Jota a fellow GASPer (portuguese arquitects group), was won the Iron Architect contest in Teched Developers Europe.
Portugal was well represented. Off the 5 participants 2 were Portuguese, and incidentally (actually not by accident, the totality of the portuguese contestants are members of GASP, i would like to think that this is due to the quality of our recruitment policies :-)).
All submissions were very similar, but all of them relied on the human factor do the the decisions. Jota went the for an automated solution, instead of having humans deciding the outcome of the attendees requests, the outcome has totally decided based on the attendees interests (based on the topics attended and their preferences). Very web 2.0
Most of the credit on his winning, should in reality be attributed to me. All the great ideas he put in his presentation, where obtained from me through osmosis. While Jota was preparing his presentation in our hotel room, i was sleeping in the other bed transpiring my inspiration to him. :-) Jokes aside, the point i i'm trying to make is, although the presentations seem to be simple, they took a lot of effort (apart from not sleeping much, some presenters had to skip some sessions in order to prepare their submission).
Apart from Jota presentation, i would also like to give some Nicklas (an alpha male nerd from Finland (on his own words)), also did a great presentation. His idea, was very similar to the other 4 contestants, but his presentation was clean, very well structured, very crisp and flawless presented. Alas, style isn't everything, substance wins over style. :-)
(although web 2.0 is so last year, it seems some luminaries are already in web 3.0 :-))
You can read his submission here
Congratulations!!!
The jury was composed by the following persons:
Photos of the Contestants (in order of appearance)
João Martins (Jota) (Portugal) (with jury)
Gunnar Piho (Estonia)
Luis Martins (Portugal)
Philippe Freddi (switzerland)
Nicklas Andersson
And all the contestants (gunnar is missing from the phone, and we have Canoas as a special guest appearance holding the microphone)
