Ian On The Red Dot

So last night was the Barcamp Singapore 2 event. It was hits and miss.

The first item for the night was a presentation by Google. Initially I thought it was boring. But, it wasn’t boring because it was bad. Everything related to maps was covered by Andrew the Product Manager from Google and covered well. It was just that I would have thought that most of the people in the crowd would have known about Google and its offerings to make what Andrew said redundant.

I guess it is about expectations. I was hoping that Google would have surprised us by announcing something like Street View for Singapore. Or some initiative unique to Singapore and South-east asia to get more mapping data.

However, after the session, Bernard from Singapore Entrepreneurs tempered, what was on hindsight, my pretty unreasonable expectations. The ubiquity of Google in my life made me not realize that this was actually the first time Google was doing anything to reach out to the local developer community in Singapore and because it was the first time, no assumptions were made and proper introductions (apparently they practiced the presentation) were done.

You know, if I ever meet Jessica Alba in real life, and instead of allowing me to shake her hand and introducing herself and allowing me to introduce myself before I prostrate at her feet, she had gone, “You should know who I am, I am after all Jessica Alba”, I would have been pretty put off, although still thankful to God for letting me see the ultimate gift to man in real life.

But, the point is this, if I don’t expect and even like people to expect familiarity and demand recognition without proper introductions, why should I do any different with a company and its representatives.

The second item was a presentation by Bak2u. Ok, this one was a total unredeemable miss. The presenter talked to us like all of us have never owned a phone before. I mean, seriously, the first couple of slides, if not the majority of them, could have been cut. Losing phone bad. We know that. Data important. We know that. The most interesting and dare I say important part of the presentation like the technology/products of the company and how it helps us mobile phone owners were not covered enough. The presenter should have jumped straight into the meat. More demo!

What was worse is that a competitor (or at least I think they are one) tenCube did a pretty good job in showcasing their WaveSecure product. Now, I know jackshit about assessing which is a better mobile security offering but Bak2u’s presentation didn’t make it any easier. Actually, wait, it did. Because Bak2u didn’t seem to offer a credible alternative in its presentation.

Now, I guess Bak2u might not have wanted to seem to be doing a sales pitch, and I can appreciate that. But it does seem pretty unfair to me if one presenter constrains himself when a competitor is going to be speaking next.

Ok. I just want to say that Harish showcased a webapp he built in 4 hours. Total hit. Simple, usable app. Awesome.

Widgeo.us to me was the star of the mobile track. I don’t think I can do justice by trying to explain what they are doing so please go check their site out and maybe contact uzyn or ridz directly.

Just want to say one thing - I wish I could use it to communicate with people not using their platform.

I heard they did videos for the night, so wait for them to come out to see the rest of the presentations.