I really enjoy the Hide&Seek and Sandpit games and when the Hide&Seek mailing list announced they were helping out with the first London Go Game, I knew I just had to try it out for myself. The Go Game is a running around/treasure hunt type of game with location based puzzles, undercover agents and creative missions. Typically they are set up as team building games for companies or conventions, but once in a while they do community games, inviting anyone along.

I formed a team with Rachel, Kevin and Tom, calling ourselves the Geeks of London (of course). We were later joined by two of the volunteers for Hide&Seek, who had helped with the registration. After taking a group photo, we got our first mission. The Go Game uses a simple website to give each team their missions, meaning at least one team member has to have a web-enabled phone with them. The great thing of this type of setup though is that the “game masters” can control all the teams behind the scenes and make sure no one is doing the same mission at the same time. Each team also got a digital camera from the organizers to take photos and videos for certain missions.

As I said before, there were 3 different types of missions: location-based puzzles, undercover agents, and creative missions. With the location-based puzzles you were told to go to a specific spot and find/solve a puzzle there. Most of them were pretty obvious once you got there. For instance, the first one we had to solve was go a certain intersection and find the building with two names: one in which you could swim and one what you did in a queue. Turned out to be Poole, Waite & co. ltd. We then had to stripe away woolpot and figure out what word you could make from the letters that were left (delicate).

We only got one undercover agent mission: located in a pub was a pirate. We had to go up to him and in Pirate speak we had to figure out in 20 questions what his favourite food was. It was loads of fun and I’m a bit disappointed we didn’t get to meet any of the other agents. Apparently there were also a space age air hostess (with funky blue hair), an undercover spy and a psychic.

The creative missions got you the most amount of points and would be judged at the end of the game by all the teams. We did 3 different ones, but found out at the end we were only allowed to enter one. The missions we did were recreate an old video game (we made a Lemmings video), a glam/slam paparazzi photo (I posed as a glamour model with a pretty car for the first photo, and then played drunk hugging a street cone for the second, see above) and recreate a a movie with fingers (we did Indiana Jones). None of our wonderful creations were that great compared to what a lot of the other teams came up with. One team got the mission to “do something they had never done before” and they made a video of four of them naked in a telephone booth. Ehm, yeah, we weren’t as committed to the cause as they were. Here’s one of the videos another team made:

[Watch the video on MissGeeky]

After 2/3 hours (I really don’t remember how long we were playing) all the teams met back at the pub and handed in their cameras. The videos and photos of the creative missions were then shown on screen and (through the website) each team had to vote for their favourites. In the end we finished 19th of the 20 teams. That was a bit disappointing, especially cause we kept getting updates saying we were in the lead. Despite that though it was a lot of fun and I’d definitely do it again.

As I mentioned in the SocialMediaCampLondon2 blog post a couple of weeks ago, that day ended with a Photo Scavenger Hunt. It turned out to be hilarious! 

The rules were simple: Kat (from SafetyGoat) had created a list of items, which we had to find and take photos of, and each item would be awarded a number of points. You could score more points per photo if the photo was funny, or had at least one team member in it. I joined a team with Cristiano, Kevin and Farhan, and we called our team The Auto-Savers, in reference to Kat having lost the first version of the scavenger hunt list (because she closed the file without saving it).

The items on the list were ranging from simple to absurd; here’s a sample:

A jogger – 5 points

A Canadian flag – 10 points

Hamburger sauce – 10 points

Person with bright pink shirt giving thumbs up – 15 points

A unibrow – 25 points

Genuine celeb – 30 points

We had a great start, finding a lot of the items immediately. Here’s a couple of our photos:

A square (with team members!)

Person with bright pink shirt giving thumbs up

Kevin with onions

Someone on rollerblades

Me pouring a pint

The most surprising, amazing thing that happened to us though? We met Catherine Tate! (and unintentionally managed to annoy her) Our team had split up at the Waitrose in the Brusnwick Centre to find a couple of the items, leaving Cristiano at the front of the store with the camera to take photos whenever the rest of us had found something. We all came back to Cristiano discussing something about some item, only to have him shush us and whisper “I think Catherine Tate just walked past us”.

