Kiwi Foo

I probably should have posted this sooner when it was all fresh, especially seeing as we had a day off on Tuesday, but after having 2.5 days to myself at Kiwi Foo I needed to spend that time with the family…which means playing soccer at the beach, throwing stones in rockpools, and taking 5 x longer than normal to mow the lawns because Flynn insists on helping push the mower :)

Anyway, a big part of promise in Foo Camp is the people you meet and this weekend definitely didn’t disappoint…I was stoked to meet some really interesting folks like (recorded here to prompt my memory)…

• Rowan Simpson - The guy responsible for development at New Zealands biggest website, TradeMe.
• Rachel and Regan Cunliffe who (amongst many other things!) run the NZ Idolblog and the fast growing TV site throng.co.nz (look for it in Oz, the UK, and Canada also).
• Matt Broad from buildyourdream.co.nz and the fledgingly NZWebmasters.
• Michael Koziarski whose deep into Ruby on Rails and gave me the 10min version (while waiting for patchy WiFi connectivity) of why RoR rocks and when RoR is better…the gist being that any lag RoR has at run time is made up for in the speed of development, ie. it ain’t meant for those huge monolithic apps like banks and stuff, so it doesn’t need to be the fastest running platform (altho it performs just fine for regular web app stuff), and has major benefits in the speed of development. I hope I got that right…it certainly made sense when Koz explained it to me. Shanti, if you’re reading this…do you agree?
• Damien Bateman, the brains behind Ben’s…he’s a developer, a designer, and with plenty of commercial acumen, the total package all rolled into one.
• Judith Tizard - NZ Government, assoc. Minister of Arts and Culture (responsible for new copyright act)…I wonder what she thinks of Steve Jobs comments today.
• Seth Wagoner who demo’d his firefox plugin, Interclue, a deceptively simple browsing enhancer. Definitely worth a look.
• Justine Sanderson from Userfaction. Justine did some work for us at House of Travel so it was good to catch up.
• And of course Nat Torkington who (as chief organizer) was spread pretty thin all weekend.

Highlites from the sessions were

• Rod Drury demoing his new product Xero…it is seriously impressive. Based on what I saw I would sign up in an instant.
• Artur Bergman doing his talk on ‘Fucking big websites’…and he would know being he’s one of the guys running LJ.
• The Pitchblack guys talking about their sideline (lucrative sideline by the sounds of things) in stunning and very innovative visual installations…travelling the world VJing at impossibly cool parties for the biggest luxury brands. Nice work if you can get it :) And in a two’fer we got to hear about the video mashup stuff at Misshapenfeatures.com…wanna see something really funny check this out: Lonelygirl meets Borat.
• The fund raising session led by Tim Horton from PlanHQ was also really interesting. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Tim directly, but I really enjoyed hearing about his experiences and the fund raising process he went through for PlanHQ (Rod Drury is an investor). Going by the number of people in attendance at this session there’s a bunch of people out there in startup mode, or looking to be.

I’ve totally missed a bunch of stuff and conversations…chances are if it happened after about 9pm I don’t recall, and not cause I was drinking (I was), but my brain was probably just too fried to recall anything at that point.

It’s after 11pm now so I’m gonna pull up stumps and come back to this later if I remember anything else noteworthy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 12:11 am and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.