Miles Burke decided that we all need to prove that we were at Web Directions last year by finding photos of us on Flickr. Mo problem! Here are pictures of me looking rather disheveled.
Ok, to pass on the meme: I wanna see photos from Tim Lucas and Lachlan Hardy.
Well more correctly, across the Nullibor Plane - We just received confirmation for the PodCamp Australia guys that Perth has won the right to host the first PodCamp! Not only did we win, we won pretty convincingly, with 152 votes. Syndey came second place with only got 82!
The event in October should feed all of the locals’ hunger for local events. Check out http://www.podcamp.info for more details as they come to hand.
After over 8 months of organsing and meetings, the WA Web Awards for 2007 have been and gone - and once again, the WA web industry hasn’t disappointed. 154 entries, whittled down to 36 finalists over 12 categories - 182 attendees at a black tie event, and as I’m sure you can imagine, the wine and food flowed through out the night. As did the crazy dancing at the Amplifier afterwards. As such, I’m sure there was more than a few sore heads on Saturday!
Congratulations to all the winners, the official announcement will be made on the WAWA website in the next few days, but for the impatient, you can go through the WAWA twitter feed to find out who got up on the night.
I would personally like to thank the rest of the committee - Kay Smoljak and Helen Burgess for their hard work, it might have been a smaller committee this year, but they worked just as hard to make the night as successful as it was. Thankyou to Jan and Rebecca at Red Horizon Events - it would have been absolutely impossible without their tireless work - there was a reason Kay, Helen and myself were so calm during the course of the day - Jan and Beck had everything well and truly under control. And thank you to Ken Drake for his brilliant work behind the camera - the photos should be up on Flickr soon.
Another big thank you to the judges - judging such an event is no mean feat, especially when you are volunteering your services. To Matt Voerman, Maxine Sherrin, Donna Maurer, Tim Lucas, Duncan Riley, James Bull and James Beaird - you did I brilliant job and I hope those of you that attended the night enjoyed yourselves. I will also thank Megyn Carpenter for the amazing job she did as the Judging Co-ordinator. Because the committee is still able to enter the awards night, we have always had a neutral chair that manages the judges on our behalf. Megyn is stepping down from the roll for 2008 and she will be sorely missed. Thank you Megs for you help!
And finally a big thank you to the sponsors - Fasthit.net, ECU, the Broth, Microsoft, Central TAFE, New Lease, Crumpler and PerthNow, for with out them we could not have put on such a huge night!
Well I think that is more than enough thank yous for one day - there are a few photos linked below (thanks Simone!), so you can have a brief look at how it all un-furled.
I’m still a little blurry-eyed from last night (as are most of the beachhouse) - but I can safely say, that WebJam Perth cranked. Estimates of the number of attendees are varied, but there was definitely between 80 and 100 people there was awesome. There was also 15 presenters, and the quality was top-notch!
After picking up the WebJam crew from the airport, and hanging out with them for the day, we prepped the Velvet Lounge and the crowd started flowing in. There was a lot of new faces there too, which is an indicator of how crazy the industry is going at the moment.
Gary Barber presented a rather tongue-in-cheek look at Web3.0 whilst managing to demonstrate some pretty cool drag-and-drop functionality. This got him third place. Nick Cowie launched a scathing attack on a number of locals for producing websites that don’t work on mobiles - which got him second prize. Richard and Simon did a kick-arse visualisation system for Scouta which can only be described, well, visually - luckily there is a video already online. Unsurprisingly, this got them first place and the grand prize of Adobe CS3.
Unfortunately, my presentation Canvas Text Replacement, which is a alternative to sIFR didn’t make the top three, but with the quality of the top three, I don’t mind one little bit.
All in all, it went off - big ups to the WebJam crew: Lachlan, Lisa and Tim, for flying over from Sydney - they have been fantastic.
So one half of WA Web Week is done, roll on the WAWAs tomorrow! For those of you that can’t attend, you can view the live twitter feed on the website.