Weekend in geekland
Posted 4 February 2008 // Jock Phillips
Beaming into Warkworth
I have just returned from Kiwi Foo Camp at Warkworth. Organised by Nat Torkington and Russell Brown, the idea is to invite about 150 people interested in new technology along for the weekend. They put together a programme on arrival, and then let the ideas fly.
I didn’t go to the first camp last year – to my regret, since I heard that Te Ara came in for fierce criticism. Apparently social networking was the coolest fashion in town; we were the symbol of authoritarian Web 1.0. Forewarned, I decided to go and defend us. I was not made more comfortable on arrival, late on Friday. The common room was filled with young men (not a woman in sight) wearing glasses and all tapping intently on their laptops as an alternative to conversation.
As it happened, I didn’t need to put up any armour. The geeks themselves turned out to be real smart, sassy talkers, and in the sessions themselves they were refreshingly polite, fair to others and open to ideas.
As for content, the camp I went to was no longer interested in the cooperative, interactive Web 2.0 world as a good in itself. The question now was how to make money out of it.
Or that was my conclusion from the sessions I attended.
The first was on how to use the media. It began with the premise that 30 seconds of advertising on television is worth $10,000. So 30 seconds of news exposure has the same value. It’s worth learning the tricks.
Session 2 was on the ‘creative federation’, subtitled ‘turning ideas into IP via 2.0′. The concept was to provide an easy-to-use tool so that people with ideas could protect their intellectual property and turn them into small business. At the same time I missed a session on how to get revenue from advertising on the web locally. You get the drift.
The last session, and the highpoint of the day for me, was one by Sunday Star Times resident economist Rod Oram on whether the economy of NZ was rising, falling or completely stuffed. Cleverly, he turned the question back on the audience. What came through was salvation via IT-based small business, which might quickly become big business. Sam Morgan was the oft-quoted hero. Even more remarkably, Wellington was the cool place, a Silicon Valley of the south.
I was not convinced about the economic prescription – but at least, it seemed, I came from the right place.
