RunningAHEAD.com Goes To Camp (Read 2544 times)

I received an email back in December from David Berlind, the executive editor of ZDNet. In his email, he told me about a conference he was setting up, and invited me to attend. The conference is called Mashup Camp, where website developers (like me), API providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, etc), and observers (reporters, bloggers, and venture capitalists) would go and exchange ideas of web development, particularly the mash up of different technologies and data sources to create a composite website. Examples of mashups are the Google maps and elevation charts on this site. The conference was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It is like no conference that I've been to. All of the participants have a voice, and everyone can suggest discussion topics. Other than traveling and lodging costs, everything else was free. Companies stepped up to provide IDs, t-shirts, breakfasts, lunches, drinks, and even junk food. It was quite interesting to see what other people are doing, and learn about new technologies that can be used to improve this site. I had a chance to talk to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft representatives. Microsoft even demoed their Virtual Earth software. Although they have higher quality images than Google, I feel they are not quite ready to compete directly against Google yet. I'm sure Microsoft will smooth out the kinks in the next year or so. Maybe then I can offer more interesting ways to help you create maps. The last two months were filled with a whirlwind of events. Things should settle down for the rest of the year, and I can finally go back to non-stop addition of new features to the site. eric