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.