NetCamp 2008 - Conclusions
I realized most of the people in the Romanian online industry (and even some from outside our borders) are not able or do not know how to create powerful and effective presentations that keep the audience not just awake, but hooked to the topic of the presentation. People don’t know how they can pass across a few and simple key concepts and a lot of them do not have good presentation skills. One of the notable exceptions to this rule seems to be Dragos Manac.
For those who feel that they fell into the cathegory described above, please see the following sources that will most surely help you improve a lot, both your presentations, as well as your presentation skills:
The idea is that you have to avoid flooding your audience with a lot of information, because the audience’s attention is limited and it will only remember a few simple concepts from your slides that are filled with walls of text. On top of it, reading your slides (which happens mostly when you have a lot of information there that you cannot remember easily) turns off most of the audiences, especially since it often makes you turn your back to it (if you are moving somewhere below or in front of your presentation screen and you turn around to look at it).
Other than this major issue that I felt I needed to touch upon, NetCamp 2008 was a pretty interesting event from which I jotted down quite a couple of ideas, not necessarily extremely new, but interesting enough that I wanted to remember them and revisit them when thinking about the online projects I am currently involved in. Here is a really short list of the ideas I’ve wrote down for myself (I watched the develop workshop track):
- Web 1.0 = Control; Web 2.0 = Loss of Control;
- Five web 2.0 concepts – don’t be a dictator, but a majority… say no to censorship… don’t bore your users… don’t trick your users… don’t underestimate web 2.0 potential;
- Twitter could be an interesting application for citizen journalism;
- Developing and online project = writing a business plan (plan to fund, develop and implement) with targets, deadlines and milestones;
If I were to compare FICOD2008 with NetCamp 2008, I can safely say that the Western Europe is far ahead of us in terms of their ideology and their implementation of digital content, most probably at all levels. There are, however, a lot of good and successful online ideas working out on the Romanian online market as well, such as eOK.ro or Trilulilu.ro, for example. But the ideas presented at the NetStartUp, at the end of NetCamp, dissapointed me greatly, because it proved to me that most of the Romanian online entrepreneurs have no idea how to sell themsevels and their ideas (albeit interesting, most of them) to potential investors.