We’re just back from 24 hours of ideas, interesting people and pizza at BathCamp08 and a huge amount of interesting topics were discussed by some very interesting people.

Talks ranged from linking CurrentCost and social media to influence people to reduce their power consumption (an idea I am keen to try out at Gradwell HQ), through to talks on how computing is changing the face of Archeology. There was some hacking, voip and lego in there too! We all had a great time.

But why is such a conference important? Specifically, why as a company, did we put some money behind it? Why should more people sponsor these sorts of things.

There are a few reasons:

• Product Research: It’s ultra-useful to be able to present an idea, without having to give the answer. BarCamps are full of people who know what your subject is and have a useful all round knowledge. So your presentation is more of a discussion - and in our case, Peter Gradwell presented some ideas about mixing up VoIP, Web Hosting and SMS. That’s important as an enthusiast, and ultra-useful as a company.
• Employee & Supplier Search: You get to meet the right-people. At <Gradwell> we want to find good web developers in the locality, who are uptodate with the current trends and technology. Both as an employer, but also as a client, especially for our corporate website, which is permanently in-need of attention! What’s cool about BathCamp is that there was a mix of techies and non-techies, the outcome of which was some really great discussion about how things should be done.
• Technology Trends: It helps us develop and you get to learn about what is going on. We had no idea how many people used twitter and that helps us with our decision to use it for customer communication.

So, after a fascinating 24 hours, we have yet more ideas and things to do on monday when we get back to work.

If you’re an organisation that uses the internet, technology or social media, then we’d encourage you to get involved and cough up a bit of sponsorship too.

Finally, lots of people said how kind we, and other sponsors where for parting with hard-earned cash. The fact is, that writing the cheque is the easy bit - organising an event is not, and we’re very grateful to the BathCamp Organisers for doing so.

Hopefully, we can fill the time between now and BathCamp09 with some informal meetups of the Bath web community.

Peter Gradwell