Brightbox at Barcamp Manchester UK 1 Mar 08
Jeremy and I went to Barcamp Manchester last Saturday – our photos are on Flickr as usual. It turned out to be six months to the day since we went live with Brightbox too!
We ran a competition on the day: people had to tell us what they’d do with a Brightbox virtual machine and the best suggestion (as judged by us) kwould win a years hosting on one. Throughout the day people wrote their ideas on post-it notes and we sifted through them at the end.
Here are some of the suggestions:
- A service to archive scans of old maps for Open Street Map
- Twitter wall app – @replies aggregated in the style of facebook’s wall-to-wall messages
- Start a rails hosting company
- Learn PHP
- Hosting for Deb
- Slowly ticking countdown timer to cause paranoia
- App to mix samples from fiction books to make new fiction
- Run a free hosting competition
- Flame retardant killer robots
- “Anything! They’re so flexible and scalable the possibilities are endless! We love Brightbox!”
- “Dye your hair orange”
The winner was Chris Maltby, who said he’d use it to host a web-based multiplayer turn-based strategy game. This made our geeky senses tingle.
Rob Lee also suggested we open source our management tools – which we already do! I guess we just don’t make a big enough deal about it. Expect to see us making a bigger deal about it soon.