It was Saturday the 22nd of May, 2010 - but more importantly, it was the first ever WordCamp Malaysia, with a keynote speech from Automattic by Naoko McCracken (who gracefully celebrated her birthday with us) and guest appearances from Matt and Andy via pre-recorded video interviews conducted by Colin Charles during WordCamp San Fransisco.
Firstly, let’s point out that the organizing committee - lead by Simon Lim did an outstanding job in the organization and running of the actual event. We hope that as much effort goes into the marketing and promotion of the event next year, where we’ve already started counting down the days!
Furthermore, as Terminal Junkie pointed-out:
This is the very first Wordcamp event to be held in Malaysia and I must commend the effectiveness of the organisers from start to finish. The whole event was on time and on schedule, something you don’t always see in a Malaysian’s event as they are infamous for their tardiness.
We believe the venue was an excellent choice, and the service provided by the hotel was exceptional. Good food and drinks, plenty of snacks and an excellent buffet spread for lunch with cakes and drinks in the afternoon too. Each table had fresh water and sweets stocked each time we re-entered the room, and the internet provided by PI was sufficient to power the 150+ attendees.
If you’re into Twitter, Joshua Ong made the best compilation of the key tweets - very cool stuff:
@icednyior Buddypress creates a whole new type of wordpress. Bring ur site out of the box & it’s free #wcmy
@kreativethemes BuddyPress as Event Management and Geolocation tools looks promissing #wcmy
@icednyior Buddypress features easily extensible plugins – make a Flickr like site, add events feature, ratings, geolocation #wcmy
@Bennimaru Extensions for #BuddyPress: doc sharing, photo albums, tweet/face streams, ratings, geolocation, events & more #wcmy
@icednyior U can build ur own foursquare by redefining the social layer in buddypress #wcmy
@vernieman Nice. BuddyPress is a re-definable Social Layer. Build your own Foursquare, FTW! #wcmy
@Bennimaru BuddyPress will be great for focus groups, community sites. Catering for individuals wif similar interests #wcmy
Talking of very cool stuff and Twitter, when we were asked to provide some marketing material for the WordCamp goodie-bags, we knew we needed something a little more memorable than flyers that would get thrown in the bin by the end of the day. At the time, a few of us here at the office were crazy (still are) about Foursquare, and figured, hell, why not get the Foursquare features we always wanted into gMaps ready for launch, and then go out and build four different square badges, and then we’d be handing out Four square badges! Trouble was, for the life of us, we hunted high and low and could not find anyone in Malaysia capable of creating nice looking square badges, so ended-up with round ones:
Our badges had a small URL hidden on them, which once visited presented people with an image and the task of finding two hidden letters from within the image. Collecting all 4 badges, putting together the 8 digit promotional code and auto-tweeting each discovery allowed us to run the competition live at the event from our mobile devices, where Jimmy was able to announce the winners by the time he presented. It was rather exciting when it got down to the last place and 5 or 6 people were all racing to get the last clue. Speaking of which, as soon as ThePremiumPress is ready to launch, they will post another article with the winners and more details on promotions available to those attending.
In addition, we also managed to find this video from WeGoPro on YouTube: