Following on from the tagging workshop I did a few months ago, last week I went to another workshop at Edinburgh University for the Branded Meeting Places Project. Again, as with last time, I was struck by the energy and innovation with their project. It really reminds me that there is a lot of exciting stuff going on, and after being ill for so long I needed that boost. This time the workshop had 4 themes – meetings, places, mobile phones and branding which feed into the larger themes of the project as a whole.

The team have developed a “toolkit” of technologies that can be used to come up with concepts, and it is great that they have such hardworking developers on board. I really think that we owe so much to the people who do all the programming and development to get things to actually do what we want them to. The Branded Meeting Places toolkit includes mobile phone communication technologies such as the usual SMS, MMS and Voice aspects, but they have also developed facebook apps, ways to work with maps such as googlemaps, yahoo and OpenStreetMap.

This means that they also have branched into GPS which was the main aspect of this workshop. Using Instamapper and gmap track they have developed an app that enables people to track how far from their friends they are. This is an interesting concept, but the cynic in me sees many ways that this could be used for criminal activities such as stalking, kidnapping and generalized surveillence, so I’m not sure how I feel about it, even if it was fun to track where others were. Other tools they have been working with are Max/MSP/Jitter, Processing, the Flickr API, and Second Life. This is quite an impressive portfolio and really pushes in a range of different directions the ways in which mobile technologies can be used.

The first day of the workshop was spent coming up with ideas for applications focusing on ways to challenge the current conference model. The final idea was then given to the developers to implement overnight, so we could play with it the next day. I think this model of working is excellent and provides a quick proof of concept, though I do feel guilty that the programmers have to work overnight to get it done. The 2nd day was supposed to be using the new app, but unfortunately I was not fully recovered from my fresher’s flu/ asthma joy and so had to leave early with a spinning head. I think the intended outcome was an application which allowed people to collect their memories of an event with a range of document types via GPS and I really wish I had been there to have a play, so shall have to do a bit of further investigation when I get the chance.