The occasional light expression

Barcamp Bangalore 3 wrapped up this Sunday, April 1 at the IIM Bangalore campus. I was only able to make it for the afternoon sessions but had some good hallway conversations with Param, Abhinav, Rajan (a sharp entrepreneur and co-founder of Motvik), Ashwin (speed demon who loves cruising the ideascape – and live blogging), Arun - a Barcamp and tech veteran, Harish (who has some great ideas on applications for unstructured and structured data – and is looking for smart tech folks for his startup -OneBigWeb, Rajiv (who started Mobile Monday in Bangalore and runs his WLAN startup Sedna), Hazra (independent visual artist and old comrade from my consulting days), MJ (A landmark graduate who told me much about utility computing at his company), and Soumya and Ashish (both from IIM B and currently Product Managers – at Aditi and Yahoo respectively – with great ideas on Web 2.0, Indian startups, and the blogging)…

My only gripe about Barcamp - it could be a bit wierder, with more edge conversations, and with a broader mix of design, music, art and technology - not just technology itself. This Barcamp’s theme - social tech - while treading new ground for Bangalore Barcamp is an old theme in general - and the absense of true artists, visionaries, or voices from the grounds of culture and the social sciences was felt. Barcamp does not need to be Burning Man, but it could get a bit edgier, more informal, a bit more chaotic as far as the themes, speakers, and presentations go - so that some magic may emerge.

Nonetheless, Barcamp still remains one of my favorite places to meet folks slightly outside of the mainstream in this part of the world..