While I think the dude captures excellent pictures, I ain’t ever hiring this guy as my wedding photographer. He captured possibility some of the ugliest, most unflattering pictures of myself at the event which have since spurred me to sign up for 30 sessions of personal training at Fitness First starting tonight.

Breathe Cheryl, breathe!

Moving on… I also attended Vyasa’s Journey of a startup – Silicon Valley Style where he shared his experience searching for investors for his Microchip start up. He and his partner Sara started the business fresh out of school and spoke to more than 200 VCs before securing RM3.5 from a private investor and a further 4 million from grants. Eventually the business failed last year due to lack of cash flow but Vyasa shared with us his believe that “For every door closes that closes, there is a new one which opens”.

Read Friedbeef’s more detailed post.

Lunch was Subway, generously sponsored by Zoecity. We love our sponsors!

Daniel and Vico’s session on recruitment and social networking reminds us all that what we put on our facebook, friendster, and blogs are being monitored and mined by recruitment consultants and potential employers.

They both however felt that we should not modify or adjust our online personas as it is our individualism which makes us unique and a good recruitment consultant like Daniel (plug) would be able to match not just your qualifications but your personality with the right employer.

Lastly I walked into Lighting Talks where everyone has a chance to share about anything for 5 minutes.

It was very informal and people where really just chilling out, talking and sharing stuff which interest them. Some of the topics ranged from hardware hacking, open source, individuals sharing their experience of Barcamp, and a call for hackers and developers to assist and educate social workers on the use of IT in promoting their cause. I was also put on the spot and babbled something about winning the Nokia E90 Communicator.

The day ended for me with some group photos – after which many volunteers stayed back to clean up the mess. Once again, thank you itrain for generously allowing us to use the venue.

Panel talks about “ideas”.

Ganesh talks about his company MOL AccessPortal Berhad, how it began, how it has evolved and his philosophies on partners and relationships.

Vishen also talks about his business partner Mike – how they meet.

Member of the audience asks the panel for their opinion with regards to the importance of a co-founder and how an entrepreneur from a technical background can find a co-founder who can complement him on sales and marketing.

Vishen talks about how Entrepreneurs can make money by being an internet merchant versus someone trying to build the next big web 2.0 company.

He also notices that per capital there are more small business owners in Malaysia and Singapore than there are in the US and wonders if there is a higher tendency for entrepreneur s in Malaysia to build quick businesses which make money rapidly because of the Asian mentality.

Shares his success on chasing the small dream with precise execution and marketing and sales.

Chicks? At BarCamp?!

Yup, the first ever Malaysian Barcamp received a decent turn out of female participants – most of which turned up alone, without a friend/bf or husband in tow.

While the girls at Barcamp did not look like this:

Or dress like this:

Or posed like this:

Today, everywhere I turned I saw a member of the fairer sex and felt inclined to take a picture and then share it here to bust the stereotype that ladies don’t attend events like BarCamp.

Wait a minute….Something looks fishy…

3 meals were providers for on the first day – breakfast, lunch and tea.

I was expecting 1 ringgit nasi lemak for breakfast, some mee goring for lunch and nothing for tea. But boy, I was so wrong…..

We started the day with two choices of sandwich and really yummy curry puffs with tea and coffee.

Lunch was a feast with a wide array of local food to suit anyone’s palate.

In a very un-Malaysian move, the ladies were given priority of eat before the guys.

Daniel Cerventus eating lunch with Daniel security dude, who is hopefully watching over my projector and 3 others as we speak…Daniel and Iris the security patrol are probably the nicest and most helpful people I’ve meet in a while.

Men in black

Thumbs up for the food!

Representatives from Nokia and Yahoo (I think)

Although banana cakes and some local sesame seed kuih was served for tea, my camera was running low on ammo and I decided to save my battery for more important pictures.

Thanks to all the sponsors for not letting us go hungry and for giving us 50 feet worth of Subway Sandwiches for lunch tomorrow.

We love:
Advertlets, Daniel Yst, Dr Sivapalan, Exabytes, Getting Personal, HongKiat, JomCode, Logistics Consulting Asia, Malaysiakini, MOL.com, Roslan Bakri Zakaria, Slashes & Dots Sdn. Bhd ,SMM, UrekaLabs, xTrain, Yahoo! And ZoeCity

All the morning sessions started out pretty much on time – with Google Android being understandably the most pack of all the opening sessions – geeks can never get enough of Google.

Gavin Bong spoke to a room packed to the brim – people where everywhere – on the chairs, sitting on the floor, cramped behind the door and guess what? No one complained! It was a great way to start Barcamp.

