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In the harbour of my hometown Hasselt, there is a brand new attraction: a huge rubber duck floating on the water and enjoying the summer sun.
The duck announces the beginning of a challenging art project in Limburg, called ‘Zoom Out’. The project wants to unfold the borders of art, architecture and landscape. Moreover, it wants to find out in which way art can be used in public spaces.
GirlGeekDinner 9 was about music and technology. With among others the cute audiocubes by percussa and a dj set by boskabout. Waw 🙂 .
I finally met the wonderful Tantieris, stumbled upon the funny and witty Tante Annie and had a great time chatting with the other ladies (and boys). My sacoche -or man at my side- for this edition was the inspiring Polle, whose marketing blog I immediately added to my blogroll.
Quite some unforgettable stories at the Girl Geek Dinner as well. Girl Geek x almost drove her car in the canal when coming to the dinner because she blindly followed her gps. And that was only the beginning of her story, which included a stop in a kebab store and a worrying phone call to her husband beacuse she got lost (despite or because of the gps?). Luckily she finally got there 🙂 . Have to admit I kind of recognize that. I have often driven my car in one way streets in the wrong direction just because my gps told me so. Leading to dangerous situations 🙂 .Girl Geek y told about how she almost got locked into a big store because she didn’t think the personnel was in a rush when announcing that the shop was about to close. Made us plan a big party during closing hours. But shhht, that’s still a secret 😉 .
audiocubes by percussa
PS. Big thanks to Clo (organisation), Bert Schiettecatte (presentation) and Boskabout (music). And to Sensoa, Fanta, Chupa chups, Guitar Hero, Apple, Jan Leenders, Fa and PlugMedia for the goodie bag. And to Giovani Oosters for the yammie coconuts and CreativeClass for the great location.
Apart from the Belgian TechCrunch meet-up that was sold out in no time, there is a lot going on the next weeks for bloggers and geeks.
-9/11: Blogboat 1.0 in Ghent. With citizen journalism expert Dan Gillmor. Registration via this wiki.
-12/11: BrusselsGirlGeekDinner in Hasselt. Subscriptions via this wiki.
Topic: Music and technology featuring Audiocubes demo by Percussa.com’s Bert Schiettecatte.
-17/11: Mobile Monday in Brussels. Subscriptions via this website.
Program:
18.30 Welcome – Wim De Waele (IBBT) http://www.ibbt.be/team#wim
18.40 Mobile Advertising what can we expect in Belgium- Fabian Tilmant (Cleverwood) http://www.cleverwood.be/blog/
19.00 Start-up case – Jean-Paul de Ville (Pumbby) http://about.pumbby.com/
19.20 Debrief of MobileMonday Stockholm session – Tanguy De Lestré
19.30 Drinks and networking
And the really nice part? The three events are for free! They cost nada, nothing, rien du tout!
Last Friday my colleagues and I were invited to talk about the future of mobile to Communication and Multimedia Desgin students in Hasselt. I promised to put the presentation online to @sigrid. So here it is.
I took care of the first two parts (‘mobile phone love’ and ‘the new mobile internet’). My colleague Koen talked about possible business models and the evolution of mobile technology. Then my other colleague Davy concluded with a workshop, in which he showed how to make a mobile application with the GLOWE specification.Those applications can also be embedded on iGoogle and blogs. The slides of the latter are not online yet.
This presentation was part of a series of experimental media classes. Also the most recent Belgian news project nieuws.be introduced itself a few weeks ago. Since the classes were open, I attended that presentation. News will always remain a passion 🙂 . Purpose of all those classes: show the students a broad spectrum of new media and challenge them to develop a project with the tools introduced to them. Within a few weeks, the students will present their projects. I’m curious!
I’m heading to Ghent today, for the 8th edition of the Belgian Girl Geek Dinner. For the second time, I take a so-called ‘sacoche’ with me. Translated that means ‘handbag’, which refers to the guy a girl can take with her.
For the first edition of the Girl Geek Dinner, Maarten Schenk was my ‘sacoche’, for this edition Hannes Couvreur will accompany me. I met Hannes during my journalism studies a few years ago, we lost contact a bit, and are now back on track because our intrests have somehow developed in a similar way. Web 2.0, creativity, blogging,… Things we both follow and bring into practice.
Theme of the Girl Geek Dinner is Art and technology, with Eric Joris (performance group Crew) and Eva De Groote (Almost Cinema festival) as speakers. Also Jan Leenders, the Belgian artist who made my wonderful Twit2Art, will be there. The next Girl Geek Dinner will be hosted in my hometown Hasselt by the way.
A few things:
1.
