by Calvin Robinson on December 21, 2008.

This time last week Ruk and I were down Brick Lane hacking away at the Last.fm Hackday event. The place was packed – apparently 150 people – I’ve never seen a larger collection of Netbooks and Macs in any one place! There was a surprisingly small amount of PC laptops – which is probably something more to do with the type of people attracted by software hacking events than anything else.

The event was sponsored my Microsoft’s Codeplex, who were there with a ‘Surface’ table, which I had a little play around with.

Back in 2005 I think I was actually excited about this kind of thing hitting the market, but now not so much. I think they’re old, before they’ve even been released. Too much hype in the early days, and they’re yet to even hit production of any kind. One particular application that caught my attention though, was Vector Form. Here you can see the MS representitive giving me a demonstration;

Basically drag-and-drop audio composing. Of course being a Microsoft product, it wasn’t bug free. The rep was quick to tell me it’s simply proof of concept

The actual event went really well. Ruk and I had a few good ideas, but didn’t actually get anything finished on the day (although watch this space, we’ll be finishing our apps and launching them soon).

An open bar is always a plus, but Last.fm went one step further, with a lovely spread of seasonal turky-and-stuffing sandwiches, and mince pies. mmm.

There were quite a lot of same-ish applications made, and a few really good ones. At the end of the day, people were given the chance to present their apps, and the winner took home £1,000, followed by two runners up who each took home an xbox. I Qik’d all the presentations.

Here are the winners;

It was quite well organised, and overall a really fab event. Free lunch/drinks all round, lots of interesting people creating interesting stuff, and I got to delve into the Last.fm, Twitter, identi.ca and Ping.fm APIs – everyday’s a school day