The Audioboo Party

So, on the 6th of January, Audioboo had a party at Sun Microsystems in London. @documentally has pictures, as does Benjamin Ellis.

We thought it was a fantastic night. We hope everyone else did as well. When planning for it, it started off as a informal do in our offices as a way of saying thank you – to any booers who could make it – for their contribution in making Audioboo the audio platform it currently is. Few bootles of wine, pizzas, the usual score.

Then Stuart Townsend of Sun Startup Essentials (who supply the servers & software that power the audioboo backend) heard about it and said “No no no. We can do better than that”.

‘Better than that’ turned out to be one big favour. Our small pizza event moved to Sun’s impressive offices on London Bridge, our few pizzas turned in a full on buffet and the numbers we were able to invite went from 20 to 200. That is true startup support! We were also lucky to have the backing of Media140, an ambitious attempt to explain and chart the rise of the real time web’s relevance to news gathering organisations around the world.

The success of the night itself was, of course, down to our own Karen Barber – multipart evangelist, strategist, networker, confident & generally cool person. She managed to organise an amazing event on no budget that would be the envy of many big organisations.

The day was complicated slightly by a fairly large 2nd round competition presentation we were doing for Vodafone Clicks. It didn’t help matters that I was convinced the presentation was at Canary Wharf in London rather than in Paddington. For those who are unaware of the enourmity of this mistake, have a look at the route. It was only after talking to Vodafone to say we were 5 minutes late and were just getting off the ferry (“Ferry? There are no ferries at Paddington”) that we realised how much of a fuck up we’d made. Still, we made it, did the presentation and got back just in time for the start of things.

After coping with that, it turned out to be a brilliant evening of meeting old ( well, 4 months old) friends and making a lot of new ones. It felt like a really nice, close atmosphere – not the usual corporate party thing. I would hope to put that down to the real connection audioboo has tried to make with its users to enable them to both feedback on the platform and influence the direction in which it develops. However, it could have been the beer.

During a short presentation at the party, I showed a poem that my mother had written shortly before her death last year, which had really acted as the seed from which audioboo was born. For when she died, I realised I had no recordings of her reading her poetry, or indeed of her memories of growing up during the war in Croydon as the Battle of Britain raged above her head, or of her life afterwards having 5 children and a career as a teacher, social worker and geologist. It was always too much hassle to find a recorder, or sit down with her and plan what to say. That’s why we started audioboo: to create an audio library in the clouds that stored & played back all the sounds that never get captured because we’re rarely prepared to do so.

So thanks to everyone that managed to make it to the 1st booparty and to the countless others who would have liked to come but couldn’t. It was a very special night for the entire team and we look forward to many more of them with more of you.

I’ve reproduced my mothers poem below. It’s called ‘When Poets Die”

Poets die still deep with words,
ribbons of lines, verses
like unstitched tapestries and whole pages
not yet set. They lie unfathomed,
crowded into jars and button tins,
beads waiting for stringing. Listen  -
you hear them, small clinks of glass and pearl,
rolling around, not into emptiness, they wait
to make a way to the sun, quickened
even in earth.

Daphne Rock, 2007

UPDATE: And I should have provided a link to the boos about the party!

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