A while ago, Joe and I attended Ignite London. Regular readers of this blog will know that we're big fans of the Pecha Kucha talk format, and given that the Ignite evenings consist of dozens of 5-minute talks with 20 slides each, it was right up our street!

I had volunteered to do a talk about some of Britain's lesser-known historical buildings: sea forts (something I debuted at our second internal Pecha Kucha session last December). You can see my talk in full below (or in a larger format from the Ignite channel on Vimeo).

British Sea Forts by Tristan Roddis from hurryonhome on Vimeo.

A year ago, I attended the launch of the Brighton Robotics group, run by Emily Troop, and yesterday I went along to its first birthday party. The group has been pretty active over the past year, with projects to create a host of swam-bots, as well as organising regular talks and hack nights.

The party, organised by Nicola B consisted of around 20 robot enthusiasts turning up at the Skiff coworking space, and constructing drawbots with the aid of excellent kits and instructions created by Steve Pinter.

Last week Joe and I attended Over The Air - a developer-centric conference focused on mobile phone technology and applications.

It had been 18 months since the last conference, and the first thing to strike me was just how much has changed in the mobile landscape. A year and a half ago, the iPhone had only just started to impinge on mass consciousness and the Apple App Store hadn't even opened.

Nowadays, every new phone launched vies with the iPhone for features, and there are over 20 different app stores - run by platform owners, mobile carriers and independents. This change becomes even more striking if you consider how little has altered in the world of desktop computing, or even web apps, in the same amount of time. In short, the mobile space feels now very like the start of the dot-com boom in the 90s: expect a lot of innovation, a lot of failed ideas, and a lot of attempted land-grabs by both incumbents and newcomers.

Keynote address in Imperial College's Great Hall

With six separate tracks, and a day-and-a-half's worth of lectures and workshops, it would be hard to list everything that went on, but here are a summary of some of the trends that I identified:

• Things are moving fast (see above)
• The rise of web techniques (Widgets, PhoneGap etc.)
• The rise of Linux (Android, Maemo, LiMo)
• Increased fragmentation (more platforms to support)
• Standardisation efforts (e.g. OMTP and BONDI)
• The rise of the App Store (see Distimo's report)
• Augmented Reality is the buzzword du jour

So, this weekend saw Brighton's fourth BarCamp, at the Old Library in the centre of town. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, BarCamp is a special type of conference where there is no published schedule: instead, each participant must themself fill a half-hour slot with a talk, demo, discussion or some other event, and so the attendees themselves become the speakers.

I love all this ad-hocery, and have managed to turn up at all the Brighton BarCamps so far. I've talked about QR codes, AVR microchips and Scratch to date and this yearI gave an introduction to programming applications for phones that run the Android operating system. You can see my slides on Slideshare.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the practice of adding computer-generated information to something you are experiencing already. Often, this involves injecting computer-generated images into a live video feed, and there's some very impressive stuff out there which sees computers spotting special tokens (fiduciary markers is the jargon name) and overlaying images or videos.

However, it turns out that there is another, simpler way of letting the computer know what you are looking at: if you can specify the exact location of the camera in relation to what it is viewing, then you can go ahead and enhance things to your heart's delight, without having to go around tagging everything with markers.

As an example of this, I've found that augmented reality has become a lot more, err, real, thanks to my new phone, an HTC Dream. It contains some handy embedded hardware that means it knows exactly where it is and where it's pointing (the GPS tells it where it is on Earth, the accelerometer tells it which angle it is pointing relative to the surface, and the compass tells it which direction it is facing relative to the poles).

One application that takes advantage of this is Wikitude AR - it will search publicly available sources of information, and then overlay their position on top of the camera feed from the phone, as you can see from these screenshots taken while I was looking out of our office windows:

Then, there's the truly amazing Google Sky Map: you simply point your phone at the area of sky that you are interested in, and it will overlay constellation information. You can also type in a search term (e.g. Venus), and it will give you a handy arrow and target, helping you to swing your phone round until you are pointing right at it. This is extremely useful for any other parent who has been pestered by their child wanting to know what that bright star is called...

