Randall Newton is live blogging his experiences attending Google's Basecamp for SketchUp users. Google artificially limited attendence to 300, so Randall's one of the lucky ones. Apparently 45,000 wanted to attend -- a problem in logistics the organizers of Autodesk U, SolidWorks W, and Bentley E would love to have.
Entries are listed here: aecnews.com/news/category/26.aspx.
just got back into Canada from BaseCamp and I have a few corrections. Actually, the attendance cap was not artificial - they were holding it on the main Google campus, with a tent set up in one of the courtyards as the central venue. Having 400 extra people milling around in a secure area was a bit of a logistical stretch for them already. The applications for a place were around 4500 actually and even that number surprized them since the previous camp in Boulder actually attracted far fewer. The random draw got a nice mix of old users and newbies and a full assortment of disciplines and hobby users.
It was a great get together - actually being able to talk to the developers and support people. They were all far too tight lipped, so the NDA that we had to sign was useless - we didn't learn anything new about version 7 anyway. Meeting people that you have known virtually for years was a great revelation and a lot of fun. Sorry you didn't get a place, but I think there were some physical limitations. Google seemed happy with the event, so it may become an annual thing that moves around to different venues with different capacities. There's a grass roots movement for BaseCamp Europe already!
Posted by: Kelly | Jun 16, 2008 at 10:32 AM