MashupCamp so far

MashupCamp has been a great experience, and we still have a day to go. It’s a special experience getting to share a room with a bunch of like-minded geeks looking to investigate a topic or take on a challenge. I’ve been fortunate enough to attend three unconferences this past month; MashupCamp has been the best of them.

I both led a session and “speedgeeked” yesterday. Speedgeeking is like speed dating, except you are demoing your app instead of yourself. I showed off the VoiceMaps app from our gallery, having each visitor add a point on the map with his or her hometown, and then recording that person saying something about who they are and what they think of MashupCamp. You can see the result here. Lots of fun, and also exhausting… five minutes sounds like a long time to talk to somebody about your app, but in reality it was never, ever enough.

The session was good too. I focused less specifically on MyVox and more on sharing what I knew about the tools and approaches available to folks who want to incorporate telephony or voice into their apps. Most of the folks here have never thought about telephony and how it fits into their development world, and it seemed like a number of folks got a lot out of the experience. While I was hoping that there would be folks from Ribbit around to comment on their take on APIs and voice mashups, some attendees of the MashupUniversity were able to relay what they learned from Ribbit’s presentations there. You can see my hasty notes on the session on the MashupCamp wiki.

Coolest app seen so far:  Yahoo’s FireEagle.  Still have to delve deeper into this one, but as somebody who’s been trying to figure out how best to bring location-based services into the mix of things we work with, this looks exciting.