Techdays is next week (so far 1739 people registered and confirmed), in order too see what kind of applications people could build around it, a bunch of people mentored by Jose António Almeida build a backend system which exposed it's data so people can built around satellite applications.
We also build a front end, which the community and attendees can use to see the sessions, the speakers and most importantly where atendees can customize their agenda.
The front end, was just one of the interfaces, that was used to experiment with some technologies (RSS,etc) that exposed just enough information that so we could see what kind of uses people would come it.
We also had other ideas, which we didn't had the time to explore. We wanted to have User Generated content, a Friend of a Friend implementation, and some data mining. Alas time seems to be as limited as usual. We had plenty of ideas but never had the time to implement them. Maybe next year.
Optionally attendees can opt in to expose their private agenda. If they opt in the system exposes the list of subscribed sessions via RSS so people can do all sort of nice things. For example, you can opt for exposing the sessions you are pretending to attend in your blog, using one of the many available RSS widgets online. If later you decide to switch your agenda, you just change your agenda on My Techdays site and your blog is automatically updated when the widget refreshes.
Here is the list of blogs that are already doing it:
Ricardo Calejo, Gonçalo Chaves
The entire agenda, is not only visible via the website, but is also available via RSS, so people can do all sort of nifty things with it. So far two applications (that i know of) have been built or are almost ready that use this public interface. A application to view and build your own agenda, one in WPF and another version for mobile devices.
Today i've also see a cool demo done by one member of MLDC (Microsoft center for language development. The team the is writing the suport for the Portuguese language in Speech Server), the application consisted of an IVR system to which you could dial, to have information about Techdays Sessions (which uses My Techdays backend data), but this is no traditional IVR system, you don't use your phone touch keys to navigate on the sessions, you speak to the system, it magically understands what you want through speech recognition and reads aloud the information you requested. For example you can ask speakers by name or sessions by title or hour. Very very cool.
You can also view this feed on IE7, we included in the RSS, some extensions which IE7 can explore. Example, see the sessions by tags, by tracks, sort by hour or session, even search. Very nifty.
I have built a video explaining how you can customize your own agenda (comments in Portuguese, apart from the non Portuguese speakers, all attendees will be Portuguese. :-))
See the My Techdays and customize your agenda, i know there are a few more surprises if you do it and you are going to TechDays.
See the video: