Friday, May 20, 2011

Angry Birds at WhyMCA

Today Paolo and I have held our speech on the reasons beyond the huge success of Angry Birds.

First of all we would like to thank all our attendees, that decided to spend an hour of their time with us. Too often we only think of what we will say or do in a presentation, and we can easily forget that a lot of people would waste their time if we don't take this responsibility very seriously. We hope all the time we have spent preparing the speech has translated in even the smallest improvement for people who choose to listen to us. The hall was crowded, but then again maybe the other ones were too full and people were looking for a place where they could find a seat and sleep for a while after dinner :-)

The other thanks are for the organizers of the conference, whithout whom all this would not have been possible. They were even so nice as to give us a beautiful t-shirt for free... and I even won a mug :-)

Here are the slides of our speech:

I suppose they are not very easily comprehensible without the speakers, but at least I am told the pictures are nice :-)

All constructive comments, positive or negative as they might be, are highly welcome: help us to improve!

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Why WhyMCA

The countdown says 5 days until the revolution, meaning that we only have a few days to finish (and rehearse) our presentation. I am having a lot of fun preparing for the event, and I am learning a lot too, but it is no bed of roses: in the end we have chosen a little less than a hundred images, some of which were manipulated and some others entirely created by us, not to mention all the mind maps made in preparation. Should we give them as handouts at the end of our speech? Slides would not be very useful without us... we tried to avoid the "death by power point" syndrome, but only the audience will tell whether we succeeded or not.

But why did we decide to get in there in the first place? after all I do not develop games, nor am a mobile expert, yet here I am, talking about the cognitive process at a conference for mobile activists. Simply put, Paolo asked me :-) but that would be too simplistic a statement. It's been a while since I first felt that maybe after getting so much from so many engaging speakers the time had come for me to give back a little something as well, but I was looking for something interesting to say. It looks like I found something that interests me, both because it is out of my comfort zone and because it is about games, that used to take so much of my time (well that was before my wife framed me with house maintenance). Maybe it could be of interest to someone else as well.

So, why is Angry Birds such an enormous planetary phenomenon? Come find it out at WhyMCA :-)