What do they say be careful what we wished for? Indeed we are in a big surprise when roughly 150 people showed up for the event and have outgrown the hall that we've started Webcamp from!

All we can say is: Thanks for making Webcamp KL a smash! We w...

Finally! We are hitting mainstream!

Webcamp KL was featured on BFM Radio today with an interview of the organizers, Wu Han and Seh Hui. During the show, we talk about how Webcamp KL got started, what makes Webcamp valuable and our mission to nurture a community of great people who are passionate about technology.

Two of our sister groups are also highlighted during the show: Educamp KL and MyCocoaHeads.

Check out the full interview below!

(Source: BFM Radio – TechTalk: Webcamp KL)

As luck has it, we had our Webcamp during Diwali: a festival of lights celebrated by the Indian community. While we do miss our fair share of murukku, we have a great lineup of speakers who were kind enough to spend time with us and share their expertise:

Yam Tong Woo – My Blind Sight: How Technology Empowers The Visually Impaired

Patrick Lim, Founder of Greenroom136 – 10 Lessons I've Learned From Project ConcreteJungle Interviewees

Mats Engstrom, CTO of ViA International – Tweet In, Tweet Out

Tristan Gomez, MindValley – Meaningful Metrics

Milad Rastian – Configure and Manage Your Servers in a FLASH with Puppet

Summary

The event kicked off with Yam Tong Woo, a visually impaired automative engineer who lost his sight due to a bacterial infection. With brimming positive energy and enthusiasm, he shared how the Internet and the mobile web transformed and empowered his daily life. During this talk, he presented a live demo on how the visually impaired access the Internet and offers his advice on the current state of assistive technology and issues he faced. As a bonus, he shared his passion for golf and how he's able to continue to play the sport. He currently maintains a blog called My Blind Sight.

The Webcampers were in for a treat as Patrick Lim recorded episode 10 of Project ConcreteJungle podcast live. Check out his talk with lessons he'd learned from the nine highly entrepreneurial guests he had on Project ConcreteJungle, closing with one bonus lesson that involved the common trait he observed from all interviewees. What's the common traits that they had in common? You have to listen in to find out!

Armed with a credit card terminal, Mats Engstrom presented his geeky little side project to make a credit card terminal print live tweets from Twitter. Dig into his adventures of exploring and using the Twitter API and the journey of making the tweet printing credit card terminal. For electronic junkies out there, you know you'd want to make one of these ;).

For business owners out there who's looking into seeing their ROI of their campaigns, we have the perfect talk for you: Tristan Gomez was in the house talking about meaningful metrics – and in 26 minutes he shared about what makes certain data and numbers in your report meaningful, how to craft your metrics and even a case study on how Mindvalley is able to harness its power to track sales and conversions.

Closing the event is Milad Rastian, a sysadmin talking about the importance of tools to automate the heck out of thankless jobs of configuring and managing your servers. In the talk, he shared his experiences in performing the task, open source tools available and specifically talks about he used Puppet to do his job. After all, it great to have fun back in the sysadmin world ;).

Help Wanted

The WCKL team is looking for awesome volunteers to bring Webcamp beyond the confinements of Kuala Lumpur!  If you love what we are doing, ping our Papa Smurf, Wu Han and we'll bring awesomeness to the world!

Help that #WCKL needed:

Networkers to make #WCKL newcomers at home during events :)

Event photographers

Graphic designers to spice up our site (and other promotional swag)

Audio/video editors to make our recordings awesome!

Event planners to organize more *Camps in Malaysia

Photo credit: Anil Wadghule [Source]

What if you bring in all the most active members on the Webcamp KL Facebook group to give talks for the night? One word: EPIC!

Yes, this month we have the all-stars lineup of experts and go on a full-on technical track, topics ranging from Google Analytics to blazing fast web development. Diving into this month's agenda, we have:

Ngeow Wu Han – Keynote: Tribal Leadership

Michal Pietrusinski – Everyone Can Do White-Hat SEO

Leong Seh Hui – Making the WCKL Podcast

Kai Hendry – The Ikiwiki Web Platform

Grey Ang – Blazing Fast Web Development with Jade and Stylus

Arzumy MD — "I, Paul the Octopus"

Brian Ritchie – Analytics on Steriods, Part 1

Summary

A fair warning before listening in: there are a couple of F-bombs and mentions of parts of a reproductive organs being and they are kept in-tact, so if you are easily offended even by mild references, stay away :).

