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.

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.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend i-Design, a one day conference and showcase for anyone with an interest or passion for interactive design and the digital arts. The programme certainly lived up to its aims as I came away truly inspired and entertained as well as being somewhat perplexed too!

The day kicked off with a panel debate centred around the idea of ‘Post Digital’ asking the question, 'If everything is digital, then what's next?' In a world where everything references digital media, how does our industry need to respond? This was a fascinating insight into the minds of the panel members more than anything, with the illustrious Adrian Shaughnessy leading the discussions.

This then lead the way for the first 5D interlude of the day by MOTH who beautifully showed their passion for experimental technology and for pushing the boundaries of traditional VJing. MOTH bridge the divide between video mixing and street art, generating site-specific video graffiti designed in response to the morphology, texture and ambience of the spaces and structures of the outside world.

Another presentation that particularly caught my interest was one by Lichtfaktor. You might recognise the work of these lords of luminosity from the TalkTalk television adverts (which also bookend each segment of ITV's popular X-factor). Their work in light-writing is spectacular, ranging from relatively standard incarnations of the practice, through to an amazing light-printer that allows pre-written messages to be created and captured in the same way as standard light-writing.

Easter egg hunts are nothing new to the physical or digital world. Whether it was the search for the chocolately goodness I so enjoyed during the springs of my childhood (and adolescence... and teenage years... and last year) or the eternal hunt for the hidden digital gems that plague my time with DVDs, the internet and various other media of recent years, the promise of finding that ever-elusive prize was always of great interest to me.

All right, I'll admit, I might be over selling it just a bit there, but who can say they don't enjoy the occasional easter egg when they stumble across it? My interest in the subject piqued again recently when I stumbled across a pseudo-egg in the BBC iPlayer website. Whilst trying to catch up with some Mock the Week antics, I found myself unable to hear Frankie Boyle's musings on how much he hates, well, everything. On examination, I noticed the iPlayer volume was down, so I went to turn it up (as you do). Lo and behold, on doing this otherwise innocuous task, I found that the iPlayer volume goes up to none other than 11.

Any Spinal Tap fans out there will immediately grasp the relevance of the volume going up to this number. In an infamous scene in the mockumentary 'This is Spinal Tap', guitarist Nigel Tufnel debates with Marty DiBergi the importance of having an amp that goes all the way up to 11 to make it louder, as opposed to just increasing the volume of 10.

We thought it would be selfish of us to keep all these delightful morsels from the Cogapp internal blog to ourselves, so here's a few highlights of the latest in creative imagination, digital inspiration and technical innovation for your perusal:

On your Bike: Avid cyclist, techophile and all-things-quirky enthusiast Tristan has been oggling the latest in the way of wierd and wonderful bicycle designs. Below is one of his personal highlights, check out a few more ingenious two-wheelers here.

2D or not 2D: That is indeed the question that out Head of New Technology, Joe, has been pondering - in this case with regards to YouTube's new 3D experiment. Whether or not people will be jumping out of their seats at the prospect of images jumping out of the screens at them remains to be seen, but it's an exciting idea nevertheless.

Augmented reality is always a hot topic of conversation here at Cogapp towers. If it's not Joe being envious of Boffswana's green monster then it's Tristan pointing his eyes to the skies for a bit of virtual stargazing. The topic garnered my own particular interest recently thanks to the demonstrations at this years E3 - the big expo in the world of video-gaming - of the latest computer game control systems from Sony and Microsoft. Having spent many a wasted evening in front of my (much mourned) Mega Drive when I should have been out practicing my hockey or socialising with my friends (quite why I should have been doing this I don't know - none of my friends were blue-supersonic hedgehogs) as a boy, I tend to keep one ear to the ground for the latest developments in the video-game sphere. It seems impossible to avoid the success of the Nintendo Wii, both commercially and in opening up video-gaming to new demographics. This success has prompted Nintendo's rival console manufacturers to look into expanding into this new broadened market with innovative interfaces of their own. Sony's as-of-yet unnamed effort involves combining the existing Playstation Eye with what can only be described as a wand to allow the player to interact with the game in new and even more immersive ways. The idea clearly borrows heavily from the concept introduced by the Wii, but the combination of handheld device and camera will allow the interaction to be even more detailed than that of the Wii remote - even with the new Wii MotionPlus ... or at least Sony hopes.

The Codeo is a contrary beast; he hibernates all summer long while the students he depends on for his existence bask in the sun instead of in the warm glow of their computers. As he sleeps, he sees strange dreams. Probably something like this: (explore Codeo winners and challenges by clicking the images) What next?

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").