Archive for November, 2009
« Previous EntriesThursday, November 26th, 2009
TechMeetup Glasgow #7
Look and listen with stereoscopic sight and stereoscopic sound.
See the wonders of the world in 3D!
Thanks to our two speakers Colin Urquhart from Dimensional Imaging and Aaron Bassett from 2Fluid for two amazing talks.
You can find Aaron’s GeoLocation code at http://github.com/aaronbassett/TMU-Geolocation.
See you in January!
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Bloop, a better way of introductions?
The introductions at TechMeetup are two things: 1) a great way of meeting people at the meetup and 2) boring and laborious.Therefore, I suggest change.
So we made a small mobile web app, called Bloop, that let’s you post your introduction at your location. You can simply grab your name and photo from an existing profile on the web, no registration needed. Post your question/conversation/thing you’re looking for and have a look at what others are thinking or talking about.
Now you don’t need to remember everyone’s name or introduction, just have a peek at bloop.at and go chat. I don’t expect a brilliant solution first go, but I want to try a few things and see what works. So please bear with me, and the more feedback the better.
Head over to Bloop (it’s designed for mobile screens right now) and post your introduction ahead of time or just do it while you’re at the meetup. Feedback to sam at techmeetup dot co dot uk – thank you all!
Update: You can now read up new releases and what we’re working on for future versions of Bloop on our blog.
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
TechMeetup Aberdeen #2 – 18th November 2009
There was another good turn out for Aberdeen’s second TechMeetup last night. It was great to see some familiar faces from last month’s meet, along with quite a few new faces.
Once again our sincere thanks goes to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen for their sponsorship of the event. And of course a special thank you to Dr Bruce Sharlau for once again organising the room, beer and pizza.
The first talk of the evening was about developing for the Microsoft Surface and was presented jointly by Kate Ho and Neelima Alluri. Kate started the talk with a cringe-worthy promotional video from Microsoft, demonstrating how the surface could be used to pick up girls in a Las Vegas bar. She then went on to describe some more practical uses, including two conceptual applications with which the presenters won a Royal Bank of Scotland backed competition; an interactive mortgage advisor and an application which would provide account information for a credit card placed on the surface. Neelima then took the stage to describe some of the under the cover detail of developing for the surface.
Special thanks also needs to be given to Mark Griffiths and his team from Codify for bringing along a surface for people to experience for themselves, no mean feat as the equipment was not designed to be particularly portable.
Next up Dave Westwater gave a fascinating talk on the BabyTalk project with which he has been involved. The aim of this project, jointly run by members of Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities, is to use Natural Language Generation (NLG) to communicate the details of babies in a hospital’s high dependancy unit to nurses coming on duty. The system, which is currently being trialled at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, takes data from a wide variety of sources and produces English language sentences summarising the information.
Dave also described how a spin-off startup company (Data2Text) has been established to, for example, use this technology to automatically compile the shipping forecast, a task which is currently several hours work for a human.
The videos for both talks will be posted shortly.
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Announcing TechMeetup Glasgow #7
Next week will see us host the last TechMeetup Glasgow of 2009. Our usual 4th Wednesday of the month slot is a bit close to Christmas and I’m not sure if Dominos does a Turkey and Cranberry pizza (actually they probably will).
So this month we’re going to make it an extra special and varied one with two speakers and two completely different topics.
Colin Urquhart, Founder & CEO of Dimensional Imaging (di3d.com), will talk about spinning his company out of Glasgow & Edinburgh University in 2003 into one of the world’s leading companies in human body 3D surface image capture, with applications ranging from facial surgery to video game character creation. Colin will conclude by introducing Dimensional Imaging’s new 4D surface image capture system, which extends its core 3D image capture technology into the 4th dimension of time.
Aaron Bassett - It’s four in the morning. Do you know where your users are? Aaron will be looking at how you can use the new Geolocation API right now in your web apps to find your users locations. While concentrating on those clients which currently support this API (Firefox 3.5 & iPhone OS 3) Aaron will also show you how to use object detection and graceful degradation to fall back to a geo-ip lookup for those users whose web client has not yet implemented the Geolocation API.
We’re in the usual place, the glorious Saltire Centre at Caledonian University, at the usual time 7pm for beer & pizza. Talks start 8pm sharpish and we finish up by 10pm.
If you’ve never attended a TechMeetup, don’t worry – we’re a friendly bunch. No need to pay, register, or even let us know that you’re coming. Just bring yourself, your bonne humeur, and your inquisitive tech-mind.
See you next week.
P.S. The videos from last month’s TechMeetup Glasgow have been uploaded to the TechMeetup channel on Vimeo.
P.P.S. You can download a map to the Saltire Centre from here. We’re in building “10″.
P.P.P.S. We were premature in confirming our third speaker this month hence this post updated shortly after the original announcement.
Thanks to Wellness & Health Innovation and Glasgow Caledonian University for making TechMeetup Glasgow possible and successful.