Tremendous success of Blog Camp 2006 at Chennai !

Since the beginning of the blog camp my blogging had taken a big hit as i was more involved in coordinating things and also moderating sessions for the two days. And i havent slept the entire two days as we had to take care of small incident at Beach house party me and raghavan being the only sober guys had to take care of things and by the time me wrapped things up it was 4.30 in the morning and i alongwith Sunil was scheduled for and interview with Osama Manzar about exploring common grounds to take up empowerment of the rural poor in india at Tidel park followed by another detailed interaction with Lakshmanan of Arvind Mills direct marketing on the launch of Fashion Blogging in relation to the global launch of Fashion Blogs of Fashion IQ .com . Subsequent to that i alongwith Andy had to moderate a session with Sujatha of Podbazaar.com. Totally hectic day and so many things happening.

We do have some totally lighter moments from the Blogcamp courtesy some pics taken unaware about serious and seasoned bloggers like Nandhu, shyam and ganesh, other bloggers but then never let your guards down in front of bloggers. They will totally bomb you! Excellent reference will be to the tagline of Blog Camp ” How do you feel Now ? ” what say you blogcamp admin group.

Surprise of the Sponsors !

The two days of blog camp 2006 was a great boon for the related sponsors Yahoo, Nokia, Ford, Intel, Merinews, enewss and other sponsors. Yahoo received a lot of foot fall for all their services and Nokia was conducting a workshop on hot to do moblogging using the N Series of mobile phones from Nokia, Ford had conducted an ipod contest for best live blogger and podcaster. The footfall in the camp exceeded to 350 people.

Live from Tidel those 2 days!

One week before the event i was hunting for a solution to address the rising needs of the Virtual attendees of Blog Camp. One of the advantages of coming from an IT background and from good networked company was that i was able to narrow down on the solutions that are available in hand to enable live videocasting/streaming and also to keep in mind the bandwidth effeciency. I got in touch with Clickstream and the response was so swift from them that i had Abhijit from calcutta representing Clipstream calling me offering to help me officially . Abhijit was so enterprising that on the first day of the Blog Camp before 11 we were hitting maximum viewership in his software and we were getting the feedback on the quality of the feed was excellent Then again we started asking him to increase the licence. We subsequently raised the level to 200 viewers and by the second day we were hitting max levels. Clipstream software is built with a feature that whenever the load of the viewers is more than maximum it alerts you and by second day during the discussions of Sharad Haskar and Sunil Gavaskar the viewership was at maximum levels. We had additional feeds from Skype as skype casts and there was the most useful IRC too. We had some great planning ad hoc by the techie goups of the BlogCamp Admin . Callers and viewers as far away as Orange county, thailand, Australia, and UK not to forget many places from india.

Post Blog Camp 2006!

For all of those who would like to view the different facets of the twod days and a more detailed account of individual sessions i would suggest that you can click on the following link and get to know the extensiveness with which the blog camp at chennai was blogged about. Pls click on the following link as the coverage on it is great.! Hats off to enewss.

http://www.enewss.com/index.php?search=blogcamp

The photos of the event are available at

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=blog+camp

http://technorati.com/tag/BlogCamp

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Blog Camp Update meeting!

This morning there was an update meeting with regards to the upcoming India’s First Blog camp.Here are some pointers of what has happened

We found out definite leads on setting the venue as IIT Chennai. Now its Kribs to roll!

We have leads to pursue to get Krish Srikanth and Rajdeep Sardesai to the event. Thanx Aish! 

The website design and content to be developed by hitesh and content developed by Syed (me) and Kiruba and to be up with all complete as on wednesday!

We had Deccan Chronicle covering this meeting for their paper due on wednesday! Thanks Nandu and Jason!

A solid plan was put in place with a strategy for covering sponsorship. Before we hit on this plan we need some parameters in place like the site with closure on venue a full fledged sponsor invitation and all that ….

Ok now all i think of is to to hit for the finals FIFA 2006. My bet is on France and all pumped up for action to start in 1 more hr. Good Night Folks!

Bloggers Dream on production

Guess what this morning we were convening a meeting to set India's First Blog Camp. This will be the first of its kind. Plans are underway to get some of the top bloggers in for the camp. This is a much bigger platform and involves even Non IT people. Planning to invite guys like Robert Scoble from Scobelizer and some top bloggers from Technorati, Blogsource, myspace and from all over India. We are planning this somewhere around 9, 10 septemberish. Going to be pretty hectic and we are a team of 14 professionals in the organizing end. We are on the initial phase with so much of work to do like scouting for venue, setting infrastructure planning, planning guest list, media promotions, listing topics for presentation, scouting for sponsors and organizing cum planning the entire event.

I will be incharge of organising to contacts to all lead bloggers to cover the event pre and post and I invite all bloggers at chennai and nearby to … if possible drop in and contribute by sharing knowledge. I will also be co authoring the website design work and content management. Anybody would like to contribute to it can just volunteer in we will be glad to share. We forsee this to be a mega event and also we expect a typical unconference approach to it. We are all very excited about it. We live in interesting times….So all you geeks and blogger get out of your bean bags and couches and come to this event share your skills, eccentricities, chill out and hang loose for the two days. We look forward to seeing everyone of you to be there. Venue and Dates are subject to changes as it all depends on so many factors

And later tonight Fuente is giving a lead presentation in The Vascular Society of India on an IT Advisory role at Hotel Green Park to a group of 50 Surgeons in Chennai. (For geeks and non medical people: Vascular surgeons are those that do the bypass surgeries, stent, angioplasty so on. Surgery is an art). Basically we will be covering on Web presence and IT initiatives to be taken to promote VSI and Medical tourism in India. This happens to be a current trend in the market. Already a lot of people from East (like malaysia, singapore, vietnam, hong kong, indonesia, brunei) fly to india for better treatment, doctors, better care and now even countries in the west (US, France, Canada) are following suit. Today India is a key destination in the Medical tourism map. And with a nexus with our already established IT industry, this flourishing medical tourism can now look forward to some good growth and great scope for doctors in India.