benchodroff.com

Blue SLadgets took first place in “Innovation Wiz” the other week. Many teams, mostly fulltime employees, presented their work to a panel of judges. We have been putting an extraordinary amount of work into our project. As of this week, we have well over 7,000 lines of code which the three of us have completed in less than a month and a half. Adding to this achievement is that we all were working with technologies and languages none of us have ever used before and we are submitting a second possible patent disclosure this week. We have been putting a lot of time into the project lately.

Our presentation was great. We showcased both the technical and business achievements our project has achieved and then went on to show a live working demo. The demo was to connect some embedded prototype hardware boards over the network and have them be controlled by Second Life objects through our Blue SLadgets framework. That is, we had light switches in Second Life controlling light bulbs in real life and vice versa. It was very impressive and received many questions and compliments! We received first place overall and was the only team to receive two awards, the second award was for the “most innovative idea.”

Between our team, the most impressive “innovation” was in our presentation setup. We rigged up a projector on top of a spare trash can, a server, and a stack of papers and projected onto some white papers taped to the wall. The wires, switches, and blinking LEDS from the hardware setup were sprayed everywhere…it was quite a site.

We’re all excited to head to Bangalore this week. We will be presenting our project to many executives and demoing the hardware setup again as well. This will mark the conclusion of our summer and we’re proud of what we have accomplished.