Museums, by their very nature, are often thought of as being places where people go to discover, reflect on and learn more about things of the past. Even museums that are focussed on modern times or even the future tend to impart knowledge of the way things are through the use of artifacts. So onlookers tend not to think of them as places of technological innovation. But in their bid to attract ever-greater audiences to their exhibitions, museums are constantly striving to create ever-greater installations for said exhibitions to instigate the 'wow' factor that will get visitors talking about (and, equally as importantly, recommending) what they've seen. Given that one of the central remits of a museum is to educate and inform the masses, bringing in the audiences is vital to their mission statement. And so it is that in their drive to create more revolutionary exhibits, museums often become incubation units for rapid changes in technology. The irony of this is that visitors having an enjoyable, easy and relaxing experience is so integral to museums that the technology needs to be implemented in a smooth and efficient way. So much so in fact that it mostly goes unnoticed. It's such a fluid experience that the technological innovation happening under a visitor's very nose is more often than not completely under-appreciated.

The results are in folks - the first ever Brighton Munge-off (patent pending) has come and gone and the winners have been announced.

You may want this explained a bit - which is fair enough. We recently took our in-house developed Facemunger application on its first outing to Glug Brighton 2 (a designers' networking event held by Crush and Agency Rush). Here willing gluggers (or glugites? Glugians?) were encouraged to snap photos of themselves with their friends and let the application work its magic to swap their faces. The results were... interesting. The application, created by our Head of New Technology Joe Baskerville, proved to be extremely popular, and with almost 400 images captured that evening alone, going through them to find the ones to share was a tough job (on both the decision-making faculties and, much more prominently, the eyes). But here they are - the best of the best of the Facemunges from Glug Brighton 2.

Howdy Pardners,

Much like the county fair, all good things must come to an end. So it is with Codeo, our coding competition aimed at local students.

Originally started way back in '08, Codeo involved us posting regular programming challenges on our blog, for which entrants would submit their creations in hopes of winning a prize. Initially started as a way for students to engage with the local digital industry and show professionals their skills, Codeo also gave them a creative outlet for the material they studied in their courses (as challenges were devised to complement what students were studying in their syllabuses).

2010 is billed to be the year of many things: the tablet (if Wired and PC World are correct), the smartphone (going by some analysts and journalists), 3D TV (according to some) and of course, the Tiger (no relation to Apple's OS though I'm afraid). However, with all the hype and speculation, one trend that will be making its public debut in 2010 that has so far been missed by critics and foreseers alike is the new art of facemunging.

Before you recoil in horror trying to dream up the possibilities of what this might be, allow me to elaborate a little. But, in line with the old adage that 'a picture paints a thousand words', allow me to do it with an image. It's not a pretty image by any stretch of the imagination, and for those of you who know Ben or Eleanor personally, this will bear an extra, far more disturbing weight than usual. However, it displays perfectly the power of facemunging. Be warned; what follows is not for the faint of heart.

Ready? This is your last chance to turn back now.

Okay, here goes (but don't say I didn't warn you):

... that's how I like my coffee. If you do too, then you could do much worse than keep an eye on the calendar of science enthusiasts Café Scientifique.

Last Tuesday, Josh and I headed down to Brighton's Latest Music Bar, which was playing host to a talk hosted by the local branch of said science aficionados. Café Scientifique Brighton are a voluntary group united by nothing more than a love of science and a thirst for knowledge. They meet on the third Tuesday of every month (from now on, the third Thursday of every month) and listen to talks they've arranged from guest speakers on, well, anything and everything scientific. Each talk is given on a different scientific topic by a different guest speaker, and while this happened to be my freshman outing amongst their ranks, I am assured by other regular attendees that the talks are always informative, entertaining, well presented and lively. The small cohort of organisers are joined by a large crowd of attendees (much larger than I - as a Scientifique first timer - was expecting I must admit); anyone and everyone is welcome and you don't even have to buy a ticket.

According to the legend that is Mr. Shakin' Stevens, 'Snow is falling all around me'. Not wanting to disappoint Shakin' (as - I have it on good authority - he's known to his friends) we've once again decided to extend this statement to the digital realm with the relaunch of the Infinite Snowflake!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the Infinite Snowflake is our way of spreading season's greetings through the ether. Have a look at the page here to design your own flake through our own in-house developed flake-maker. Just draw a pattern you like in the triangle, and our flake-maker will use it to create a beautiful (... or not so beautiful) flake of your own devising. Once it's ready, generate your newly made piece of digital drift and it will get added to the ever-expanding uber-flake, compiled from all the flakes created thus far. You'll also get the chance to add a message of season's greetings should you so wish, and send the flake on for other people to enjoy too.

The dictionary on my trusty Mac tells me that 'glug' can be either a verb meaning to drink liquid with a hollow gurgling sound (e.g. he glugs down half his beer) or a noun meaning an amount of liquid poured from a bottle (e.g. a couple of good glugs of Dubonnet). I tell you this because I feel the two examples listed about the word probably give you a better impression of what the first ever Glug Brighton was like than any amount of material I could write ever would. But I'll try anyway:

Firstly, apologies for the increasingly tenuous and odd Pech-app Cake-cha blog titles. If it's any consolation, I'm more disappointed in them as an author than you as a suffering reader will ever be.