The event kicks off with Wu Han setting the tone for the event by sharing a five-point scale in the book Tribal Leadership, from "My life sucks" to "Life is great!" and shares the Webcamp KL vision of having a strong tribe of highly engaged and satisfied members.

Following into our first talk was Michal Pietrusinski sharing a great introduction to white-hat SEO and why everyone could do it. According to Michal, there is one very critical strategy in getting ranked on the first page of Google, and with that, the tactics will easily follow and adapt. Find out what that secret sauce is!

The second talk was brought to you by yours truly (as the writer of the blog post :)) going through the steps of making a good podcast from a raw audio recording to a shiny entry in iTune's podcast page. In this talk, I shared all the workflow, tips and secrets in getting up to speed in making your own podcast and what pitfalls you should avoid. If you want to explore a new channel to spread your message to the masses, tune in!

We also had a special guest all the way from the UK this month: Kai Hendry, who have contributed to the HTML5 specification (WOW!). In this talk, Kai shared about a project called Ikiwiki, which sports some really great features that geeks would really appreciate: it stores pages in a revision control system and uses Markdown as the editing syntax. Not to mention that you can edit your wiki pages from the command line.

The audience were in a roll when Grey Ang took the stage and demoed two great tools that greatly speeds up your web development efforts: Jade and Stylus, mainly due to the fact that Grey played along with Harrinder's, umm, choice of word to be used in the demo. Get infected by the hilarious vibes from the Webcamp live audience :). Due to the fact that you can't see code through an audio session, you can grab the full source code from Grey's Github account.

Arzumy was playing soothsayer that night with the title "I, Paul the Octopus" – sharing his experiences in using the Google Prediction API. In his demo, he shows how you could hook up with the Predictions API, feed it with a list of titles used in landing pages and the traffic received and have it predict whether our titles for our new landing pages will prove to be a smash hit based on historical data. Neat!

To wrap it up, Brian Ritchie go on deep in the first of a two-part talk on Google Analytics. In this technical session, Brian teaches beyond the basic of the pretty dashboard on Google Analytics: he dives deep to show you how custom variables and multi-channel attribution open up to a wealth of data to help you understand your website visitors better and how well does your marketing campaign perform. As a business owner, you should check out this great overview to this power tool.

Help Wanted

It is raining jobs since the beginning the year and everyone is looking for talent: among them are Mindvalley (Brian Ritchie), Quantips (Talat), InstantTaxBack.com (Mila) and CellKast (Johnson). If you are a web developer/web designer, feel free to contact them!

The very thing that makes WebCamp KL awesome: rain or shine, WebCamp KL will go on – even on public holidays! Yes, while most Malaysians were celebrating our 54th Independence Day and Hari Raya, we're really pleased that there's a strong turnout and community bonding for this month's event. (and having pizza and beer helps, too!)

Despite being a shorter WebCamp than usual, we are glad to have a solid lineup of speakers:

Richerd Chan – How I went from being an iPhone developer to sleeping on the streets of Kuala Lumpur

Mats Engstrom – Electronics design: from idea to market

Summary

While we didn't intend to make it the theme, Richerd Chan kicked off with an eye-opening story of how does it feels like being homeless on the streets of Kuala Lumpur for several days: from being exposed to the elements (rain, in particular) to debunking the myth that Kuala Lumpur would be as quiet as a ghost town during the long holidays. And his story is bound to be really juicy when I had to bleep out certain words to spare unsuspecting listeners. Curious? Listen in! :D

Richerd previously lives as the principal developer for HootSuite's iOS application, adventurous at heart and working on a stealth startup that would transform your Gmail to a support helpdesk command centre.

And do you have a passion for electronics? And would you love to design an electronic kit to fellow hobbyist? And what if you could turn your passion into a side business? Joining us in our second talk is Mat Engstrom, who shares his experience and the process of starting your own electronics side business. There's some really solid nuggets you shouldn't miss out!

