Balkan Venture Forum in Sofia is over. It's been two very exciting days, full of many interesting talks both on stage and off stage.
There were so many things that happened and so many new people I met that it will be hard to mention all of that in a single blog post. I just want to highlight the things I enjoyed the most.
Networking & pitching at the bar
I've been invited to BkVF long ago. However my initial intention was not to attend because this month proved to be very busy. I've changed my mind after Boyan Benev, one of the organizers invited me 10 days ago with an interesting proposal - distribute Difio's beer mats at the bar!
So I was there for the networking. As I used to say when people asked me if I was pitching
I am pitching at the bar!
Networking was very intensive both during the coffee breaks and cocktail and during the sessions. I've now got close to 50 new business cards in my pocket. I've met very cool guys and gals both developers and non-tech.
From the companies that were pitching in the main hall I particularly liked Imagga, Transmetrics and Kimola. Imagga was probably the most deep-tech/science oriented company at BkVF while Transmetrics and Kimola focus on cloud and big data solutions.
BlackBerry development session
OK, I'm not into mobile technology nor smart phones but that may change soon. BlackBerry had a strong presence and I was able to talk to some of their developer support folks. The OS of BlackBerry 10 is based on QNX kernel with multiple SDKs available to write apps. Most of all I like the fact that it is POSIX compliant with C/C++ native SDK available. Qt/QML is also available.
I'm particularly interested in how hard it will be to port some existing open source tools to BlackBerry. I'm talking Bash, Python and the command line tools I currently use on Linux. I'll be contacting them in the near future to get a device for testing and hacking and will keep you posted.
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