Sorry for the lack of updates here on the blog, but the summer has been to damn awesome, so we haven’t had time to write that much. More about the awesomeness in a coming update, but for now I want to write a bit about the last weekend, when we went to Tjärö to socialize and hobnob with the social media elite in Sweden. This post is quite long, but you can skip most of it and just read the last paragraph.
One camp to rule them all…
For all y’all that missed out on what this event was all about, here is the short version: Tomas Wennström (of whatsnext.se fame) wanted to meet up with a couple of geeks and discuss social media. Preferably by a camp fire and fueled with beer. So he threw together some words about the idea on his blog and suddenly something big was brewing (btw, when will we finally be able to use whynot.ee? ). The response was enormous, so what started with the vision of ten people meeting up at someones place ended with 280 people meeting on an island. We found out about this quite early and liked the idea, so we signed up and suddenly we where on our way.
The weekend…
We drove to island in the same tank (or maybe it was a twitterpansarvagn?) that took us to Mini Seedcamp in Helsingborg. The trip was great, lots of sing-along to Meatloaf tunes and Amy diamond. Anders drank beer , so that combined with the utter lack of a driving license issued under his name gave me the role of pilot. I went totally Schumi and shortened the estimated trip time calculated by the GPS by around 1 hour. When we arrived to the ferry that would take us to the island, it was raining quite a lot so we did like most youngsters in american high school movies do and partied a bit in the car. However, as soon as the rain stopped we went out to socialize with the people waiting for the ferry.
As soon as we arrived on the island we were greeted by some locals performing Super Mario Bros tunes. While putting up our tent we made great use of our engineering skills, since the tent was somewhat damaged since the two festivals this summer. Lots of people were already there and they guided us toward the registration area. Our name badges were missing, so we created our own with matching QR codes. It was about eight o’clock by now, so Tomas greeted everyone welcome and we were treated with a great barbecue (burgers and free beer, we like). The night continued with lots of discussion about lots of things and a couple of more beers.
The next day started with a nice breakfast and then it was time for the sessions. Anyone could set up a session, there were a lot of places and time slots to choose and the range of topics was great. The first session we attended was Joakim Jardenberg, who talked about his project to make the government agencies in sweden open up their systems and providing the data and information to us. It was a great session with an interesting discussion. When I have some time over I’ll have to read more about this project.
The next session was titled Combat Social Media, and the initiator is about to travel to Afghanistan to work for ISAF and wanted to know how he could make use of social media while being there. The previous session was more of a presentation while this was just a discussion, and everybody provided great ideas and their own views. When the session ended it was time for lunch, but since it was just two hours since breakfast we ended up on a grass field, with a beer and discussing our own stuff.
After lunch we listened a bit to a session about PR and their place in social Media, or something. Sounded like a great session but we weren’t that interested in the subject.
Thanks to Martin from Twingly we heard about a session that was bit more technical than the others, which was something that we missed. It was called NoSql, and was about substitutes to relational databases and also the presentators own product Neo4j.
A stand-up comedian was attending the event and he decided, under the influence of mr Jack Daniels the night before, to perform during one of the sessions. He said he was a bit unprepared but it still kicked ass. Just plain awesome.
The next session was the unyielding of a project called Shinobi. The host, Twingly, gave away free beer and some swag and their product sounded great. Can’t wait to test this baby.
The rest of the evening was spent socializing with people and eating. We met the guys from Appcorn who is in the same business, and had a great talk.
Wrap up..
We had a really awesome time on the island. The people were great to talk with and lots of interesting ideas were discussed. We hope that something similar will take place soon. It was also nice to meet some of the people from Seedcamp in Helsingborg once again.
Tap Gun 