Monsters, TV and NASA

Picture the scene - hundreds of geeks armed with laptops in one of the icons of British media technology, a couple of monsters, a full broadcast TV station to play with and NASA.

Yup that’s right - the only place you’re going to get all of that in one go is Mashed 08 (was Hack Day last year). A two day event for mashing and developer geeks - both hardware and software.

I was at Hack Day 2007 last year helping Matthew Cashmore and his team out - you can read my reports on the event from last year. Including details of lightning striking the ceiling.

I’m not going this year - I have a young and teething baby and he has to come first - but I am really upset I’m going to be missing what is shaping up to be a legendary event.

Last year it was a partnership between Yahoo and the BBC (Hack Day is a Yahoo concept) whereas this year the BBC (Matthew Cashmore and the Backstage team) are taking the lead themselves.

So, before I explain some of what I’m going to be missing - lets kick off with the monster. I’ve already mentioned it twice after all.

The headline for this post was very nearly ‘Doing the Monster Mashed’ but I decided that was far too obvious and It’s already been used.

Basically the Monster talk is all about a competition being held at Mashed for someone, or a group of someones to build - well a Monster!

The challenge is to make use of the skills (ARM) and tools that will be on hand at Mashed, as well as anything you take yourself to create a full-size, fully worked monster.

You have 24 hours, at the event, to build the next BBC Sci-Fi monster - trying to avoid the words Doctor Who and breaking any copyright on existing monsters.

You have until 18 June to send your monster ideas to Matthew Cashmore (Backstage). The best two ideas will be funded to the tune of £500 (you get the money after the event) to make their monster idea at Mashed.

Then you present your monster at the event to an audience who vote on the best of the two - no prize just the bragging rights.

When planning your monster idea think about something that has ultimate killing potential, how well it can deal with stairs and how scary the overall effect is.



It’s not just monsters though.

As well as monster building and hacking there will be nine talks from industry experts on a massive range of subjects and ideas.

These will include Andy Smith talking about the iPlayer, Nick Gallon with advice on hacking the BBCs TV services, Audio & Music Interactive talking about /programmes and the cool stuff that team is doing with making BBC data available to the masses - oh and robotics with Microsoft!

There will also be a full broadcast TV station that will give you the ability to hack and build your own interactive applications.

As for the NASA part of my headline - all I know about that is the last line of Matthew Cashmore’s blog post “AMAZINGLY COOl…. NASA are coming… I so damn excited right now. Fucking ROCKETS!”

And that isn’t just the rockets created by Ewan Spence

I’m really jelouse of the hundreds of developers getting to go to this years event - it looks like a real corker and a great opportunity to get together with loads of like minded people at a really fun event.

But lets just hope lightning doesn’t strike this year as it might just bring the monsters to life!

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