Q&A and Help Wanted Panel

Finally, we have 20 minutes of solid community townhouse session where members can ask for help from the community. Two Q&A questions were raised:

In a web application that has elements of HTML5, how do you maintain backwards compatibility with older versions of Internet Explorer? And is the effort of maintaining such support viable?

What a website that sells dresses can do to solve an Adwords campaign which has seen clickthroughs but zero conversion?

Some resources mentioned in this episode includes:

Modernizr

Google Chrome Frame

Twitter's Bootstrap framework

Highlights of the help wanted session:

Christina wanted to know a cost estimate of developing and maintaining a social media site for a niche market, as well as seeking for investment for her new startup

Khalid from StyleKandi is looking for a frontend developer for their startup, contact AnticsMedia for details

Nicholas Yip from Innity is looking for 13 experienced, hardcore web developers who is confident is handle large loads of data

Joshua is looking for a technical co-founder for a mobile social media site for a niche market

Daniel from Experian is looking for Javascript specialists

A hackerspace in Multimedia Universiti, Cyberjaya is looking for volunteers to mentor the younger generation

An experienced product developer is offering consultation services to accelerate your startup

The same web developer who asked for help in the Q&A for his online store to sell dresses is looking for side hustles and offers his experience in PostgreSQL, accounting and ERP systems

In the spirit of WebCamp, we are always eager to try new things to spice things up. In this meetup, we are trying out two new formats: Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds each) and Powerpoint-Karaoke (impromptu presentations on random slides).

We are...

In this episode, WebCamp KL took a voyage from the mothership (aka MindValley's Hall of Awesomeness) to Fluentspace – an newly established co-working space in Kelana Jaya. The team is really thrilled to be there – looking at the carefully designed interior to the people who decided to make it their sanctuary to get work done.

We are also in for a great surprise when more than 70 people showed up for the event – an unprecedented full-house with like-minded people taking up a narrow hall from end to end. Some audiences get so close that they sat right beside the speaker, with only a table separating them both.

As usual, the meetup is packed with great talks as well as something fresh:

Opening keynote: Welcome to Fluentspace! – Kamal Fariz Mahyuddin, Fluentspace

Five Things I Learned, Building Greenroom136 – Patrick Lim, founder of Greenroom136

Web Apps and the Art of Mathematical Betting – Talat Fakhri, founder of Quantips

Building EngineerList, the Startup Roots Way – James Chan, investment manager of Neoteny Labs

Event announcement: Hackweekend – Hakim Albasrawy & Brian Ritchie

Big Think: The WCKL Mastermind Group/Luncheons – Ngeow Wu Han

Poetry recital: Holding Hands – Thato Ntshabele, PoetsPassport

Highlights

The session kicked off with a bang when Patrick Lim shared his stories in building up his messenger bag company, Greenroom136 – showing its progress with pictures of every bag he created throughout his journey: from zero, to the embarrassingly ugly first attempt, up till the rugged and downright gorgeous bags that everyone wants one as soon as they see it.

Talat Fakhri follows-up with his talk on his hypothesis on why web apps is the perfect medium to start your own business and why through rapid iterative development and prototyping would stack chances in your favour. As a bonus, understand why he'd make a bold statement of why “entrepreneurs are like gamblers and the VCS are like casinos”.

James Chan came all the way from Singapore to share a new approach in supercharging emerging tech ecosystems through the StartupRoots initiative. He thoroughly explains why Asia is where all the action is going to happen in the future and how the talent pool in Asia is unable to catchup with the demands of tech innovations. Check out why this initiative is worth sponsoring and how having a de-centralized Y-Combinator/Techstars would work.

The father and think tank of WebCamp KL, Wu Han, shares his big think for a community-driven WebCamp KL mastermind group/luncheon, which allows entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-to-be to ask for help: whether it is asking for connections to talent, vetting startup ideas or brainstorming.

