I just found some fun little videos I made about a year ago when we did the Balloonacy game.

Timelaps video

Made from screenshots of my blog over a few hours time

40,000 balloons in 22 seconds

The second one is a speed run through the map and most of the balloons on it. It looks a bit mental in the middle.

(Thanks Gav for wicked AF skills)

Map + Balloon data visualisation

This is more geeky and it's showing the basic data structure we used for the race map and some rainbow portals and balloons. It was rendered using Ubigraph.

I have no idea why it got such bad framerate when transcoded by Vimeo.

Vote for us in People's Voice!

Balloonacy is nominated in three categories in the Webby Awards. I'm super thrilled about this and I'd love it you helped us win! Sign in at the People's Voice and in the Website section, balloonacy can be found under Services > Telecommunications. In the Interactive Advertising section balloonacy is under Game or Application and Online Guerilla & Innovation.

Yesterday we installed Bakertweet at Albion right across the road from work.

It's a little Twitter box hanging off the wall telling followers when fresh bread is coming out of the oven!

@aszolty did a great job with the arduino that talks to our bakertweet website, that in turn syncs the freshly baked croissants to twitter.

If you like your buns hot, and are stationed around Shoreditch, go to Twitter and follow @albionsoven.

Today I got my Phidgets from Active Robots. It's a set of sensors and output devices connected to an interface board which plugs into the USB of your computer.

Basically it's my first baby step towards building my own light switches, art installations, cars, robots, space rockets etc. This evening I built this very simple Twitter to LCD thingy, and it's actually surprisingly easy to get going. And dead fun. ;)

I hate the expression but: watch this space.

So today was the Developer Day at Wembly Arean. There was a few good talks, but nothing really ground breaking. I kind of hoped they would talk a little more about innovation and where google is going the future with their services like Gears and App Engine. Instead it was pretty much demonstrations of how the google products work and how we can use them. Basically stuff we already know. Maybe I had my expectations set a little high but all in all, it was a very good day.

I regret I missed Dion Almaer's talk on AJAX. Highlights though were Kevin Marks talking about open social and viral vs organic growth.

If you behave like a disease, people will develop a imune system.

The Javascript APIs for geolocation information via Gears is also very interesting. I can't wait for this stuff to properly come to the mobile devices! Btw we were demoed a handset running Android, which kind of left me wanting to go buy the Iphone.

A bonus. The angry green man USB stick freebee.

I never really saw the point of podcasts up until very recently. I kind of saw them as always outdated amateur radio shows. But I've actually started listening to a few now and I quite like it. So here's some of the geeky stuff I've got on my iPod.

Audible Ajax

Lots of web talk and trends. From the guys at ajaxian.com.

Jeff and Casey

Two game developers that talk about musicals, cars, microsoft and internet porn. It's funny and silly.

Pragmatic Podcast

Software development from Pragmatic Programmers with lots of interviews.

StackOverflow

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky creates a programming community and talks about it and lots of other things.

Software Engineering Radio

Pretty hard core computer sciency stuff.

TEDTalks

Brilliant and random talks about technology, entertainment and design.

For the past couple of months I've been working on this crazy balloon race across the internet, and the stuff's just gone live over at playballoonacy.com. Basically what we're trying to do is to fly a bunch of balloons over a set route of internet sites. If you push your balloon around you can pick up little prize tokens which puts you in a daily prize draw pool. And if you're really diligent about your ballooing and you manage to push it the furthest during the 7 day balloon bonanza, you will win a trip to Ibiza for you and your friends.

The actual race starts Monday 23rd June and I can't wait!