Facebook Garage Round-up and Pics/Videos
11th of February 2011 by conor
The Facebook Garage on Wednesday was an absolute thrill to be a part of. We had 140 sign-ups so, using our normal measures around free events, we expected 50-60. In fact it peaked at over 90 people! Luckily the lovely Gateway Ireland building was easily able to accommodate everyone.
We have a bunch of people to thank:
- Louise Byrne from Gateway Ireland who took care of absolutely everything. It wouldn’t have happened without her
- John McColgan for giving us the use of the building
- Niamh Walsh and Will Peat who helped Louise throughout the day
- Alan Duggan for helping to control the flood of arrivals
- Colm Doyle and the Facebook Ireland crew for all their support and the schwag
- Brynn Holland, Julia Lam and the Facebook US crew for all of their support and the Garage Pack
- Everyone for turning up
- And of course…..
The Speakers:
The Garage opened with Richard Delevan of BetaPond talking about Facebook Places
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URI4BobgTtE
This was followed by Ben Arent and Jonathan Siegel providing insights into the the challenges around different sign-up flows and abandonment on RightRental.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a5Jgvb1W_g
Then we had David Johnston from OWJO talking about f-Commerce and in-Tab stores.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UqvIYkB6U
Sebastien Sicot from Bluecube Interactive gave some genuinely surprising stats on competitions, engagement and incentives.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX-A8k3F3-o
Sean O’Sullivan from Rococo Software talked about Local Social and how proximity adds a layer of personalisation to location
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHeqeQXGH3k
Finally Colm Doyle from Facebook gave a run-down on Places, Credits and the latest news on the Platform. Of course if we’d had the Garage on Thursday we’d have been there all night with questions on the changes to Pages 
As I said at the end of the event, we want as wide a range of people speaking at the Garages as possible. Whether you are a lone developer or a large company doing interesting, useful or fun things on the Facebook Platform, we want to hear you speak.
Why not contact web2ireland.editor@gmail.com now if you think you’d like to speak at the next Garage.
The plan in 2011 was to do one Garage per Quarter but the feedback on Wednesday was that you want them more often. So we’ll aim to have the next one much sooner. Keep an eye on Web2Ireland.