I have been puzzling over the data sets as they have been announced, looking for that killer idea that A)actually uses the data and b)has some hope of me being able to get it made in 24 hours.

The first idea I came up with fell out of the book “Trackman” by Catriona Child that was made available in digital form by Lutha press – all nicely split into chapters, paragraphs and lines. There are also image and sound archives available, and other literature in the form of a pile of poems, so I though maybe some sort of crowd-sourced experiential reader might be good. Allow people to add pictures and sounds to the background of chapters or paragraphs and have them scroll behind the text while you are reading that bit.
There would have to be some sort of voting and atmosphere choice by the reader but that was the basic idea:

But then the Glasgow Museums released their Zoology data set. A great big list of living things with the GPS coordinates of where they were captured (I guess, some sort of GPS location anyway).
That, and a couple of whiskies, gave me the idea for a location based Bug Hunter game.

You have rocket boots that multiplies your movement, so that you can get round the world with 100m jog in the park and get close to the bug (Left Screen). Then you turn off your rocket boots and have to move 1/1 to keep the bug in range of the power net for long enough that it’ll join your collection. Meaning you have to jog around in a circle for a bit as it swaps directions on you (Right Screen).
Once one is in your collection you can see the information on it, trading card style, and choose the next bug to collect. The stronger the bug, the faster it runs away and the harder it is to catch.

I’m not sure if I will make any of those tonight, but if I can’t sell the Bug Hunter to my team I’ll be tempted to put it together myself – with a button that makes my dot run forward without getting out of my chair, for testing of course!

Shows someone choosing between adding a Rose, Carnation or Gaabera (?)

A nice idea but I’m not sure if this is something that I would use for a bunch of flowers, but I can see it working for things like a box of chocolates or a food hamper. I guess that tells you that I didn’t have enough for lunch today.
Not the same as a micropayment based split-the-bill system as it allows people to spend what they like – I wouldn’t bother adding £2.20 roses to that bouquet that already has 62 other flowers from 12 people with 12 days to go…Wait a minute, this is Kickstarter for flower arrangements!

A good 50% of the graphs and stats I used in the original paper have disappeared!
PinchMedia have been bought by Flurry and while before the merger both gave teaser stats and graphs on their respective blogs to tempt analysts to pay the subscription and to get a few column inches the new Flurry blogs not only publish nothing new – they have been scrubbed of any old statistical data as well.
AdMob used to be very proud of their graphs and stats with a whole metrics.admob.com subdomain devoted to it, but since they were swallowed by Google they too have erased all interesting data from their website.
IDC and their ilk seem to have either put up prices or locked down access as the amount of third party commentary on their guestimatistics is also much lower than it seemed to be last year.

MobiThinking.com are one of the best I have seen around for a while so I recommend them for the moment – but the detailed genre data from AdMob, Flurry and PinchMedia are sorely missed.

At the moment that page allows those in SICSA universities to sign up, this will let us book a venue with enough space (and buy enough beer) so fill in your details as soon as you can!

Hopefully more posts will start to appear now….

There are no answers in this post, unfortunately, but by writing this it will make me more likely to give leeway to that ‘hold-out’ friend (everyone has one) who refuses to sign up to Facebook. The reasons being something to do with personal information and evil corporate conspiracies – I wasn’t really listening. The hold-out costs you the extra time it takes to write an email when everyone else gets by with an event invitation and, by way of subconscious punishment maybe, is more and more likely to be forgotten when arranging things. I might, might, try to make the effort and write that email until we have some answers.

Any complaints of it being too bright and it’ll go back to the scary theme.

Most of the posts have been carried from the old site now, enjoy.