I lead the Share Your Gadgets session at BarCampMilwaukee, where geeks gathered to gab about gadgets…
It went very well, but like many sessions, it seemed too short. We spent about an hour, but it could have easily gone twice as long. I talked a bit about my PIX Sports device, which is cool, but not quite cool enough. I described how it sort of required morse code to program it to display something, and while the geek factor on that is high, the usability is a bit low. The group was surprised you couldn’t just plug it into a USB port to program it. That would definitely be a nice addition (as long as it didn’t require some lame Windows-only software.) I also mentioned how it had no on/off switch and to turn if off you have to remove the batteries. Someone thought that making it use USB for charging would be a good idea, and it would. So this is a gadget that is cool, but the 2.0 version could be so much cooler.
We also saw and discussed a number of phones and software apps run on them, a Psion organizer circa 1992, and an AlphaSmart Dana Wireless system. This is definitely one session that I wish could have run twice as long. (In fact, I could have went for hours discussing gadget UI‘s, usability, and connectivity.) Ah, well, there’s always next BarCamp…
Things like letting everyone know when sessions were starting or when lunch arrived, or even just trying to find someone in Bucketworks, would have been easier with an intercom system. We could have done something as simple as put an FRS radio in each session room to alert people as to what was going on. (Sadly, I had three radios with me, but didn’t think of it at the time.) I know at least a few times I had to stop sessions from running over their time (only because the space was needed by others) or had to let people know that the session would need to end in 2 minutes.