The idea behind Helloapp is absolutely brilliant. When you sit down in the conference hall, you ‘check-in’ to your seat, by tweeting @helloapp with a code attached to your seat and giving a few hashtags to describe yourself. Then if people want to approach you, they know where you are. Whenever you meet someone throughout the conference you tweet “@helloapp met @cr” for example, and then if the person tweets helloapp back, you both get 10points. This is where the points system comes in.

Whoever collects the most points throughout the conference wins a prize. You can earn prizes through several different means. If someone Hi5′s you (@helloapp hi5 @cr) that’s a one-way shout-out that’ll earn you 20points. There are tokens hidden around the venue, that once claimed will earn you 5 or so points. Certain vendors also have their own selection of tokens to hand out as they see fit. Microsoft and Sun Microsystems (Sun Start-up Essentials) were handing out a code to anyone who would sign up to their program/newsletter.

The reason this app is so cool, is because the whole purpose is to encourage people to network and make more connections. I’d love to see it being used in more events, not only Carsonified hosted. No to mention everyone loves a bit of competition, and as the gaming industry is demonstrating lately; everyone loves a sense of achievement, however small.

Of course there are a few tweaks that need to be made to this app. The biggest two problems I faced over the last two days were these;

• Finding your own profile page is not exactly self-intuitive. There was a UX lapse here. The only way to view your profile, or that of other people’s is to know the URL (http://hello.carsonified.com/Profile/cr) or to click someone’s thumbnail photo on the seating plan. It’d be  nice to have a ‘Go to user profile’ search, where you can type in the name or twitter handle of someone to view their profile.

• Special codes that were hidden on tokens around the venue not only gave users tokens but they added badges to your profile. There were some rare tokens (for this event they were Star Wars themed, i.e. Millennium Falcon). The system *should* have a mechanism to stop users simply searching “@helloapp claim” and copy & pasting the codes themselves. The idea was that you share (or trade) the codes with other people around the conference. So maybe only allow these codes to be used a certain number of times or something.

I was lucky enough to find a couple of tokens downstairs in the Sun Start-up Essentials Chillout Lounge (with the help of @scoobeesnac). If you search the codes for these, you can see people claiming the code, who I’d never even met – cheeky!

So I managed to get to about 200something points by claiming the codes I found, other people had found, and the ones vendors had handed out, then my score was practically doubled when my friends started Hi5-ing me, bringing me up to 570. It’s at this point people started telling me to check Twitter, because Ryan Carson had called me out. Brilliant, I had won! I got to take home the excellent remote control car – but not before charging it up and rampaging around the venue with it . I also got to quickly pimp my company (SRCLDN.com) on the stage. It would have been a nice prize to do a short 3 minute pitch – maybe something to think about for the future.

Anyway, here’s my HelloApp profile. Check out my pro badges . I’ve been playing around with the system a bit more and by exploiting I managed to get over 1,000 points. A good job nobody figured this out during the event!

I want to end on a quick ‘props’ to Elliot Kember for Tweets From FOWA – this live twitter stream monitoring the #FOWA hashtag made for huge fun during the Gary Vee and Kevin Rose show at the end of the final day.

SQL

I don’t really need to discuss this, I mean who uses MS SQL?

Azure

I can see where/when Azure would be useful, but again, just go Open Source for more control and more options.

Silverlight

Silverlight 3 is actually looking quite cool and is set to release by the end of July (shh ). Silverlight currently works on Windows Mobile, when they’ve tested it – but it just hasn’t been implemented yet. Expect to see this in Windows Mobile 7.
MS brag about the cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility of Silverlight, but at the same time they offer no support to Novell with the Moonlight project (to get Silverlight compatibility in Linux).

IE8

There were few IE6 jokes of course, but that’s to be expected. At least MS can laugh at themselves – because the rest of us already are – IE8 offers some interesting features, I just don’t know how useful they are;

Slices allow the user to save a section of the site, like a bookmark but not-quite. It’s almost RSS replacement, but it’s something that I can’t really see taking off on a large-scale. The biggest down-fall of this feature is that it needs hard-coding in the HTML to be able to work, so a user can’t ‘Slice’ any content, only content that has been tagged in the source code.

Accelerators are more interesting, this is the tool that cuts down Copy&Paste steps in the browser. Simply right-click on selected text and you have the option to search that text in Google, Bing *groan* (yes it’s good, but I don’t have to keep admitting it!), Amazon and all other site that you’d expect with this feature. You can also e-mail the text, useful stuff like that. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Firefox already provides a much better plugin (more feature complete. Accelerators doesn’t even have an eBay search).

Deep Zoom

Apart from the goofy name, this software was actually pretty cool. Huge image rendering through Silverlight. Visit the Hard Rock Cafe Memorabilia page and hit the magic ‘v’ button, then just keep zooming out – you’ll see a nice demonstration.

ASP.NET

People still use ASP? All jokes aside, .NET is a good idea. One development environment for all your applications, whether they are web or desktop. With Mono, it’s almost Open Source friendly too. But ASP? Really? … Just go Java.

–

So I went into this meeting thinking ‘Apache + Java > IIS + .NET’, and I came out with ‘FF > IE8′. The Microsoft guys were really friendly, we had a good chat. I didn’t rebel too much, although I was the only one in the room with a MacBook Pro and iPhone, and I may have been the only one asking Open Source questions – but that’s not rebellious, that’s just tech-savvy. MS offer no innovation, they are a bore to the market. People moan that Apple provided no Copy&Paste, it could be said that Microsoft give us too much Copy&Paste.

Quote of the Day: “We’d never try to make our tools the only tools you could use”