Barton's Blog

Last Thursday over a 100 cloud enthusiasts gathered for Cloud Camp Austin.  The event was held at Pervasive Software‘s headquarters and kicked off after 5PM with munchies and beer.  The event brought in folks all around Austin as well as visitors from exotic areas like upstate New York (the group had been in town for meetings).

Pre camp munchies and drinks as folks assemble.

Dell was one of the sponsors along with IBM, Microsoft, Twilio, Tropo, Redmonk and our  hosts Pervasive .  As always, the event was guided along by Mr. cloud camp, Dave Nielsen.  Being an “unconference,” after a spontaneously assembled “unpanel” who was called upon to answer questions from the audience, the crowd worked together to decide on the topics that would be discussed.

Dave Nielsen explains how this "unpanel" is going to work.

What a difference a year makes

I attended last year’s cloud camp in Austin and I don’t know if its the fact the industry has evolved so much since then or that this year there was a greater percentage of knowledgeable attendees (I suspect a little of both) but this year the topics and questions were much more sophisticated/technical.  As a results the conversations were much more meaty and focused more on “how to” rather than “how do you define.”

All in all a very cool event.

The schedule created on the fly by the attendees.

If you liked Cloud Camp and you like Hadoop, you’ll love…

Speaking of camps, Dave Nielsen is taking the camp idea and applying it to the world of Big Data.  The event, which will be held in Santa Clara on June 28, is imaginatively entitled, Big Data Camp Santa Clara.  This unconference  is targeted at users of Hadoop and related technologies and is held the night before Hadoop summit 2010.  So if you’re in the area and Hadoop/Big Data are your thing, check it out.

Pau for now…