Last week before the Volcano overshadowed any events, Joe Baskerville and I headed over to Denver for Museums and the Web 2010- a major international conference for Museums in the digital space. The conference is a hub of information from the sector with a series of lectures, workshops, conferences, and presentations all exploring the issues of museums online.

WITHIN minutes of speaking to the Queen, the Prime Minister had sent me a quick email. I wasn’t surprised. It was the fourth time he had been in touch in recent weeks. 

Two years ago the proportion of the world's population living in cities eclipsed those living elsewhere for the first time in history. The trend has persisted, in fact it seems an unstoppable juggernaut with the ratio predicted to reach 3:1 by 2050. Of course, city-dwelling is nothing new, but cities that 20 million people may call home certainly are. As Justin McGuirk discusses in this article, the transformation presents some of the most profound design challenges of our era. The process of regeneration is relentless - you can't go far in New York or London without seeing immense construction work underway, or derelict buildings whose future is no doubt already a glint in the eye of some ambitious developer.

So, as John said, the question at hand is: how do you wow the un-wow-able without alienating the familiar? It's a tough question, and here at Cogapp it's our job to try and answer just that question. We understand better than most the phrase "appropriate technology" - when to hide technology, and when to show it; how technology can be used to enhance an exhibition without overwhelming it. Ever since we developed the first museum interactive almost twenty years ago (in the form of the National Gallery's Microgallery) we've been creating new technology and developing new ways of implementing it; advanced hardware and software deployed behind an intuitive user experience is what we do. We're constantly trying to find new and exciting ways to do it. From creating award-winning vivid and instinctive installations for the Great North Museum, to bringing Prudential's corporate archive and stories to life with expansive sheets of Holopro glass, pushing the envelope is never off our radar.

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.

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

Working on the project as AV producer, our main challenge was to strike the right balance between the variety and scale of the operation and the limitations of our budget, never forgetting that the audience’s experience is really what counts the most. Here’s the story behind just a handful of the 10 AV presentations we created...

Right Whale

For the glass-bottomed boat exhibit, the museum asked us to create the effect of looking over a parapet onto a plate of glass with temperate sea creatures swimming beneath it. So we needed to provide moving images of a whole host of creatures, from whales to whitebait as viewed from above. Of course, the problem for us was that most of the time, anybody who videos fish will do so in the water face to face, not looking down at their dorsal fins!

The first solution was to computer generate them, and we were ready to do that, but it just wasn’t possible within our budget. Instead, as well as trawling the best film and video archives in the world I took my own camera to several Sea Life Centres on the South Coast and dangled it into the water to capture footage of desirable species from above. Luckily for us, the larger creatures we found in the libraries - whales, dolphins and turtles etc - often swim on their side, so there’s plenty of footage of them swimming by with their backs to the camera. When the display is seen from above, this gives you just the right effect.