Popfly, America and Jetlag

It's coming to the end of the second day out in America working with the Popfly team, and I thought it was only appropriate to undate everyone with whats been happening over this past couple of days.

The first day with the Popfly team, started of extremly early, with Ben and myself making it into the office (MS Building 41) for around 8:30, which is earlier than ive been out of bed this last couple of weeks :s

We met up with John Montgomery who is the GPM for the Popfly and Visual Studio Express teams, and John showed us around some of campus and introduced us to various people on his teams. Then on to set up in our own offices and start to flesh out some of the idea's that we have had for the projects that we will be doing this week.

This involved lots of writing on white boards (is alot cooler than it sounds) and story boarding our 3 presentations which will cover an "Overview of Popfly", "Mashup's", and "Game Creation". For each presention we will have to deliver a 60 minute presentation with a number of demos / builds, complete demos and walk throughs for presenters and also hands on labs for the audience to either complete in their own time or after the presentation.

With the outlines of each presentation done and we started on building up a number of demos that will be introduced into the slides, these include some great mashup's such as an Live Image search and display mashup and a recreation of the classic Amiga game "Bouncing Babies" (no babies were hurt in the production of this game!) whereby babies would have to jump from a buring building to be caught by the firebrigade below. We have also got an idea for a Deepdive for the mashups and block creation where we will use a number of different social networking sites and RSS feeds to either create a friend feed esq. sidebar app or an online presence idicator which can be put on your blog as "Blog Bling" (also check out Pimp My Live) to show visitors to your blog where else they can find more info about you, such as your twitter, FB or Flickr profies.

The second day we continued with our fleshing out of ideas and creation of demos and walkthroughs...

*edit* Remove mention of how horrid JavaScrip is *edit*

Along with the request for a Merge block to be included in Popfly (stay posted for the latest).

Needless to say after minimal sleep and alot of work, jetlag has started to kick in, however I will keep updating when more cool stuff happens.