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

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.

One 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.)

This is another great moment in the night. It's a pre-rendered HD video element along with a live video feed, all telling donors how they should SMS in their memories!

If we provided BU-branded phones, we reasoned, we could have a VoIP application that would call tables and ask questions, and we would already have 120 pre-registered phones that we could send text messages to. (This would also help with the game show, since we’d know ahead of time that 309-111-1111 was at table 1, and so on.)

To get an idea of how the table layout turned out, as well as a lot of the work of Matt Forcum, Mitch Anderson, Brett Noe and Jim Ferolo, check out our University photographer's gallery from the event. You'll even see a shot or two of the quiz show!

I taught my MM 491 students mobile web design and game development with Flash Lite during the first part of the semester, so we also considered pre-loading Flash Lite games, wallpapers and ringtones onto the phones. I even developed a very simple prototype Flash Lite UI (I’ll adapt it for the web and post in a future article.)

I found a Nokia 6085 GoPhone refurb through AT&T wireless for $30 and my class and I began to run tests. The Nokia 6085 runs Flash Lite 2.0 and J2ME. AT&T’s prepaid service is nice in that it does include both SMS and data, so we theoretically had all the pieces in place.

Check back tomorrow for the next post in this series!