Now, onto the topic at hand: the latest round of Pecha Kucha presentations held over cake, tea and the like brought with them a combination of art, film and technology. For those of who who haven't immediately popped out to the bakery, here's a rundown of what went on at Cogapp's Pecha Kucha 3.0: In his own unique style, Colin kicked off proceedings with his long anticipated 'Sketcha Kucha' (again, really sorry about the dire puns). Having, over the last two weeks, asked us all at varying points to do quick self portraits, Colin displayed these to us with a few musings about his first love: pencils. Re-igniting in us a passion for the importance of designing with our hands rather than mice, Colin displayed the incredible results achieved by using age-old tools over modern techo-easels.

Now that I've got your attention, it's time for a rundown of musings from the corridors of Cogapp in our latest and greatest Internal Digest. Aside from the surfing dog above from Tristan, here's what else has been captivating the collective Cogapp mind of late:

Joe dug deep into the back-end of Google Maps, scouring miles of code and a nigh on infinite amount of pictures to find the deeply hidden algorithm that reveals how Google Street View works according to Google Japan:

To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program.

Firstly, let's a get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of the digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to Brighton's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume [http://www.tomhume.org/] (MD of Future Platforms [http://www.futureplatforms.com/ ]) and Joh Hunt [http://bluejoh.com/] (a postgraduate research at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun.

Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people of different backgrounds working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.

But enough of the build up, "What was it you were actually doing?" I hear you cry. The exercise splits the group into several teams (in our case, 4 teams of about 5 people) and introduces us to the fictional Jeremy, a 34 married civil engineer with 2 young children. He is a novice in the world of mobiles - using his allocated texts, minutes and data allowance sparingly - but considers himself technically aware. He is dyslexic and enjoys nothing more than exploring his local peak as part of a spot of mountaineering. Each team was asked to design a mobile application for Jeremy that would allow him to interact with his workmates and family whilst on a mountain, and given a swanky dummy mobile on which to design it.

The teams all went to different corners of the office and got prototyping. Whilst I can't speak for the creative methodology behind the other groups, we had a discussion and created a Journey On- inspired mountain route planning and sharing application that we dubbed Journey Up. After hours (or minutes) of intensive (or lighthearted) prototyping, we had our idea, and we welcomed Mr. Joe Baskerville from a competing team for a bit of vigorous (or easygoing) user testing. This part of the exercise really highlighted the necessity of even the smallest amount of user testing, as clearly apparent but previously unidentified kinks in our product were brought to light by Joe's scrutinizing eyes.

After a reconvening session where teams displayed their designs so far, the proverbial spanner wasn't so much thrown into the works as it was hurled in with wild abandon as Tristan instructed us to swap the mobiles on which we were developing our apps. In all cases this completely changed the capability of the technology with which we had been working. All the teams had to adapt their development to accommodate the new technology and whilst some (a campfire emulator was adapted to incorporate a music purchasing program by one team) were more successful than others (Journey Up took a big hit when GPS was removed from our phone's spec), it showed how important it is to keep the wider audience in mind at all stages of development.

After a quick discussion of the lessons we'd all learned and a riotous round of applause, TTOP ended. Hats off to Tristan for a brilliant and welcoming Tech Tuesday, and indeed to Tom Hume and Joh Hunt for creating an imaginative and thought provoking exercise (read about their successful running of the event here [http://www.tomhume.org/2009/09/mobile-mountains-over-the-air-2009.html] and here [http://www.tomhume.org/2009/08/agile-2009-many-paths-to-the-top-of-the-mobile-mountain.html]).

To those of you looking for Top of the Pops who have come to this blog-post accidentally I say "fret not wandering searcher", for you have stumbled upon a treasure far more substantial than the much-mourned TOTP. You have stumbled upon Cogapp's TTOP: Tech Tuesday Outreach Program. Firstly, let's get a bit of background out of the way. Tech Tuesday is a fortnightly occurrence here at Cogapp central. The Technical Department gather round Japanese food in our conference room and discuss all manner of tech related trivia, from iPhones to ICONS and anything else they're musing about. This has tended to be the realm of digital gurus, technological masterminds and computational wizards in the past, but this week Tristan decided to mix things up by opening the invitation to the entire office (and holding Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday, but that's less dramatic). Not only this, but having recently been to London's Over the Air event, he had been inspired by the presentation given by Tom Hume (MD of Future Platforms) and Joh Hunt (a postgraduate researcher at the University of Sussex) called "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain". So with material generously lent to us from Tom and Joh, and an invitation to the hallowed halls of Tech Tuesday extended to everyone, we descended upon the gathering. With almost all of the Cogapp team involved, Tristan had a much larger audience to demonstrate his digital delights to; the Tech Tuesday Outreach Program had begun. Tristan started with background information and a brief about what we were going to be doing before swiftly moving onto the main event of the TTOP. "Many Paths to the top of the Mobile Mountain" is a group exercise designed to get people with different skills working together on one project at the same time. This interdisciplinary approach creates a hotbed of creativity and ingenuity as ideas are proposed and almost instantly analysed by experts in various fields. With specialists from design, tech, production, user experience, finance and business development all bouncing ideas off each other, the inventive juices really got flowing.