1. Show & Tuttle

    During the eGovernment hack day, RewiredState, a bunch of us were taking a break downstairs at the Skiff, where the projector was set up.

    rewired state at the skiff, brighton

    Brian and I started showing the others in the room the QR Code project we had been working on, and so started a few hours of browsing the internet, discovering things and showing each other cool stuff we’d found, or saved earlier.

    Brian demos QR Codes

    Yeah maybe we did also just watch a view videos, or geek over various map mashups, but we all came away with a feeling that the format worked really well, even though it hadn’t been planned.

    The guys upstairs finishing their project came down and joined us, and so we wrapped up and went to the pub. We all learned something, shared something, and felt just a bit inspired.

    So I’ve decided to organise a similar session.. 27th March from 5pm, at the Skiff, sign up here. There is no agenda, and no pressure to show anything, just come and hang out and see where the browsing and conversation takes us.. I’ll also add a wiki page for each of these meets, where we can list all the things we browsed and add some notes.

    Sign up here.

    We’ve very kindly got a small sponsorship for beer and projector hire, which has covered half the cost. If you want to chuck in a fiver (or more!) that’d be appreciated, there’s nothing like beer karma for geeks :) Click here to make a donation. Thx! And hope to see you there.

    P.s. Tuttle coworking is meeting weekly, upstairs at the Sanctuary (map), at 10am on Fridays. All are welcome, go signup on Upcoming here.

    P.p.s. Almost forgot to thank the guys at the Skiff for letting us use the room! Thanks :)

    Posted March 16, 2009 in the events category, with the tags: , , , , , , , , and no comments yet

  2. Mobile Industry Review, my podcast debut!

    On Friday I had the honor of being the special guest on episode 17 of the Mobile Industry Review podcast.


    Mobile Industry Review Video 17 from Ewan MacLeod on Vimeo.

    It was great fun, we spent a few hours in Covent Garden putting it together, and generally being geeks in public. Which in this case was great fun :)

    I got to talk about the start of the upcoming Brighton Tuttle Club (Social Media Cafe), and a little about the future of tracking offline to mobile conversions and location specific behavioral patterns. Something that I’m really interested in at the moment, and will happily talk about, come find me at the weekly Tuttle!

    Mobile Industry Review podcast shoot

    Posted August 11, 2008 in the Mobile category, with the tags: , , , , , , , and no comments yet

  3. Flickr QR Codes – copy Flickr photos to your mobile

    QRFlickr demo from Josh Russell on Vimeo.

    Some time last year Dave and I got really into QR Codes.

    (install the QRFlickr greasemonkey script I talk about in this post and demo in the above movie. Read on to find out what QR Codes are and how it works)

    For those that don’t know, a QR Code is essentially a 2 dimensional barcode, in that it stores it’s data in two directions on a grid instead of in one direction as lines. (see the example at the bottom of this post)

    Using various tools to create these codes (on a RESTful URL) it’s possible to embed or encode many types of information, such as plain alphanumeric text, phone numbers or whole vcards, or urls. You can also denote a protocol for the information to help the device reading the code to know what to do with it, i.e. http://, smsto:, tel: etc..

    For example, encoding “tel:+44207000000″ will produce a QR Code that when scanned by a mobile will ask the user if they would like to call that phone number. Lots of possibilities! Yes, the things you’re thinking right now are possible ;)

    (Brian and I went further with this and have started to create a wiki that documents all the different scenarios and protocols and tests them to understand how best to use QR Codes in the everyday application. More on that at a later date!)

    So I then decided to see what else could be done. Others have done lots of examples, and I’m in no way suggesting that this is groundbreaking, but this is an example that interests me greatly, and also shows very simply the power of this technology.

    Not being a coder I spent some time trawling the internet for some javascript help, I was about to write my first Greasemonkey script, so needed some basic help. I wanted to be able to find a particular element in an html page, in this case an image, and identify it’s URL. This URL is then turned into a QR Code and displayed conveniently on the page. So that while a user (with the Greasemonkey script installed) was viewing a Flickr photo page they could easily then visit the image URL on their mobile phone, and possibly choose to save it.

    So here’s what it looks like:
    QRFlickr in use – Original photo by cgandolfo, thanks!

    Interesting? Yes. This is *the* simplest and quickest way I’ve ever seen to transfer data from one device to another, without and sort of direct connection between the two (Bluetooth, USB) or without any network or contact details (email address, fileserver). The user doesn’t even need to know the URL, type it in, or send it to themselves. Within seconds the photo just appears on the phone.

    So if you want to do this, go install Greasemonkey for FireFox and then click on the QRFlickr script from the link below to install:

    Install QRFlickr

    Enjoy :)

    Posted June 23, 2008 in the Mobile category, with the tags: , , , , , , , and 3 comments