We didn’t believe him at first, but on closer inspection it turned out it was actually her! I walked up to her and asked her autograph, while Cristiano took a photo of us. She mistakenly thought he was paparazzi and turned irritatingly away from him; I apologized and said he was with me. We tried explaining the photo scavenger hunt, but by then she was already annoyed we had disturbed her shopping:

Still pretty cool, right? After that we wandered around for a little while, before heading back early to the pub to meet the other teams. In the end we won with a massive 470 points! If I remember correctly that was about 100 points more than the runner-up (so even if we hadn’t gotten our celebrity, we still would have won). The prize was a Hot Rod toy car and tickets to Spring Awakening (more about that another time). 

It was a fun end to an already great day, and I love to do something similar again. Anybody else interested in organizing our own scavenger hunt?

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Last weekend was Yahoo’s Open Hack 2009, two days full of hacking, networking and fun. I’ve been to two similar events before (Over The Air and Mashed), but never ended up hacking anything together (choosing instead to make swedes and trailers). This time around I really wanted to make something.

I’ve recently been getting into PHP and have started messing around with APIs. And I had a cool idea for the weekend: Flickr Ego Tracker. An app that would track activity on Flickr photos that I was in and update me when someone commented or favourited. I was slightly optimistic about me being able to hack that in 24 hours though. While my programming skills are pretty okay, I had to read up on and try a lot of stuff I’ve never touched before.

Photo by Nate Lanxon – CNET UK

I didn’t end up presenting my app, but I still feel as if I actually did do something this year. I didn’t even play a single game on the Saturday night, opting instead to go on with my hacking. Maybe next time I’ll manage to actually finish something (although I am continuing working on my little project).

There were a lots of great apps hacked together that weekend, like Dan‘s London Undersound, an app that uses last.fm and the Oyster API to visualize what music you listen where on the underground, and Cristiano‘s ShouldIBackupMy, an app that would tell you whether or not you should backup certain data (fill in Magnolia and it says “Too late”, fill in Yahoo, it says “probably”, fill in google, it says ” Not really, but why not”). 

It was a great two days and I do feel as if I actually participated in the right way this time. To check out more of the hacks (including the winners), take a look at the Open Hack wiki.

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One of the coolest stands at the Gadget Show two weeks ago was The Gadget Hall of Fame, set-up by the Centre for Computing History.  It was full of gadgets and gizmos, showcasing products from the past 34 years.

The Center for Computing History was established to create a permanent public exhibition telling the story of the information age. The museum is based in Haverhill on the borders of Cambridgeshire, Essex and Suffolk, but is currently only viewable by appointment. I definitely think I should organize a GeekMeet during the summer to visit, cause it looks like they have a great collection of old computer hardware.

The stand at the Gadget Show was clearly a favourite among most of the visitors. The exhibit was arranged in such a way that there were different sections for each decade, with retro gadgets against the wall and (per decade) two featured game consoles (everybody of course wanted a go on those). The 1970’s section had the Binotone PONG game and the classic Atari 2600 console, the 1980’s had the Sinclair Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and the 1990’s had the Atari Jaguar and the Sony PlayStation. 

I was amazed how many of the gadgets featured there I still own: the NES (with the DuckHunt gun), the Donkey Kong Game & Watch, the Atari Lynx, the Atari Jaguar, the original GameBoy, the GameBoy Colour and the Sony PlayStation (not even mentioning the more newer consoles, like the Nintendo DS and the PS2, of which I’ve “owned” three different ones). It was great seeing some of them in action again, and makes me want to dig up some of my old consoles and play with them again.

There was also a video made of the event, and I’m actually in it! I’m seen playing the Jaguar (very concious that I was being filmed) at around the 3 minute mark:

[Watch the video on MissGeeky.com]

Btw, the Centre of Computing History is always interested in expanding their collection, including calculators, cables and books. Just check out their donations page. Anybody got anything obscure that deserves to go down in history?

