stephenlgray

Dan Shearer is a veteran of open source (he once told me, he first started developing software when I was 2 yrs old), and is a founder of the Samba Foundation. Virtualization is essentially “Abstraction”. You can simulate electronics and hardware, physical interfaces, people (how users interact with the system) and even time (speed up or slow down the computation to test for faster devices, and even change the direction of ti

Andrew Hood, MD at Lynchpin Analytics gave a quick rundown on Analytics, what it is and why to use it. He explained how advanced analytics can help websites track the sources of traffic and the flow within the website. Analytics can also track how successful various marketing campaigns (like AdWords/AdSense) and referral strategies have been.

Gordon Guthrie of Hypernumbers gave a high level yet interesting talk on Erlang. He focussed on the philosophy behind Erlang which was designed from ground up to be a concurrent & distribution-oriented programming language. Even though Erlang syntax is similar to many other functional programming languages, it provides native concurrency and multiprocessing capabilities. So an application written in Erlang can scale easily to a large network of computers.

In the first demo, Yann Seznec gave a great demo of his Wii Loop Machine software. Yann’s application allows users to create new electronic music using a Wii remote. A big part of producing electronic music is to do with looping music samples and mixing them in a good rhythm. Yann’s software allows you to control, mix and match these loops, just like a DJ would, using a Wii remote.

Thanasis Theocharidis who has been working on casual games for many years, gave a demo of his game “Crazy Space”. Crazy Space is a “Othello” inspired game which has been engineered ground-up. Thanasis wrote his own libraries for online AI calculations and fast hardware acceleration in Java. The game can also run on Google’s new Android mobile platform.