Mashup Camp is an unconference about Mashups and everything related to Mashups. This was my second Mashup Camp, last Mashup Camp was in Boston in January and it was a brilliant event. I learned a lot, met a lot of great people and it opened my eyes in many ways. Last week Mashup Camp 4 was in Mountain View, California and again I meet great people and had some interesting discussions (check out some photos here) But something was off, maybe too few people, maybe not the right people, I am not sure. Maybe it was just my high expectations, maybe it was that I couldn’t attend more than the last day (Camp is 2 days, with a prequal 2 days of Mashup University) or maybe the competition of other events meant that not enough people attended. According to David Berlind (one of the organisers) they will go back to having the Camp early in the year, which I think is a good idea.

Some highlights
Chime.tv stole the show in many ways. Joost and others are trying to create the next generation television experience, but I think they missed something extremely important, and that is all the content already available on the internet. You might have heard of a small site called YouTube, and there are also a few other video sites out there (and by a few I mean 1000s and 1000s). Chime.tv is a great site that allows you to watch all these videos without having to go around to all the different video sites and without having to load each individual video yourself. The videos are shown back to back creating a channel with continous content. Either use some of the premade channels or make your own by searching for whatever you are interested in from whatever site you are interested in. Definitly the coolest site I saw at the Camp, a brilliant use of all the videos available on the internet. They have built a great video site without having to host videos or have to worry about all the bandwidth the videos are eating up. Check it out, I am a total chime.tv junkie already.

Some other highlights were

• KarmaGeek – a try of leveraging all our Geek knowledge for the benefit of Non Profits. Still very early days (started at the last Mashup Camp), but it has real potential.
• Google Mashup Editor – a cool mashup building tool aimed at developers. It requires some coding, but the results I saw where impressive and the coolest thing is the easy integration of other Google services such as Maps.
• Apatar – a very interesting open source project building a way to create workflows between different applications and databases.

Early early days
It is really clear after this Camp that these are the really early days of Mashups. Even at Mashup Camp there are many people that are trying to figure out what this Mashup thing is all about. There are some attempts to do Mashup tools and frameworks of different kinds. BEA Pages and IBM QEDWiki are a couple from the big boys aimed at Enterprises, Google Mashup Editor, Teqlo and Bungee Labs are a couple aimed at the consumer market. I am happy to say that Kapow Technologies is in the forefront of the Mashup wave, a good place to work right now. We are spending a lot of time thinking about Mashups and where things are heading and so far we seem to be on the right track (f you haven’t checked out openkapow.com yet then please do so now). I am looking forward to following Mashups as they develop and as it starts to be accepted (and maybe even a requirement) inside big companies. It is clear that Mashups are growing up and are becoming more than just an excuse to use Google Maps (more about that in a later post).

Hope to see you in Dublin
Next Mashup Camp will be in Dublin in September. I hope I can go to that one, it will be really interesting to see what people will come to an European Camp (it will also mean a shorter flight and no jetlag for me, which would be nice for a change). A Camp fuled by Guniess should be fun!