At thursday, November 26, 2009 Peter Kaptein (Instant Interfaces) and Valerie Ivangorodsky (Vivango) of the Roomware Project offered the “Connection point” also deployed for the Cabellero Factory Business Event 2009  and the Music & Bits event last October. The NIMA MEE was held in the Brandboxx in Almere. In total there were over 250 people present that day.

The Nima MEE 2009 presented three finialists x 4 categories (Absolute Excellence, Innovation to the max, Completely Customer Connected and Most MVO).

Nima asked the Roomware project to install the Connection point to enable their visitors (over 250 marketing professionals) to exchange their contact data. The system works by scanning the QR-codes and deciphering them into readable text. When two people show their code the system perceives that as a match and sends an e-mail. Person “A” will receive the contact data of “B” and “B” the contact data of “A”.

This was possible via QR-codes produced by Peter Kaptein and printed on a second badge which could be scanned by the QR-code scanner. The QR-codes contained the full name, the function and the e-mail address of the person. There were more than 30 e-mail exchanges between people.

If you allow me i’ll take your attention and point in the general direction of where roomware is now and where we are going. Roomware the project that is, not roomware the concept which is going places without me having to write a single word. As you might have noticed if you’ve been following our roomware twitter feed or this blog, lately most Roomware activity has been around a new platform that is being created by Peter Kaptein and Valerie mostly.

These guys are building some great tools and to do it they have basically rewritten what has come to be known as “the roomware server” into something similar yet completely different. This is all very shocking of course but since it  allows them to be highly productive the roomware team as a whole applauds it.

This did lead to a situation where there are now two versions of “the roomware server” out in the wild, one made in Java based on the concept of a central node that uses communicators to talk to different devices and one made in C# (code online soon!) based on mediators for each bit of hardware you want to support that are like drivers for the roomware operating system. I won’t get into details here, read Peter’s blog if you want to learn more, but looking at this unfolding we recently discussed how this all fits into the grand scheme of things and we decided the roomware project needs an upgrade. Not so much a software upgrade but more of a mission upgrade.

So what were doing is transforming the roomware project from an open source software project to the roomware foundation, which aims to supports the spread of knowledge and tools that allow the creation of roomware applications.

We hope to achieve this this by doing a lot of what we have been doing all along; things like organizing workshops and making sure the right people are talking to each other, but we will also put more effort in promoting what we feel are cool new roomware (-ish) projects on our website, blog and twitter feed and by telling people about them wherever we go.

What we will no longer be doing is supporting a single piece of software as the one and only solution for building roomware applications. We never really thought of the roomware server that way but it might have seemed like we did since it was the only piece of kit you could download from our website. From now on we’ll be offering a wider range of tools on our site and we invite anyone who develops tools for roomware to send us their links so we can offer a wide range of, curated, tools you will want to use for your next project.

In the coming months we’ll start updating our website to reflect our new goals:

• organize events where roomware developers and designers can meet
• showcase cool roomware projects on our site
• write about new roomware developments on the blog and twitter
• teach people about the tools and how to use them
• promote proper use of roomware through our manifesto and code of conduct

We hope this will make for a more energetic, open and successful project. And as always we can only do this with your help, be it helping out with coding or even just by sending us examples of your work so we can showcase it on the site.

On October 26 Valerie Ivangorodski and Peter Kaptein presented two concepts to use the phone as a Remote Control using RoomWare. Peter Kaptein showed a solution requiring a Android phone and using Sockets to connect to a RoomWare server. Valerie showed a more generic remote control where you can use any mobile phone to dial into a number and manipulate objects or RoomWare applications using your keyboard.

The presentation can be found here.

October 2, 2009, the RoomWare Project hosted the “electronic business cards” at The Cabellero Factory Business event. Using a simple setup with webcams and two laptops, people could exchange contact data using the QR-code printed at their visitor badges.

Read more about the backgrounds here.