Mobile Geeks, Amplified08 and team building

As well as the Pinkerton Lecture, I made my way to a few other events this week.

Mobile Geeks of London. Run by Whatleydude, this event is a drinking and connecting event, run every few months or there about. I got there later in the evening, after my trip to the IET, to find the place buzzing. There was a special preview of a really cool mobile app, involving barcodes, utilising the idea of putting virtual objects in your screen. The project launches next week (it’s a marketing project) and I’ll be writing about it on Digital Stuffing. I had a great time, buying my ticket for the Mobile Industry Review Christmas Presents and having some great conversations.

Amplified08. I managed to get to the last session at Amplified 08, the first in a series of ‘conferences’ trying to connect the multiple networks across the country. My original choice of session was one on using social networks for change, to compare it with the previous night’s lecture, but I ended up skipping that and joining in an impromptu session about Hierarchy of communication and adoption of the tools. There’s no doubt that many people at these sessions are edge cases, using online tools to connect far more than most, but it was interesting to see how we used things differently. We all had out own hierarchy, the different levels and ways you connect with people.

Team Building and Farewell Parties On Friday, the team got a few hours out of the office to discuss some works processes, but if you were following my Twitter stream you would have noticed the conversation varied a little. We talked about internet use, I was surprised of the lack of usage for someone working building websites. We discussed communication strategies, from email and phone only, through to me who uses a lot more channels. Other topics included Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard, co-relation coefficients and the Netflix challenge and the learning of languages. We also got onto London, how it’s a palimpsest of history, multiple layers of meaning. At the end of this, after calling into see James, I went to say farewell to my cousin, who’s back off to Australia after spending a few years here. The pub was just round the corner of Pudding Lane, another reminder of the city’s history.

That’s enough; next week there’s a few things I’ve not confirmed plus a trip to Leeds for the office Xmas party.