Thursday, March 20, 2008

Urbanista Synopsis: WomWorld Meetup

There will be a few more posts in wrap-up mode related to my participation (now concluded) in the Nokia Urbanista Diaries and things I did along the way. But this one is particularly pertinent.

In London the WomWorld outfit (WOM standing for World of Mobile), organizers of the manpower behind the Urbanista project, scheduled a meetup for all their mobile device enthusiasts and beta/trail participants in the London area. They brought lots of the nseries devices for people to play with, including several more of the Nokia N82, the phone/camera I had been logging and documenting my whole journey with.

Here is a fellow meetup attendee performing the classic "over the head crowd/event portrait" shot. Exactly the same thing I was doing when I took his picture.

03-14-2008 (by clickykbd)

But really, in classic British form, the whole event was a chance to talk, socialize, and of course, drink. Which, combined with the other activity planned for the evening, THROWING CAMERAS, makes for some amusing situations. Not really a full blown workshop like my last effort in Italy, but more of an informal demo followed by LOTS of impromptu participation. Organizers brought some rope lights and "fairy lights" (which I learned is what they call "christmas lights" in England) and some soft surfaces for cameras to land on. Just about everyone had a go at it and the best results were emailed to WOMWorld, where the staff picked their favorite.

Their winner was Abul Hussain, who took this photo in his first evening of camera tossing using his camera phone (a nokia for sure, but not sure which one):


Photo by Abul Hussain, 2008
at the WOMWorld Meetup at The Crown, London on March 5th

There was a good turn out to the event, and although I had to leave early to rest up for another full day in London, the party went on into the late hours. Here is another view of the scene at The Crown. Not a great shot but does demonstrate the powerful punch of the zenon flash on the N82.

03-14-2008 (by clickykbd)

I actually wish I had more of the camera toss results from everyone that evening to share. If you were there and reading this, head over to the flickr group and stick them in the pool or discussion threads.

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Urbanista: The End (perhaps)

03-08-2008 (by clickykbd)

The Nokia Urbanista Diaries come to an unfortunate end today, as I blog this from my last city, Helsinki, on my last day (heading to the airport shortly). Helsinki feels to be a magical place but 24 hours really is not enough time! I promise this white city of the north that I shall return some day!

Although this is the end of my physical journey, I don't think Nokia is done hosting urbanistas. In my meeting with a few of the team yesterday over lunch (including eating yummy smoked raindeer (sorry Roudolph!)) they indicated many of their international offices now want to start organizing urbanista projects.

I didn't get a chance to write much feedback or stories of the travel on the go, so the next couple weeks I'll be catching my flickr up to date and expounding a little more on the experience here. I'll also populate that page posted earlier with all sorts of geodata goodies. The pace was just too fast to pull it off on the go.

I'll also be trying to organize all my feedback about the N82 and respective applications I was using, as that was one objective of the trial while traveling. On the go I simply concentrated on really getting the most of the camera features.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Long overdue update...

Despite the inactivity on this blog, yes, I am still traveling with the Nokia Urbanista Diaries project. Due to the pace of my journey and lack of accessible internet in most stops along the way I have not kept up the posting as I thought I might be able to, but the photos are still going up in near real-time on my flickr stream. Definitely the best reference for following along despite my best laid plans to have more interactive alternatives. Unfortunately, the nseries interface seems to have mostly folded due to inadequate planning for the volume of route data and photos it is trying to serve up. Unfortunate because I think I've been posting some pretty nice photos in the 'urbanista' spirit.

I've been to Vienna, Berlin, Milan/Florence, Paris, Bristol. I am now in London (my first day of two here). I was speaking with our organizer at WOMWorld about the problem of blogging while traveling on my journey and looked down at the chalkboard where we had stopped for breakfast. "Free WiFi". Finally!

This evening is scheduled a WOMWorld meetup. I hear they've thrown together quite a spectrum of opportunity for the attendees to explore camera tossing with nseries camera phones. Should be interesting. Read here for details of when and where.

Here's some more photo highlights from the previous cities, (follow through to flickr and click the map links if you want to see where):

02-23-2008 02-23-2008

02-24-2008 02-24-2008

02-26-2008 02-26-2008

02-28-2008 02272008764

03-02-2008 02-23-2008