Codebits wrap-up
So Codebits ended last thursday night. It was the best conference I attended in a long time.
We had pretty good house (I would love to know official numbers, but I would say that about 300 people where around), and at the end of the contest, 47 projects, some goofy, some hardware hacks, a bunch of mobile hacks, and a lot of web stuff. I think it was a good participants to projects ratio.
The 90 seconds per project presentations where very cool, and it gave a very good rhythm to the whole thing. At the end, 10 lucky winners (I suppose the winner list will be online sometime next week) got a great set of prizes: Xbox 360, Macbook and Vaio laptops, O'Reilly books, iPods, and lots of other stuff.
Of all the projects, two of my favorite projects won a prize: a Pong game based on distance sensors, and a presentation about a slideshow organizer for pictures of porn sites (the presentation didn't include the pictures of those sites, but he did put up a porn movie in the background, audio-only during his 90 seconds...). Just for the record, the last one won the humor category.
Two other projects that didn't win but deserve a mention: the first, called GPlat. Its a simple website for playing games. I liked it because it matches some of the work I want to do with the SAPO Messenger client. The second, Use Your Head, is another pong game but this time you control your pad using a web-cam and facial recognition.
(Update: I was mistaken, Use Your Head did win a prize. Thanks to JoaoP for the correction)
Celso and Pedro are to be congratulated. They did an amazing job putting this together, and they where able to get an amazing set of support people. Congrats to all of them.
You can look at updated photos by Delfim and also see what people uploaded to SAPO Fotos and Flickr.
As for me, it was a blast participating, and being part of the jury. If they had pre-bookings, I would put my name down for the next year.
Update: more links to photos, videos and blog posts:
- videos at SAPO Videos;
- photos at Flickr;
- Isa Costa summary;
- Especialistas (several cartoons about Codebits).
Update 2: official wrap-up post by Celso.