MiNIbAR SuMmaRY

Hi all – thanks for coming to MiniBar and thanks to Pier (who r u?), who has just provided an excellent summary of the evening. I felt guilty all weekend long for not having done the same thing. On Pier’s Feed you can read:

A good evening as usual at the minibar event in the Truman brewery on Friday before the bank holiday discussing mostly geo.

The presentations were pretty rapid fire and everyone speaking had a 3 minute timer displayed on the screen to keep them honest, a pretty good idea which I might have to ‘reuse’.

A summary? hard one really, it reinforced the good health of the UK startup community and the level of interest in new business models. Mapping and where? continues to rise and geotagging is just going to get more and more important. I’m not sure I’ll go as far as angelina though.

The speakers;

ecourier announced a competition for developers to mashup their data. They record the location, speed etc of all their couriers over london every few minutes and think this might tell us interesting things about traffic flow etc.

Ymogen showed a neat geo story telling tool which they have put together with the BBC innovation team. It uses mobile phone data, pictures and video etc on a map. Look forward to seeing that one available.

Map my hotel is a map based search using googlemaps and hotel booking / availability data.

Lawrence from Rate it All showed how he is extending the reach of his site with the use of the rather clever rate it all widget. I had a brief chat to Lawrence and his wife after the presentation and they had some excellent advice on starting out with widgets which was really helpful.

Blindside was a new one for me. A government blog / wiki launched to discuss the question ‘What are the implications of emerging information technologies?’. Being from the government they got a bit of a hard time from the audience which I thought was a little unfair. It’s good to see government reaching out to these new forms of communication to capture feedback and views.