The Web 2.0 Summit kicked off this week in San Francisco. One of the more popular workshops is a rapid fire launch and demonstration of new technologies, products and business models.

From social networking sites like "the blogophere of bulletin boards", to tools like, "yellow post-it notes", which allows you to share smart data, to a 3D social network that operates inside your browser called 3B.

The Read/Write guys summed up the projects revealed quite nicely in this article here.

Open Source Mecca

This upcoming week, Brussels is the place to be, and not just for the "chocolat met room".

A heavy contingent of open source coders, developers and decision makers from around the world will be descending upon the city for DrupalCon, EuroOSCON, GovCamp and BarCampBrussels.

Raincity Studios' Lead Drupal Developer Steve McKenzie and Production Manager Erik Hermans will be attending and reporting on the events in Brussels. We expect to hear hack-fest, geeked-out, theming, coding, designing "open" tales from what should be coined as for this week The Mecca of Open Source. Check back in on The Standard throughout this week and next for more from Belgium.

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BarCampVancouver starts tonight with the opening BBQ at the new Bryght office. All campers will be shufflin' our way 4 doors down the road to set up camp at WorkSpace, where a night full of geekery, Drupal hackery and midnight photowalks shake down. Sessions commence Saturday morning and run all day.

After many, many months of bashing in walls, tearing up floors, sweating over permits, regulations, wiring, rebuilding a 4000-square foot Gastown space into a unique and refreshing "better place to work", Workspace is opening its' doors and showing itself to our Vancouver world.

Come join Bill MacEwan, creator and owner, at the Workspace unveiling party, Friday night, August 18th, 8pm into the wee hours. Raincity was stoked to work with Bill on the site a few months back. Check out the space on line and sign up on upcoming to see the end result at the grand par-tay!

Raincity & The First-Ever BarCamp in China

Raincity Studios and Bryght are taking the world-wide success of the ad-hoc un-conference BarCamp and bringing it to Shanghai, China this September.

Scales and Crystal of Raincity, and kk+ from Bryght are heading off to China this September as part of the next wave of the China Access 2008 project, while also gearing up to initiate the first China BarCamp.