DISQUS

Watched the presentation at BarCamp. Awesome initiative!

I see you conjured up the courage to remove hotdockets from the list. Nice one! Maybe we should just check the domain age and remove any site that is older than 3 years from the list. I know this is arbitrary and unfair, but so is listing just any old site. Without a clear (and unfair) rule it might turn into a free-for-all...

Would this help?

Had a quick look and watched the video. Not too impressed. It looks really flash, but all it does is spit out bits of real estate lingo. I might have missed the point, but it doesn't seem to actually write the description. But maybe the simplicity of it is what makes it a good idea, time will tell...

Great! Being geographically far from the US wasn't good enough. Now we're getting a China filter and if the great firewall of China is anything to go by, expect a huge hidden cost for the economy for sysadmins trying to debug weird errors or problems for days only to find it's related to the China filter. Lost productivity due to increased latency. Increased latency affecting the ability to run international operations and time critical applications over the web, etc, etc. And those cost go on top of the $189 million that this program will cost.

And the goal of all this is to prevent kids from accessing inappropriate material? Firstly it's an insult to the intelligence of children, it's more likely to stop computer illiterate adults than children these days. Second of all, you'd have to do a whole lot more to keep children save online, with websites being the least of your problems.

Anyway, good to see there are people who care:
http://www.efa.org.au/2008/10/16/efa-alarmed-at...
http://nocleanfeed.com/

Hi Duncan,

Thanks for showing up for the weekend and interesting to read about your experience. I enjoyed being down in Melbourne and meeting lots of amazing people.

Putting together developers with different skill into teams was indeed a change from the Sydney event. I admit that it wasn't helping the teams in creating a finished product in the limited time. Upside though was that developers got exposed to new tools, new languages, etc. It's a hard trade-off and we'll take a poll for the next weekend to see what people prefer.

When it comes to Jordan Green I have to disagree with you. I believe that his input and feedback was very useful for the teams and it gives some legitimacy to the final pitching. I agree that Jordan was very direct in his comments but I felt he made it clear that he didn't mean anything bad by it. I was glad he did because StartupCamp is supposed to be a learning experience and it gave the participants a chance to understand how VC's or angels think and it allowed them to experiment learn in basically a risk-free environment. For the next StartupCamp we want to have an angel or VC work even closer with the teams to prepare their pitches.

Hope to see you at the next StartupCamp!

Bart

I'll try to be more specific next time, it's just hard to remember when you live in the center of the universe. ;) Anyway, yes, this one is in Sydney. But that shouldn't stop anyone from putting something together in the other cities.

P.S. Date has moved to 5-7 Sept and location is final, see http://www.startup-australia.org/startupweekend

Let me explain "throw away" startup... we're not going to throw it away... the idea is to create something of immense value - at least a billion dollars - that requires zero maintenance after it has been launched (unless participants want to spend more time on it). The point here is that to join you need to commit to one weekend of your time, nothing more, nothing less.