The event tickles the entrepreneurial bone with its unique information sharing model that is both impromptu and interactive
On the last weekend of February a small of group of entrepreneurs, some prospective, huddled into the conference hall at the Management Development Institute (MDI) in Gurgaon for an event that only had a sketchy agenda.
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The speakers here were not the usual VIPs that throng big events and are invited to add star value; rather, at the BarCamp – as the gathering was called – every participant was a speaker with free mind and spirit. They also doubled up as audience that was not expected to maintain that customary silence during the presentations either.
Registration was free and everyone was welcome to speak on topics that would help entrepreneurs across various domains, at the Sixth edition of BarCamp Delhi held on February 28 and March 1. The profile of the attendees ranged from IT professionals – either entrepreneurs or working with a company and wanting to be entrepreneurs – to students, recruiters and more. There was a board at the entrance where people booked a time slot for their session. Two to three sessions could happen at one go in different classrooms. Every session was allotted half an hour, and the moderator had to ensure that there was enough time to have a discussion after the presentation was over. The atmosphere was informal but not casual; networking was the key reason behind people attending.
One of the early sessions on day one was: “How well you know your website?” It focused on various navigation designs that websites use with examples of bad ones. The objective of the session was to understand how navigation differs from industry to industry. The session was attended mostly by web designers. The presentation was short and had thrown a lot of questions to the audience.
Horizontal and vertical text placements are the common forms of navigation, yet some websites complicate it. Navigation is an integral part of site design and is directly linked with user experience. So there is no fixed profile of a website visitor. One of the primary reasons for the lack of adequate design is choosing a wrong user interface manager, so the vendor selection is very critical. As a result of this discussion, people from the audience volunteered to help the those who needed help in improving their websites.
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Another interesting session was on Location-based Services (LBS), where co-founder of RouteGuru, a LBS service provider, Piyush Gupta, gave a presentation showcasing the fact that the true potential of the LBS market is still untapped. He spoke very clearly about how we are dependent on the web for personal navigation and how in the near future this will shift to WAP. Despite its benefits, Gupta had also listed out its negatives, such as high cost and lack of last-mile data. He also mentioned areas like, directions through MMS, real-time traffic information and voice-based navigation remain untouched.
Other sessions on content strategy and social media, the startup checklist, the financial crisis and the social web were also conducted.
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