Apparently some CDs didn’t see the funny side of being sledged by text (SMS) at the AWARD party at Sydney’s great arts venue Carriageworks on Friday. Guests could text comments with their mobiles that appeared in speech bubbles over pictures of the award winners.
Most of the comments were funny or in good spirits but as the night wore on and the alcohol kicked in the barbs became more poisonous.
We knew this was an experiment and therefore going to be a bit risky (see a similar use at re:publica conference). And some people will always go too far. However we wanted to show that at events, technology and interactivity can come together in a very intuitive way. It was an opportunity for people to experience first hand how easy-to-understand and engaging an interactive idea can be.
Video of the projection at the AWARD 2007 party:
We set it up using a standard SMS gateway, drawing the incoming live data (text messages) into a flash file which constituted the projection of photos made a few moments earlier. This might have been the first time such technology has been used at an Australian event.
If you know of similar applications or would like to comment (sledge?), please drop us a line.
Update:
The SMS celebrated its 15th birthday two days after we invited to text to the AWARD screen. Of course, we hereby salute the engineers at Airwide for their brilliant addition to the world of communication.
Between 0 and 1 
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Awesome job guys! Really great idea to use txt to make fun of the personas present!
Hey Tim,
gute Idee. Ist einfach aber sehr effektiv. Ich hab ein ähnliches System letztes Jahr auf einem Kongress in Berlin gesehen: http://www.flickr.com/photos/klisch/459735259
Mit diesen SMS Sprechblasen wurde eigentlich der ganze Kongress begleitet, was sehr lustig war. Präsentationen konnten so 24/7 kommentiert werden – nicht immer sehr einfach für den Referenten…
Nice one Tim 😉
I also like those two sms projects
http://www.simpletext.info
and
http://www.txtualhealing.com
Hey Tim,
cool – haben wir bei unseren Angeboten auch immer in der Tasche bei Kunden, bei denen’s passt. Ist indes (natürlich 🙂 nicht neu, ich hab mal als schnelles Beispiel http://www.chatwall.de/ ausgepackt.
Gab es bei eurer Installation eine Redaktion/BadWordFilter/… ?
Best aus FFM,
Stefan
@Gerald: cool, it would be great to have a video integration as well, thereby confusing all speakers at the conference completely, possibly leading to Attention Deficit Disorder in the audience.
@Stefan: a “bad word” filter wasn’t applied (we do have it though) as we felt it would take away a lot of the fun. also this crowd was old enough to be able to withstand an occasional swearword. All sender data of the incoming messages are of course in our database (there is no anonymity).
@Alex: Twitter and other IMs would have been a bit too geeky as we were striving for the smallest common denominator of interaction.
No matter how often Bluetooth zones, WiFi downloads or 3G/UMTS browsing is mentioned in our circles, texting and voice calls remain the classic, easy and fool-proof methods for public interaction.
That’s great – I’ve been wanting to do something like that for ages. I had a plan to do it on a massive dot matrix display somewhere.