WebDosBeta is Spain’s equivalent of the Web 2.0 Conference and it was held on 24 October in Madrid. I noticed it the other day in Technorati’s Top 10 searches, but at the time I couldn’t find any English translations. Thankfully Yannick Laclau has come through for us English-speakers and posted a fantastic summary on his blog (hat-tip Rafat for passing it on to me).
Yannick described the event as “an intense day of startup presentations and panel discussions” and noted that more than 150 people from all over Spain attended. I enjoyed Yannick’s description of how WebDosBeta came about:
“This was a grassroots initiative started by Albert Armengol’s post on the lack of innovation in Spain. Journalist Enrique Dans and SixApart’s man in Spain, Victor Ruiz, picked up on this meme and the three of them kicked off, via the blogosphere naturally, the idea to hold a conference.”
Those of us who don’t live in the US could do the same in our countries. On innovation in Spain, Yannick wrote:
“It’s alive! There are great hackers here, and totally cluedtrained entrepreneurs who are as internet-addicted, tech-passionate, and buzzword-savvy as anybody anywhere. But I guess the problem is that it’s not a very large group, they’re not clustered anywhere in particular, and are desperately undercapitalized. Almost everybody presenting seemed to be totally bootstrapped operations!”
That could very well describe any country outside of the US! And even in the US, outside of Silicon Valley.
Yannick noted that the best conversations at the conference were with “real entrepreneurs, even if their companies are tiny” – rather than the country reps of the big US Internet companies.
Also check out the list of companies that presented at WebDosBeta. There are some interesting-sounding ones there, but one in particular caught my eye. It’s called EyeOS and is apparently an Open Source project to build a Web-based Operating System. On their webpage it’s described as:
“…a free, cross-platform Personal Content Manager System based upon the style of a Desktop Operating System. The base package includes the whole Operating System structure and ten apps, as a Calendar, a File Manager, a Text Editor, an Internal Messenger, a Browser and a Calculator.”
According to Yannick, EyeOS is the product of three “18-year-old catalan kids”. It sounds like an intriguing product, so I’ve added it to my list of apps to keep an eye on (pun unavoidable).
Thanks Yannick for updating the English-speaking world on what was obviously a Web 2.0 event every bit as enjoyable and energetic as the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.
UPDATE: Albert Armengol points out in the comments that it was actually one of my posts that inspired Albert’s post that led to the creation of WebDosBeta! Very cool 🙂
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)