if you’re in Vienna or surroundings, lets meet at tomorrows BarCamp Vienna 2007! taking place at WerkzeugH, we’re starting at 10am with two session-tracks + catering + afterparty at 7pm. the attendance - of course - is free, as are the fresh BarCamp-shirts I got from Merchzilla yesterday (kudos for sponsoring go to Super-Fi)… 
Thanks to Helge, the next instalment of Barcamp Vienna is going to be on Sunday, june 10th 2007 @ WerkzeugH! See you there!
it’s an inconvenient but somehow accepted opinion that society & politics in europe (and Austria probably in particular) don’t really foster entrepreneurship and small-scale business the way they do overseas. YEurope, a (Micro-)Venture Capital firm based in Vienna and launched earlier this week by Paul Böhm (Metalab) is a welcome change. obviously inspired by US-VC Y-Combinator, YEurope is offering small-scale funding to local web/tech-startups. for more info read the controversial at Y-Combinator’s forum or the followup at my not-yet-launched-officially, german-language blog.
as reported by Robert Scoble & 3pointD, a new Second Life-competitor is currently being developed in Australia: like SL, Outback Online is based primarily on user-generated content, but promises better scalability by use of P2P-technologies, better 3D-graphics and the ability to host much larger user-audiences than SL. however, this is private beta, no screenshots whatsoever, and their blog seems to be only a week old. smells a bit like vaporware to me, but only time will tell.
another virtual reality just launched into (sort of) public beta recently is Papermint. however, comparing the austrian project to SL seems a bit unfair, since it’s hardly more than a graphically enhanced chatroom aimed at technically non-inclined beginners. the java-based client replaces common 3D-graphics with simple semi-perspectives similar to paper-cuts and from what I have seen on my brief visit, content is predefined mostly. furthermore, I guess creator Avaloop kept beta-accounts a bit too scarce - I hardly met other users in Papermint. if you want to try it anyway, keep in mind that it’s german-only.