On Monday I went to the first Mobile Monday in Brussels. A small and informal event with players from the Belgian mobile phone market. Which is still very far away from the big Mobile Monday events in Amsterdam, but it’s a start. And a good start it was. I had some interesting conversations with people from VRT, IBBT and MobileWeb. But most importantly: I finally got to see (a tip of) what’s going on in the Belgian mobile sphere. Who is doing what? Which companies are asking for which solutions? It’s a great way to bring professionals together I think, so I’m happy to be part of this.
The next Mobile Monday takes place at the 17th of November. The location hasn’t been decided upon yet. The former location, the bar of the Bemanos hotel was impressing at any case.
2.
Tomorrow, I’m heading to Amsterdam for the PicNic event. Last year I met some great people there that I’m still in touch with, like Kerim Satirli and Paul Bradshaw. Hope it will be as amazing as last year. The people there convinced me to start this blog because they wanted to find out more about my projects, yet I couldn’t send them anywhere on the web to find out. So this blog celebrates its one year anniversary 🙂 .
3.
On the 8th of October, the developers community I’m working with will officially ‘come out of the box’. At the Hasselt Student Take-Off, they present some applications they made. I’m curious how they will react and how the students will react (to them). Will be a kind of ‘boy meets world’ experience I think.
Yesterday we had our first twunch in Hasselt. Twunch, I beg your pardon?
Twunch is a fusion of ‘twitter‘ and ‘lunch’. Which means, in non-geeky words, that I went to lunch with my Hasselt Twitter friends. In Antwerp and Ghent, there have been quite a few twunches already. So high time for a Hasselt edition 😉 . It’s nice and easy: somebody ‘launches’ at Twitter that he’s feeling like lunch, and who wants to join, joins.
For this first edition in Hasselt, we were with 5 ‘Twitterers’. We talked about stuff like iPhones, a next mobile webcamp, other Twitter initiatives (soon I’ll tell you more about a fantastic Twitter project I got to know!!!), but we also discussed holidays, work, the high oil prices,…Conclusion: I like the initiative, and I liked the conversations.
To be honest, I had a great time. And I think most attendees had. The weather was great, the ice cream was good, but the best of all: the mobile webcamp was inspiring, relaxed and fun. And that was exacty what I had hoped for. Thank you everybody!!
Presentations, blog posts, tweets and other pictures can be found via the mobile webcamp wiki.
(First picture by kodel, other pictures by lone black rider)
Yes, high time for a mobile webcamp in Belgium, since 2008 simply breathes ‘mobile’.
All the information you need to know can be found on the wiki of the mobile webcamp. With the login ‘mobiel’ and the password ‘devcamp’ you can add your name, a presentation you want to give,…
And yes, I’m very proud to announce that I’m co-organizing the event. That’s why I’m now visiting the three high schools and the university in Hasselt, to make sure students join us there. Because, yes, they are the future ànd they have the opportunity of a lifetime to exchange ideas and plans with professionals (and vice versa) 🙂
And I never dared to hope that right now, after opening the site like two days ago, already 46 attendees have subscribed on the wiki. And quite some waw attendees, like Tom De Bruyne, Tijs Vrolix, Pascal Van Hecke and Bart Vanmaele. I’m a happy girl 🙂
By the way: also our location is waw, check it out!
The citizen reporters of HasseltLokaal were asked a while ago to be test users of the research project i-City in Hasselt. Therefore, they received a PDA together with ten other groups and 500 individual test users. On the PDA they can consult a so-called mobile services platform i-City has created. Firms and organisations can put new projects or applications on the mobile platform and the test users are then asked to experiment with it. Afterwards, they fill out evaluations forms or are invited for debates about their experiences.
To be honest, I don’t use the i-City platform that much, above all because there aren’t that many (working) hotspots in the city centre of Hasselt. But sometimes, I have tested quite some interesting applications. Recently, I have been asked to give in my favourite book topics (for the curious ones: German books and works on psychology). Everytime the library in Hasselt receives new books on those topics I get a message and can make a reservation. So when I’m in town, I can immediately go to the library to get the brand new book 🙂
On the 4th of December, the citizen reporters will gather to talk about their PDA experiences. They will also get a presentation of a brand new ‘City Services Platform’. You can find the information about it on the website of i-City, but for the moment the article is only available in Dutch. I wonder what the citizen reporters will have to say about the platform. I can tell that they have been using the platform a lot more than I did. Especially because HasseltLokaal is available on it and like that they can show off with their great articles and pictures everywhere they are 😉
Anyway, it’s quite something for the citizen reporters to have those PDA’s. As volunteers, they are not paid for the many efforts they put in HasseltLokaal. And as a matter of fact, everybody wins: i-City because they can experiment thanks to the test users, the organisation behind the citizen reporters because they have a way to reward the efforts of the citizen journalists and the reporters themselves since they are the proud owner of a PDA. Yes sir.
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