Most of you must have seen the video I posted a couple of days ago about the T-Mobile “flashmob”. While I had my doubts about it, it turned out to be a great event! 

I turned up on Trafalgar Square at around 17:45 and it was already packed! I hadn’t imagined that so many people would come. A big screen was setup with on it a “warning” that T-Mobile was recording their latest advert and anyone who didn’t want in it should find a steward. I was able to make my way to the center of the crowd and saw that microphones were being handed out to anyone who wanted one. That’s when I started realizing what the “gimmick” this time would be. I declined, cause I had my camera in my hands and I knew there were going to be some great photo moments (and I was right).

At 18:00 it was announced that “this time you won’t be dancing, but singing!”. I was amazed at how many people hadn’t figured it out, and were totally surprised by it. And then everyone started singing along to “Hey Jude”. The atmosphere was brilliant! Everyone was smiling, singing along and even dancing along. I had to leave halfway, but still got to enjoy “Is This The Way To Amarillo” and “Baby One More Time”.

Here’s an early footage clip of the event:

Tuesday evening I managed to go to another London Bloggers Meetup. This time the event was sponsored by Fashion Targets Breast Cancer (FTBC), a campaign to raise funds for Breakthrough Breast Cancer. They gave a short, but interesting talk on what FTBC is and how you can help.

FTBC was setup in 1994 by Ralph Lauren as the fashion industry’s response to breast cancer, raising money through high-street items. The new FTBC range features designs from Topshop, River Island, Marks & Spencers, Warehouse, Coast, Laura Ashley and Goodone. From each purchase from the FTBC range, 30% is donated to Breakthrough Breast Cancer to help the charity with its research, campaigning and education work. 

The latest campaign from FTBC is the Million Model Catwalk, an interactive website with a competition. The idea of Million Model Catwalk is that you can upload a photo of yourself, stick it on a model’s body, choose clothes for your model to wear from the FTBC range and see your model walk down the catwalk.

After the talk there was a giveaway of a couple of FTBC T-shirts and I won one of them. Yay! Here’s how it looks like:

I really do like this top and I actually wore it for the remainder of the evening. The rest of the event I spent talking to and catching up with (mostly) familiar faces and some new ones. As always, this London Bloggers meetup was a lot of fun and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

Last Saturday I made my way to Wallace Space St Pancras for the second London SocialMediaCamp. It was a great day with interesting sessions, interesting people and lots of interesting conversations. One of the disappointments though was that there were a fair number of people that didn’t show up. Besides that only half (!!) the session slots were filled. Kat has got a great blog post (with lots of different views in the comments) about whether or not everyone should present. I do agree with her though and there’s one line from her post that sums it all up:

I feel very strongly that there’s something wrong with the social media industry if those who are supposedly building it don’t even bother to make an effort, to step up and to do something new and scary, how can they expect the rest of the world to join in?

Most of the sessions that were held though were pretty great; I’m just disappointed that there were so many more interesting people there who could have contributed their own interesting angle. Anyhow, here are a couple of sessions I went to:

SocialInnovationCamp

SocialInnovationCamp sounds like a great event: developers and designers are brought together with people with a great idea to make a prototype over one weekend. A couple of previous prototypes were presented and showed how that weekend was the start of actual viable websites. The next SICamp will be held in Glasgow on the 19 of June, and  you can submit your ideas for a prototype until the 22nd of May.

PR Agencies Want Your Soul

Vero held a nice discussion session about the do’s and don’ts for marketing agents when contacting bloggers. The attendees of that session were a nice mix of bloggers and marketing people. 

Free Cake

Cake! To be specific: Broken Biscuit Cake. Neil Crosby had a fun session on how he made this cake and let us all sample it. The recipe is also on Neil’s blog and I know I’m going to give it a try some time: the cake was delicious! 

How I Met My Troll

This was a great talk from Joanna Geary about how she met her troll in real life. While working for The Birmingham Post, she came across a regular commenter, “Clifford”, who was very criticizing about The Post. After a while she wanted to meet him in real life and see what type of person leaves those type of comments. Turned out in real life, he was a very polite and nice old man; and he was oblivious to the image he had online. Read more about Clifford on Joanna’s blog.

