san francisco

OSCON & OpenSource World 2009 Double Report

Blog post by koki on Thu, 2009-08-27 19:00
Urias at the Dell booth at OpenSource World.Urias at the Dell booth during OpenSource World.

It's been about a month since Urias, Scott and myself represented Haiku at the O'Reilly OSCON 2009 conference in San Jose, and approximately two weeks since we exhibited at the OpenSource World 2009 conference in San Francisco. I think this is the first time that we exhibit at not one but two events in a row, and we don't write any reports; and that is a real shame. So here I am, after some very serious procrastination, finally attempting to give a recount of both events in a single blog post. Like we say in Argentina, better late than never... :)

OSCON 2009: Way Beyond Expectations

OSCON is an open source event organized by O'Reilly, a well-known company whose core business is to foster technological innovation by publishing books, holding conferences and providing online services. I had never been to OSCON before, so I did do some reading about it prior to applying for a booth earlier this year; beyond all the usual stuff (history, demographics, etc.) that I could find on their websites, what caught my eye was a statement about this year's OSCON, which I quote: "If the first ten years of OSCON were about opening the minds of big business to the philosophy of open source, are the next ten years about opening the minds of the open source community to the possibilities of its future?". Quite interesting articulation indeed, I thought, and one that raised my expectations for the event to a motivational level. I can say now that, luckily, those expectations were not only met, but even surpassed: OSCON 2009 was a real blast, the kind that you don't ever want to miss again.

LinuxWorld 2008 as I saw it

Blog post by koki on Thu, 2008-08-14 00:14

Haiku made its "big stage" debut at LinuxWorld for the first time this year. If you follow the feeds on our website, you have probably already read the nice reports that Urias posted on the website during and after the show (day 0, day 1, day 2 and day 3). I thought I would give me own personal recount of the event, in order to perhaps bring a little bit of a different perspective, and hopefully also complement what Urias has already written about the show.

I had never been to LinuxWorld before, but I knew from reading about the conference that it was bigger to other open sources conferences we have exhibited in the past. I also had an idea of the demographics of the event, as I had done a little bit of reasearch before proposing our attendance last year. Average attendance was said to be more than 10,000 people, and by the size of the exhibit floor at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and the duration of the show (three full days), this seemed just about right; this was obviously a very compelling number from the point of view of getting exposure for Haiku.

A weekend in SF, for LugRadio Live USA 2008

Blog post by koki on Thu, 2008-04-17 23:00
Scott at the Haiku boothScott at the Haiku booth

I spent this past weekend in San Francisco in order to attend the LugRadio Live USA 2008 event. Together with Scott McCreary (of BeDrivers.com fame), we organized a Haiku booth to represent the project at this the first LugRadio Live event to be held in the US. This event was a bit of a mystery to me, in the sense that I did not know what to expect. It certainly turned out to be an interesting and fruitful experience, not only because of the usual increased visibility that results from having a booth at any open source event, but also because it gave us the chance to get to know and network with quite a few interesting individuals.

I drove into San Francisco on Friday afternoon, as I wanted to check out the exhibit floor at the Metreon and also see if I could setup our projector screen in our booth in advance. We were originally told that there would be a "no hanging stuff from the wall" policy, but it turned out that it was OK for us to hang the projector screen from the tube holding the backwall drapes behind our booth. And that's exactly what I did: with the kind help of one of the on-site crew and a couple of plastic cable straps that I had brought in my show box, I had the screen setup in no time. I spoke with the on-site staff about wireless access, and got all the info that I needed to get my ethernet-wifi adaptor working, so that we could have internet access from Haiku. Once I had the plan for the next day more or less clear in my head, I called it a day, and went back to my hotel room to relax until dinner time.

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