Webjam Perth was absolutely unbelievably ridiculously huge!
15 fantastically clever geeks presented seriously cool demos and talks of all stripes.
A full list of presentations will be available soon, but some highlights of the evening that didn't make the prize pool were a sexy Gmail rip with some serious improvements called Lichen from Hourann Bosci; a hot new type of standards-based text replacement from Myles Eftos called Canvas Text Replacement; Kat Black talking up the awesome ByteMe Festival and Dan Bett showed us some very clever (and valuable!) use of SMS alerts for local farmers in the project known affectionately as 'vegeSMS'
The winners!
If you want to see the full shambles we like to think of as a prize-giving 'ceremony' and observe precisely how unlike Gretel Killeen I am as a host, there is an embarrassing video embedded just below. If you want the straight skinny, more rambling text immediately after that
The third place prize for the evening, a copy of Vista Ultimate went to Gary Barber for his presentation on Western Web 3.0 (it'll make more sense with video). Gary's cynicism about current web trends was a big hit. Second place went to Nick Cowie for his presentation on why you need to build separate mobile sites. His presentation hilariously slammed a number of people in the room (including attendees, sponsors and our own site) in order to make his point. I coined it 'web-sledging' and the term seems to have stuck. Nick also won a copy of Vista Ultimate and received a cool new Crumpler bag.
After massive issues with hooking up a Ubuntu laptop to our projector, what was to be our second presentation for the evening finally delivered in the last slot - and won! Less time to vote for the amazing Scouta presentation didn't matter when they showed the room ICCARUS! This 3D visualisation of all the people, relationships, recommendations, and favourites in Scouta is absolutely mind-blowing. When describing it all I can say is - it doesn't look like a 'visualisation', it looks like an actual galaxy! It's so hot it even got TechCrunched !
Well done to Richard Giles and Simon Wittber for their win. I hope the copy of Adobe CS3 Web Premium is useful to Scouta. If you want any technical details of how ICCARUS was built, Simon has a blog post describing it.
Thank you!
Thanks to our all our sponsors: Adobe, Microsoft, Crumpler, and Canvas Photos. Special thanks to Myles Eftos for being our man on the ground, and to Stewart Greenhill for stepping up on the night and offering to supplement our video with his own. If anyone else has video of the night (or any Webjam night), add it to our new Webjam group on Viddler, and tag appropriately.
Biggest thanks of all have to go to all the local Perth geeks who rocked out on the night, soaked up the experience and made it a night of total awesomeness! We'll be back - and it'll be even bigger and better. Thanks, Perth!