LARPing

Surprisingly I found this one of the most interesting talks of the day. Max (hawkida on Twitter) gave an introduction to LARPing, how she got involved into it herself and the rules and ideas behind it. It’s much more complex than I had imagined it to be; it’s like a real life Dungeons & Dragons session where you have to memorize every single move and statistic of your character. I don’t think it’s something for me (the whole camping thing is not my style), but I’d love to try it out at least once in my life.

After all the sessions there were some free drinks and some prize draws. I won a weird PC game called Chuzzle. I still had some energy left, so I decided to join the Photo Scavenger Hunt organized by Kat. It was great fun, but more about that in a later post.

Win tickets to Sci-Fi London’s Italian Horror All-Nighter!

As part of Sci-Fi London’s line-up of events, there will be an Italian Horror All-Nighter at midnight on Saturday 2nd May.

The event, which is sponsored by Electronic Arts’ new title Dante’s Inferno, sees four classics being given a rare screening. These are: Mario Bava’s The Mask of Satan (aka Black Sunday); Dario Argento’s Sleepless; Lamberto Bava’s Macabre and Mario Bava and Salvatore Billitteri’s Black Sabbath.

The venue for the event is the Apollo West End Cinema and tickets for the all-nighter include a goody bag, Red Bull and ice-cream. Visit www.sci-fi-london.com for more information.

I’ve got a pair of tickets to this great event up for grabs. Just take a look at the following question:

What’s Your Favourite Horror Movie?

Email your answer to contest@missgeeky.com by the end of 30th April (that’s tomorrow!) and don’t forget to include your name and telephone number.

I will contact the winner of the 2 tickets on Friday 1st May. Please note that travel & accommodation is not included. Entrants must be over 18.

Back in January I blogged about T-Mobile’s “flashmob” at Liverpool Street Station. I liked the idea, but was a bit annoyed by the fact that unlike normal flashmobs the main dancers were obviously professional and hired (and most probably payed) to do the dance. I said in that blogpost that I would have loved if they had organized a more typical flashmob so that anyone could have joined in.

Now it seems though T-Mobile might actually be doing that. This Thursday there’s another event, this time at Trafalgar Square. Watch this video for the details:

I’m curious to see what it will be. I’ve got another event at 18:30, but I’m definitely going to try and make it to the beginning of it. Anybody want to join me?

Last Saturday I was invited by the team of 3mobilebuzz to The Gadget Show Live in Birmingham. I must confess I had no idea what The Gadget Show was, but it sounded like fun so I agreed to coming along. I’m glad I did, cause it turned out to be a great day.

So for those of you like me who don’t know what The Gadget Show is (and why there is a Gadget Show Live), here’s a little explanation. The Gadget Show is a British TV series on Five, featuring reviews and previews of the latest gadgets and other technology news. Apparently it’s really popular, so this year they arranged The Gadget Show Live: part live show and part gadget exhibition.

The exhibition floor had a lot more stands than I expected, ranging from computing to gaming to DIY to biking. Unlike most exhibitions, where I always feel as if I’ve seen everything after wandering around for 2 hours, I still don’t feel as if I saw everything at The Gadget Show Live. I spent more than 6 hours going from stall to stall and talking to people, and I still feel as if I missed some stuff. I’ll write about the cool gadgets I came across later this week, cause they all deserve their own posts. 

The live show was fun too. We had tickets for the 17:00 viewing and it was packed! The show consisted of silly contests (whoever could hold up a laptop the longest with one hand won it) and some weird, yet interesting performances. The coolest were the digital jugglers Feeding The Fish, a juggling act with lasers and LED batons, creating a visually stunning spectacle. 

If you want to see more of The Gadget Show Live, check out Marianne Taylor’s blog. I’ve also got some photos up on my Flickr event account, but they didn’t came out as I wanted them to (I really have to sit down and learn how to use my camera properly).