Campers were also very keen on Widgeous – a platform that allows applications and people to communicate via multiple channels like widgets, SMS and Instant Messaging.

Although Widgeous is currently more of a B2B platform, U-Zyn Chua the co-founder and CTO gave an open call to developers to hack away at their API via their Hackathon contest.

From their website:

Another fully packed session was fellow volunteer – Roni Mustapha’s “Monetizing YouTube and other on-line videos?”

Roni’s startup UREKALABS, also a sponsor for Barcamp Malaysia, demoed a prototype of their platform which dynamically allows images to be overlayed on videos. The goal is so that video publishers can overlay advertisements dynamically based on the demographics of the viewing audience-think of it as contextual advertising for videos. It’s really cool stuff and I wished I took videos instead of photos

The next session I walked into was the paneled style – Entrepreneurs Going Global which was moderated by Daniel. Panelist included Vishen Lakhiani of Mindvalley, Ganesh Kumar Bangah of MOL.com, Roslan Bakri Zakaria from MDEc and Siva who mentors budding entrepreneurs.

Out of all the sessions this was the one I could relate to the most. Probably because the questions asked by the floor was very relevant to where I am at this point in this. The four of them shared their experiences, and gave the audience some advice on entrepreneurship – I have some of it down on video which I may upload when I get up tomorrow morning, – yes I do want a Nokia that bad…;p ‘

I really liked Vishen’s philosophy which is – “It’s seldom about the idea, it’s about the execution”.

I also liked what Roslan said about commercializing ideas – “Your product does not need to be 100% perfect to be ready for market…Microsoft products never are”

There were a lot of things which Siva said which rang a bell – like how there was no sure fire away to find the right partner and that it was always important to have a mailing list when promoting your product.

Ganesh, who is also my CEO at MOL said a lot of cool stuff like how it was important to keep evolving the company’s business model to survive, sustain and ultimately grow.

Curiosity got the better of me as I joined Khailee, Arzumy and Kris Khaira on their gang bang crusade and enjoyed the passion and energy these guys have and how they wanna make this region the next Hollywood by encouraging the free flow of talent, ideas and money through lighthouse.my and webwatch.com.

Finally I stepped into the Blogging in Malaysia session – there were a couple of pro bloggers in the house like Liew CF and Mr Advertlets himself- Josh Lim. Quality blogging takes a lot of effort and passion and I think that what separates top notch bloggers from people like the inconsistent me.

I had a blast at the sessions today and look forward to tomorrow.

With BarCamp Malaysia less than 10 hours away, everything looked set for an exciting and inspiring two days.

The venue is easy to find – Look out for Infomatics at Block E and the signage below will guide you the rest of the way.

There’s going to be plenty of activities so you’ll be spoilt for choice. Pick one of the many concurrent sessions to match your interest.

There are going to be 4 separate rooms for Campers to run their sessions in. My personal favorite is the theater for their comfy seats of course.

If you’ve registered you’ll get the very awesome BarCamp Malaysia Goodie bag with lots of cool stuff inside like the BarCamp Malaysia and Yahoo! T-shirts. If you haven’t registered, don’t fret – Walk in early and you may be lucky enough to bag yourself one.

I am really looking forward to tomorrow. Time to get a little shut eye before the big day!

While I’ve pointed most of my curious friends to the official BarCamp Malaysia Blog and FAQ which gives a clear idea of where, why and what the event is about, there are some questions which I would like to address here on this blog.

“I went to the BarCamp Malaysia registration page but its password protected. Does this mean I can’t attend?”

While it is true that the BarCamp Malaysia tickets were taken up like hot cakes and the registration site is now closed, it is still possible to attend the event by walking in on the event day on Saturday, 26th July at 9.00am. I would however recommend anyone interested on walking in to be there on time as we may be required to close the doors if the place gets too crowded.

I am not a programmer or developer. Is BarCamp for me?

While the sessions tend to be IT centric, everyone is welcomed to attend.

From a non-tech person’s point of view, I would personally attend the following session, and so can you:

Interesting Web 2.0/Mobile services in China, Japan, India, Kenya and Korea
Entrepreneur + Developer Gang Bang by Arzumy, Joel Neoh, Kris Khaira and Khailee Ng
Blogging in Malaysia
Music 2.0: Community Building & Survival Guide
Leverage Facebook Now!

There’s really something for everyone, so come with an open mind and have fun!

Is BarCamp going to be a Sausage Fest?

Admittedly there will be more males than females at this event but there is also a strong showing from the members of the fairer sex – so far 34 have registered!

So it won’t be a sausage fest though I don’t expect any of the girls to come dressed as the below: