Wednesday 28 January 2009

Ignite

I've been meaning to post about the Ignite event I went to last week at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds.

There were tons of speakers and I couldn't possibly blog about all of them so i'm going to have to limit myself with a couple of highlights:

* Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino: Could hardware hacking save us?

I really liked Alexandra's talk, mainly because I bought an Anduino set a couple of months ago:

http://www.tinker.it/en/Products/ArduinoNG

I also liked hearing about the different events that have been held and the idea of the creative aspects of building something physical yourself and how this can allow people to think more creatively in the future. I also had a quick chat with Alexandra afterwards about having an event in the region which I intend to follow-up on at some point, maybe this is something for me to discuss with OS4B as it is an open source product...

* Stuart Childs, Richard Garside, Dave Lynch: FriiSpray digital grafitti w/IR tracking

I also liked this presentation about using the wii with an electronic whiteboard to create an electronic spray can for grafitti work. My brain is still thinking about this one as i'm convinced there are all sorts of possibilities with it. Could be great for events, has obvious tie-ins with young people and artists, could have potential for interactive advertising boards? A way to collate information? I like the idea of having one somewhere that people can just come in and use and a snapshot is saved to file every 30 seconds or something like that... Anyway still thinking about it which must be a good sign!

There were loads of other speakers who were all very interesting and often very entertaining, i'm assuming the slides will go up online somewhere soon at:

http://www.meetup.com/Ignite-UK-North/calendar/9017862/

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