), assurances that partnering discussions won’t lead to the plundering of a startups ideas, assistance in scaling (e.g. EC2), more and different conference sponsorships (my request was that they all pool money together to fund David and Doug fulltime), etc.
In looking over this summary, I realize it’s been a bit matter of fact, but it’s already 10 and I haven’t even started to write the Microsoft/Novell piece so I hope you’ll indulge me.
Tomorrow’s sessions look good, and I invite all of you attend the talk Cote and I will be leading around dealing w/ analysts and media. Step 1 will be calling RedMonk 😉
