The Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance: Flash Lite, J2ME, SMS or MMS?

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Sun, 05/04/2008 - 16:46

This is the third in a series of posts chronicling the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance kickoff gala, a mediated event in which I used Drupal to gather alumni memories, run a quiz show, and display photography both on the small iPhone screen and on some giant screens via Flash.

As you'll recall from the last post, my students and I were tasked with building an interactive quiz and a method to collect memories from alumni and donors. We planned to buy a large quantity of AT&T Nokia 6085 GoPhones that we could preload with Flash Lite or J2ME apps.

My first practical step was to check reception in the space. Armed with my refurbished Nokia and my trusty T-Mobile Dash, I visited the giant ballroom in which this event would be held. Both my Dash and the Nokia got at least 3 of 4 bars throughout the entire room with connectivity to the EDGE network. (Verizon is the only 3G carrier in Peoria at the moment, sadly.)

The Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance: Pick Up Your Bradley Phone!

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Wed, 04/30/2008 - 14:20

This is the second in a series of posts chronicling the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance kickoff gala, a mediated event in which I used Drupal to gather alumni memories, run a quiz show, and display photography both on the small iPhone screen and on some giant screens via Flash.

Bradley and CaterpillarOne of the killer theatrical moments of the night - the presentation of Caterpillar's gift worth between $30 and $48 million dollars!

Almost three months ago, Jim Ferolo dropped the bomb on Matt Forcum, Harry Williams, Brett Noe and myself that we would be using our respective areas of expertise to produce the gala kickoff for the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance. Since I am teaching a section of MM 491 on Multimedia for Mobile Devices, my students and I were tasked with building interactive portions so that our donors could interact by sending in memories, voting in a quiz show and sending in their photos. (We would later nix the photo / MMS capability.)

We expected up to 1200 guests at this event, distributed around up to 120 tables. Our first idea was to give each table a BU-branded phone, with which we could do all sorts of neat things. First, imagine the cacophony of 120 phones ringing at the same time (especially since we had planned to hide them from the guests up until that point.)

The Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance: A Multimedia Introduction

Submitted by Steven Merrill on Fri, 04/25/2008 - 07:54

Since the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance has now been officially opened, I can start talking about the gala kickoff event, which Bradley's Multimedia and Theatre programs collaborated on to produce.

I took point on a good deal of the interactive portions of the night: alumni text messaging onto the big screens, an interactive "Bradley College Bowl" quiz app that pitted tables against one another to answer BU trivia, and some apps to display photographs that were being taken and delivered to us behind the scenes with WiFi. We also built a special iPhone interface that showed photos being taken at the event and so that iPhone users wouldn't have to use SMS messages to participate.

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