The event is ended with a high-note thank to Thato, who recited a great poem called holding hands – reminding us to stay connected and to love the people around us. The cheers and applause for the performance is breathtaking and thunderous, clearly showing resonances among the crowd. This would make it the manifesto of WebCamp KL, don't you think? :)

Announcements

Kamal and Brian announced Hackweekend: a 24-hour hackathon that gathers coders, visionaries and designers. The event will be held on 9–10 July at NSTP's WakaLabs and the theme of the hackathon is Gamification. If you haven't signed up for this great event, rush over to their site and sign up now! (after all, how would you be able to resist the unlimited supply of Red Bull to keep you going? ;))

WebCampKL is also going to have a T-shirt design competition, and whomever who comes up with the chosen design will get The Prime: this badass messenger bag sponsored by Greenroom136 (Thanks Patrick! :D). You want it? You gotta earn it! Look out in the WebCamp KL Facebook Group (or this blog) for further announcements!

Thanks to Fluentspace for hosting the event! If you want to have a great place to work in and mingle with highly motivated freelancers and entrepreneurs, you should check them out!

As Rapture's not happening as predicted, what better time to imagine what the future might look like. With a massive boom in web technologies, Webcamp KL have invited great speakers to whip up their crystal balls and share their vision of the future. (despite their humble acknowledgment that they aren't clairvoyant)

The awesome lineup for the month consists of:

The Future of Storage – Colin Charles, open source software hacker and all sort of stuff

A Realtime Web – Kamal Fariz, Fluentspace

The History Of The Future – Gareth Davies (aka ShaolinTiger), Blogger, Photographer, Hacker

The Performing Arts Goes Digital – Low Ngai Yuen, Kakiseni.com

Educating Tomorrow's Kids, Today – Ngeow Wu Han, Mindvalley

Q&A panel – with Colin, Chris Hong, Gareth, Ngai Yuen and Wu Han

The Global Student Entrepreneurship Award – Min Xian

In this month's meetup, we have Colin Charles sharing a birds eyes view on the future of data and storage – everything from databases, NoSQL and even Database as a Service (DBaaS). Followed by our own Ruby guru talking about how to make your web-apps real time with Juggernaut.

Blasting way back into the past, Gareth Davies shows that iPad, Skype and other technology that has actually been conceived as far back as a century ago. (that's why science fiction is awesome: they have more foresight and accuracy than fortune tellers)

Bridging tech with non-tech, we have Ngai Yuen from Kakiseni sharing how technology is being used to promote and change the performing arts and calls for action in changing the local landscape in a struggling industry. Lastly, Wu Han shares his passionate big think of how education of the future should be like. (Sir Ken Robinson is his hero and you should check out Ken's animated video, Changing Paradigm, which serves as Wu Han's daily inspiration)

The event ends with an electrifying high note with the Q&A panel with members of the audience sharing the same passion for arts and education and bounced ideas to bring change. It's especially exciting to hear a story how a geography teacher make use of an underutilized computer lab and changed how subjects are being taught.

This is the longest recording we ever had and the energy and passion is totally electrifying. Enjoy this podcast and hope you'll be as pumped up as much as we do during the event!

This month's meetup was definitely one that would get everyone's ears perked up as Aaron Chipper, CTO of Friendster came to give a talk. Most of us would fondly remember when Friendster is THE blazing hot social network in Asia and famously known to be plagued by crashes and performance issues before Facebook came in happily gobbled up their user base.

And with the announcement of our Malaysian owned MOL Sdn Bhd acquiring Friendster and people are made aware of the patents Friendster owned pertaining to social networks, Friendster has yet again gained media attention and having people wondering what Friendster is up to now.

The speaker lineup were as follows:

Joget Workflow – Law Tien Soon, VP Open Dynamics

“Being Awesome - it's easy! (when you're awesome)” – Aaron Chipper, CTO Friendster

How to be an underdog in overdrive – Chu Tzu-Ming, Persuasion Technologies

Pitching session: Introducing FeedGeorge.com – See Tho Chee Seong, founder of FeedGeorge.com

Event announcement: Startup Weekend – Daniel Cerventus

Event announcement: Nova Weekend – Hakim Albasrawy

Event announcement: IGDA Malaysia Meetup – Bazil Akmal Bidin

Summary

The event is given a kickstart with a demonstration from Tien Soon of how easy you can create workflow applications fast with no code involved. The audio certainly does no justice to seeing how impressive and easy Joget Workflow helps you in creating a workflow applications (the audience were awe-strucked), you would be interested to check the step-by-step video tutorials posted on Joget Workflow to see for yourselves.

