Two talks on J2EE, one talk on Opera and Atul Chitnis doing his talk on a Fedora Core machine. Sounds like normal Barcamp material, right? Yes - except that this was all on Microsoft premises here in Hyderabad.

Barcamp Hyderabad 2 was quite fun. We kicked off the day with a talk from Pramati's CEO on the new world of mobility. I was late to this talk (I was upstairs in my office working on my slides :-) ).

When I eventually found my way downstairs, I was greeted by the sight of a Fedora Core laptop (this one) booting up on the big display. Definitely not a sight you see around here too often :-).

Atul Chitnis did a talk on ..well..why mobile devices are so huge. And why we need to stop thinking in terms of PC and even to stop using the word 'computing'. Backed up by Larry Lessig-esque slides[PDF] (Atul told me that he even got the same font that Lessig uses - from Lessig himself!), this talk was probably the best of the day.

His essential argument revolved around how mobile devices adapt to how you want to use them - rather than how they want to be used. I didn't buy his arguments about screen displays - I firmly believe that large screen monitors increase productivity if you're trying to do work and are awesome to watch movies on.

Apart from that, I liked this talk for one very simple reason - this is one of the few times I've seen someone talk of how mobility is *cool* without saying 'Mobility is cool since it has so many users and will have so many users'.

Mobile devices are not cool because millions (billions?) of people use them and will be using them. Mobile devices are cool because of the way in which they can change people's lives. There are quite a few people I know who don't understand this distinction very well.

After his talk, I went up to Atul and introduced myself. We have a long history (I've heckled him and generally been a pain in all the wrong places over the years :-) ) but this was the first time we've met in person.

I was very pleasantly surprised - unlike some of my past encounters with the open source world, I thoroughly enjoyed the conversations I had with Atul. Over the course of the day, we touched a *lot* of topics - from Windows Vista to Microsoft to the GPL v3 to why he doesn't like Windows Genuine Advantage to the sad state of computer science in colleges today. In fact, we (Aarthi, Atul and I) pretty much missed the rest of the Barcamp talks and spent the day 'hanging out'. He may not like our software but he sure does like our coffee :-)

My own talk went reasonably well. Things get interesting when you try to squeeze a 80 minute talk into 15 minutes but I think the crowd was happy with the general outcome. More than the talk itself, I loved the conversations that ensued and the people I got to meet as a result thereof.

One of the folks I ran into was Asshar Farhan from Spokn. We got to see a little demo of Spokn and it is an interesting Skype competitor in the mobile VOIP space. I had an interesting 3-way conversation with Asshar, myself and one of the people running the Office Communicator Mobile team.

Spokn is also interesting to me personally as they use my team's product! It is written using Visual Studio 2005. Interestingly enough, it is written in C and not using the Compact Framework.

My only criticism, if any, of the entire day was that it really wasn't an 'unconference'. There really wasn't anyone stepping up to share what they knew/wanted to talk about. We did have a couple of interesting group gatherings but overall, the feel was no different from any other conference (though this had a looser style).

I'm really not sure why this is the case. Is it a cultural thing? Or was it a function
of the speaker/theme/venue? I'm really not sure. I sure would like to see more open-ended discussions next time around.

Best comment of the day - Atul Chitnis, when we escorted him to the front gate. "You can tell your superiors that you escorted Atul Chitnis to the gate and *made sure* that he left the Microsoft campus".

Hey Atul, we're not so evil. Judge us by our coffee :-)