At the end of May we were at J and Beyond 2010, a three-day international conference about the Joomla!World that took place from May 30th to June 1st in Wiesbaden (Germany).
It was an amazing event with more then 50 speeches about the most different topics in 72 hours, and with around 190 attendees from all around the world representing 27 different countries.  (to learn more about jab10: www.jandbeyond.org)

During this great event we put online the first ohanah.com alpha 1 version, the proof of concept of our project at which we are working hard since more then 6 months.

The Ohanah social event management platform allows people to easily create, follow and promote their events in a fully social environment. This is what differs our project from all mainstream and major event manager systems already out there: setting the focus on the networking process between the people, before, during and after the event, along with the goal of integrating other existing services and the ability to deploy event focused application to cover the organizers, planners, and attendees needs. This is why we choose to present the early alpha version of ohanah at the #jab10, an event where the social interactions and the overall networking experience were key factors.

For that purpose we created a “J and Beyond” event page on the live site and started there simulating its use in such a real environment by uploading pictures, writing story updates and making people register and invite their friends to the event itself. Apart some problems with the alpha inviter system the results of the simulation were quite good and the people following the event from home and onsite gave us really positive feed backs.

Here a testimonial from one of them, Rastin Mehr from Vancouver:
“We could follow the J and Beyond event on Ohanah without physically being there. It made me think that Ohanah would be a great place to virtually attend and simultaneously follow multiple events that are happening around the world in real time.”

During the #jab10 we also had the pleasure to get invited by Johan Janssens (Joomla! co-founder and Joomla! 1.5 lead architect) to his #nooku framework extension showcase to make a short presentation of our project.

After those inspiring days in Germany we worked hard on the integration strategy of our platform. Ohanah lacked of an event registration system, so we went on the quest for one to integrate. Wufoo.com amazing services and apis were just what we were looking for: easy custom online forms creation, allowing event organizers to collect whatever information they need from their attendees. Thanks to wufoo now ohanah offers a robust, flexible and extremely powerful event registration system allowing complete control of the collected data.
In the following weeks we will deploy the ohanah alpha 1.1 with this new proof of concept and few other nifty features to our users. If you would like to experience ohanah request a free invitation.

In conclusion of the “J and Beyond” experience we would like to thank all the event organizers and all the other people interested in our project that came speaking to us, during and also after the event. They appreciated the work done until now and in particular they liked our philosophy of “not reinventing the wheel, but to find better ways to use and integrate what’s already out there”.
That gave us the consciousness of being working on the right path, and motived us further to work harder toward a beta version of our service in order to be soon able to fully support such great events like the J and Beyond 2010.