Aaron Chipper, CTO of Friendster, later takes the limelight by constantly engaging the audience in candid conversations, like he puts it “Friendster is an agile company and so I think I'll make this an agile chat.” He assures that Friendster is not dead yet (otherwise he wouldn't be there) and shares the history and events that surrounds the birth and beginning of social media platform wars, handling the technology crisis, mismanagement and bad code as well as the future of Friendster.

The hilarious tragic comedy and lessons learned in dealing with bad technical direction and bad code is really worth listening to, and the dramatic history of the “YEAH! to meh…” roller-coaster ride in Friendster would keep you wanting to know what's happening next. And with several relaunches and pivots that Friendster gone through, this cat is still going strong with more lives left.

Getting straight into business, Tzu Ming shares his stories of living through the dotcom boom and bust and why it is important to work towards being an underdog. He argues that success does not depend on your mindset, but rather the ability to focus on four elements of creating a successful business: aiming towards high returns, distribution, marketing and sales, self promotion and access to capital. With examples, he outlines a solid framework in thinking how you should think of structuring your business that would increasing your chances of succeeding.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, Tzu Ming's talk is one that you shouldn't miss.

It's one month after one of the greatest WebCamp turnout, it does feel like it's hard to top that record. But as happy WebCampers, it's great to know that WebCamp is going strong one year after it first started.

To wrap up the first quarter of the year, we decided to explore the recent trending topics of the year: the concept of co-working (and remote working, for that matter), NoSQL data stores as well as commercializing mobile application. How fun! :D

And here it is, the line up of the month:

On his experience starting up White Space – Jason Chow, CEO of White Space Int'l

Tearing the Sofa Apart: CouchDB & CouchApps from a Beginner's Perspective – Leong Seh Hui, Application developer, 40Square

Commercialise your mobile product and service – Aaron Lee, TeAM supporting partner

Pitching session: Careers at Mindvalley – Vishen Lakhiani, founder and CEO, Mindvalley

Pitching session: Careers at Antics Media – Khalid Hilaby, lead web developer, Antics Media

Summary

Everyone loves to have an office, especially one that comes with an address of a very prime and hip location in Kuala Lumpur (say, KLCC). But what if you are a one-man freelancer and an office would only drag you down in terms of rent and mobility? Jason Chow is a successful entrepreneur who managed to create a successful business with not only one co-working space, but two (and with plans of creating a third one in Bangsar)!

In his talk, he talks about the journey off setting it up and expanding it, as well as the future he envisioned about the business. Now, that's a very exciting plan to hear about and wouldn't it be awesome when Whitespace manages to have co-working spaces all over Malaysia?

Next up is yours truly giving a premier on CouchDB – a distributed document store that is so easy to use and understand that you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure. In this talk, I guide you through the key concepts and features of CouchDB so to get you started as soon as possible.

As a bonus (or maybe distraction?), I presented the WebCamp KL Facebook group page stats and break down juicy bits from the best time to post so you get the most eyeballs to the most active members in the group. Come on! If you are a WebCamper, you'd be curious about it, won't you? ;)

The last talk of the day was from Aaron Lee, who talks about how to commercialize your mobile application… or scrap that, mobile is more broader than just applications! Aaron presents you the various means which you could build your business in mobile: it could be new alerts, applications or even cute cat videos! He also touch on the various strategies you could monetize your mobile idea as well as the current state and affairs in the mobile business.

The whole talk ended up with a very passionate debate touching on the unfairness in revenue shares due to predatory mobile operators and the state of monetizing mobile music. So to gain insider information of what's really happening in the space and what it could possibly be like in partnering with mobile operators, you shouldn't miss this!

To wrap things up, all WebCampers are showered by career opportunities by two great companies: Mindvalley and Antics Media. Mindvalley has been a great host for WebCamp in the past year and beyond by allowing us to use their meeting space as well as chipping in some snacks to munch on. And Antics Media showed very polished and exciting projects to work on in the future. So if you are looking for a job and you want to work with exciting people and projects, they are still hiring :).

Enjoy the podcast!