Finally Australia/Sydney has reached a critical mass of internet enthursiasts and entrepreneurs to organise conferences and meetups. The web industry is flourishing. It has taken some time from the very humble start of Web standards group of a room of ~10 people at the Australian Museum.

Then there was the Web Essentials conference, now rebranded as Web Directions. More recently there’s other styles of meetup / casual conferences like Webjam and Barcamp.

The type of audience is ever expanding from the bleeding edge geeks to the general web related professional to technology entrepreneurs. I am happy to see the passion in everyone that participated and learnt a great deal from their presentations. I was also great to meet people from outside of Australia join in the fun. It was great to meet brothercake, the author of various high quality javascript library including the ultimate dropdown menu.

However, what I see is still missing is the attention to the mobile industry. There’s some highly priced, well organised conferences on mobile trends targetting corporate CEOs, e.g. AIMIA mobile industry group. But even at Barcamp, I would expect some mobile startup or development companies to participate in the discussions. The mobile industry will become a very hot space very shortly, given high performance devices like iPhone is already commercialised. There’s a mobile monday group in Melbourne. And I just found out there’s one for Sydney, as I’m writing this post. I would love to see more mobile startup actions rather than replicas of US web 2.0 ideas.

Lastly, I need do abit of promotions for our Ruby on Rails Sydney group. We’ve meetings every month and it’s been a great learning experience and social event for fellow RoR developers. We’ve recently got the blog setup and there’ll be more to come. The mailing list and IRC chat room has had some interesting discussions. And NO! I should not mention there’s a railsconfau which doesn’t seem to have any speakers but is collecting ticket money.