Last Saturday saw Brighton's first Outdoor Gaming festival (a.k.a. BOGfest), organised by Richard Vahrman, COO of innovative GPS-gaming company, Locomatrix. The day featured a variety of games, mainly featuring mobile phones, so I thought what better way to contribute than to resurrect the Hunt the Wumpus game that I originally created to demo at Brighton Barcamp back in 2007.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, the idea is to navigate around a series of interconnected rooms and to shoot the Wumpus before he eats you, all while avoiding other hazards such as giant bats and bottomless pits. The original 1970s version was entirely text based, but my updated version uses a series of Quick Response (QR) barcodes to represent each room in the maze. Players scan the codes using a camera phone, and are given clues on their telephone handset.

In its first incarnation I printed these codes out on stickers, and created a cave on a roll of wallpaper. For BOGfest, however, I thought it needed to be much bigger, so I regenerated the codes on A3 sheets of paper (all hail OpenOffice, which, because of its XML format, allowed me to automatically generate the document instead of manually inserting all the graphics). I then enlisted the help of my sons to stick these bits of paper on a 10m x 10m area of Hove promenade, and to draw the rooms and tunnels in coloured chalk.

Then it was just a case of helping people get the barcode software running on their phones (or just lending them one of the Cogapp R&D handsets) and letting them get on with it. During the afternoon dozens of people played, and it was fascinating to watch their reactions: everything from extremely skeptical ("what are you selling? How much does it cost to play?") to the extremely enthusiastic ("this is a lovely idea").

On Wednesday I attended a one-day seminar at the excellent Dana Centre. Organised by Museum ID, it focused on the cultural sector's use of social media, broadcasting and the web, with lots of concrete examples from UK museums and heritage organisations.

The day started with a presentation from John Stack, Head of Tate Online. In it, he emphasised the need for a two-way dialogue between museums and their audiences, and provided several concrete examples of when the Tate has done exactly that with regard to tying in with physical exhibitions. These projects included: How We Are Now, where visitors were asked to contribute photos to a Flickr pool, the best of which were exhibited in the gallery; Tate Tracks, with visitors contributing their own artwork-inspired audio; Street or Studio, where the best contributed photos were made into a limited edition book; and finally a short-story competition to tie in with the TH.2058 exhibition in the Turbine Hall, with the best entries made into an audio podcast narrated by ex-Dr. Who Christopher Eccleston.

Next up was a presentation by Adrian Arthur, the Head of Web Services of the British Library. He outlined some of the BL's experiments with social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and podcasts, as well as their experience in opening up their sound recording archives to user generated content such as tags and annotations. Then he emphasised the need for cross-departmental cooperation in achieving the goal of disseminating the two key strengths of the library: its enormous amount of content, and the expertise of its curators. His colleague Clive Izard, Head of Creative Services, then took over to discuss the changes in both technology and user expectation which will be instrumental in shaping services in the future. As part of this he demonstrated some innovative and exciting ideas for researcher tools, including a rich multi-tiered interface that can provide for both lay and specialist audiences, and which could incorporate cutting-edge visualisation techniques alongside original source material (e.g. a 3D terrain view, synchronised with historical maps).

Joe has already mentioned the first three presentations we saw at This Happened.

Last month saw the first meeting of Brighton Robotics, a group organised by self-styled robochick, Emily Toop.

Around 25 people turned up for a meeting in the basement of the Skiff, and after a round of introductions, there was some wide-ranging discussion (how to control a robot using an iPhone's accelerometer, where to get laser cutting done locally, what's in store from the next-generation RepRap etc.)

Then it w

Yes folks, it's that festive season again, and thoughts naturally turn to 'what application should I use to draw a snowflake?'

Well, for starters, there's Cogapp's own Infinite Snowflake. This allows you to draw a pretty snowflake using our tasteful Christmas colour palette, and to optionally send it as an e-card to your friends.