Joomla Featured at Geekfest Panama September 2006
Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2006 4:38 am
UPDATED AFTER FINDING SOME IMPORTANT DATA ON EXTREMADURA REGION'S AWARD & CLARIFYING BOOTSTUDIO'S PRESENTATION POINTS & ALTA'S SPONSORSHIP .
Just thought I'd let everybody know...
I have just come back from Geekfest Panama (http://www.geekfestpanama.com), where I have given a "2 minute" presentation on the Joomla Open Source software and why everybody should consider it. (The presentation ran more like 5 minutes).
Geekfest will be a monthly event promoting technology and open source software in Panama's City of Knowledge (http://www.cdspanama.org/index.php?cccp ... anguage=en), sponsored by Alta Software (http://www.altasoftware.com/).
It is free to attend and participate, though you have to reserve. There are giveaways, and free beverages, snacks and pizzas for the attendees, courtesy of Alta. Speakers are not paid.
Four speakers speak for 2 minutes each (or at least THAT'S the plan) on a technology of interest.
Alta Software is a company headed by one Adrian Scott, Ph.D., founder of Ryze, and founding investor in Napster! Yes, in Panama!
Pictures from the event will be available at that URL, probably tomorrow.
Some VERY interesting people & groups showed up.
The Minister of Technology for the Region of Extremadura in Spain, Mr. Luis Millán Vázquez de Miguel. (http://administracion.nccextremadura.net/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1)
He told us how his region, one of the 5th poorest in Europe back in 1983, made a concerted effort to get out, industrialize and technify.
Today citizens of this semi-autonomous region enjoy FULL BROADBAND everywhere, and won a MAJOR Spain / European Union Technology award last year for promoting free and open source software! (I Congreso de Informática en España (CEDI)) http://www.cdspanama.org/index.php?cccpage=index&set_language=en
This gave us a lot of hope for the future of technology in Panama, which is a country with extreme disparity of income and prospects for its citizens.
http://www.g-n-u.de/'s owner and founder Dr. Peter Gerwinski who is also the maintainer of the GNU Pascal project (http://directory.fsf.org/GNUPascal.html) among many other projects.
This german national gave a funny and captivating speech on open source. I wish he could have spoken longer, even though he went well over the time limit.
Two locals also spoke. Mr. Jose Arango of http://www.bootstudio.com gave an interesting talk on the programmatic and usability layers that lead up to User Interface design, and invited us all to an upcoming event about UI. I'll be sure not to miss it. I'll post the URL for that when I have it.
Finally (though I was second on the lineup), I made a simple presentation on the benefits of using Joomla as an open source CMS tool. I put forth the case of www.entertainmentpanama.com, a Tourism & Information Portal that was launched within two months of accepting the project and is already indexed by Google, and aided by a TV and radio campaign.
The project had languished for about 5-6 months before I stepped in. It had never gotten past some dreadful design done in dreamweaver...
(It now sports a SmoothPortal template from joomlashack.com, which, mind you, was the ONLY expense other than domain registration, hosting and what I charged for the project).
It is a showcase of Joomla components. It uses Cinema, Alphadirectory, Joomfish and many others. Eventually it will include Community Builder and more.
I am filled with enthusiasm for Joomla, and I hope that it showed. Afterward a good number of people approached me for copies of my presentation and requests for additional information.
Ehem, even some MAMBO users came up and said, "should we switch?". I'll let YOU guess my answer.
I also plugged some of my upcoming Joomla projects (www.laredsocial.com) (that means The Social Network in Spanish) and other large, medium and small sites I have created using Joomla, at very little expense.
Well, thank you for letting me on the soapbox. I'll crawl back into the shadows.
Take care,
Carlos
Just thought I'd let everybody know...
I have just come back from Geekfest Panama (http://www.geekfestpanama.com), where I have given a "2 minute" presentation on the Joomla Open Source software and why everybody should consider it. (The presentation ran more like 5 minutes).
Geekfest will be a monthly event promoting technology and open source software in Panama's City of Knowledge (http://www.cdspanama.org/index.php?cccp ... anguage=en), sponsored by Alta Software (http://www.altasoftware.com/).
It is free to attend and participate, though you have to reserve. There are giveaways, and free beverages, snacks and pizzas for the attendees, courtesy of Alta. Speakers are not paid.
Four speakers speak for 2 minutes each (or at least THAT'S the plan) on a technology of interest.
Alta Software is a company headed by one Adrian Scott, Ph.D., founder of Ryze, and founding investor in Napster! Yes, in Panama!
Pictures from the event will be available at that URL, probably tomorrow.
Some VERY interesting people & groups showed up.
The Minister of Technology for the Region of Extremadura in Spain, Mr. Luis Millán Vázquez de Miguel. (http://administracion.nccextremadura.net/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1)
He told us how his region, one of the 5th poorest in Europe back in 1983, made a concerted effort to get out, industrialize and technify.
Today citizens of this semi-autonomous region enjoy FULL BROADBAND everywhere, and won a MAJOR Spain / European Union Technology award last year for promoting free and open source software! (I Congreso de Informática en España (CEDI)) http://www.cdspanama.org/index.php?cccpage=index&set_language=en
This gave us a lot of hope for the future of technology in Panama, which is a country with extreme disparity of income and prospects for its citizens.
http://www.g-n-u.de/'s owner and founder Dr. Peter Gerwinski who is also the maintainer of the GNU Pascal project (http://directory.fsf.org/GNUPascal.html) among many other projects.
This german national gave a funny and captivating speech on open source. I wish he could have spoken longer, even though he went well over the time limit.
Two locals also spoke. Mr. Jose Arango of http://www.bootstudio.com gave an interesting talk on the programmatic and usability layers that lead up to User Interface design, and invited us all to an upcoming event about UI. I'll be sure not to miss it. I'll post the URL for that when I have it.
Finally (though I was second on the lineup), I made a simple presentation on the benefits of using Joomla as an open source CMS tool. I put forth the case of www.entertainmentpanama.com, a Tourism & Information Portal that was launched within two months of accepting the project and is already indexed by Google, and aided by a TV and radio campaign.
The project had languished for about 5-6 months before I stepped in. It had never gotten past some dreadful design done in dreamweaver...
(It now sports a SmoothPortal template from joomlashack.com, which, mind you, was the ONLY expense other than domain registration, hosting and what I charged for the project).
It is a showcase of Joomla components. It uses Cinema, Alphadirectory, Joomfish and many others. Eventually it will include Community Builder and more.
I am filled with enthusiasm for Joomla, and I hope that it showed. Afterward a good number of people approached me for copies of my presentation and requests for additional information.
Ehem, even some MAMBO users came up and said, "should we switch?". I'll let YOU guess my answer.
I also plugged some of my upcoming Joomla projects (www.laredsocial.com) (that means The Social Network in Spanish) and other large, medium and small sites I have created using Joomla, at very little expense.
Well, thank you for letting me on the soapbox. I'll crawl back into the shadows.
Take care,
Carlos