We had our Geekzone Party on 13 August to celebrate our 40 million pages served, and to meet some of our readers... We now have some pictures here (scroll down).
It was lots of fun meeting some of you, talking about technology and learning more about each one's interests. We had people from Telecom New Zealand and Vodafone present there, and lots of fun placing video calls with the new Vodafone 3G phones, Telecom CDMA Pocket PC speed tests, and other things to play with.
Thanks to all people there, and in special to the ones driving from Hastings to Wellington to meet us, or jumping on a plane from Auckland and Christchurch to join us. chris021 even decided to purchase a plane ticket on the day at 12pm to join us at 5pm for the drinks!
The party started at The Last Supper Club, where we had drinks and platters. We also had some spot prizes, including a Bluetooth car kit handsfree from phonestuff.co.nz, a few 24 hour Wi-Fi vouchers from CafeNet, a couple of Pocket PC Magazine demo CDs, a Bluetake Bluetooth adapter, and a DLINK Wi-Fi PCMCIA card (courtesy of Disenchanted). Everyone also got a Geekzone pen!
After that we moved to Masala for dinner and the ones still up moved to Strawberry Fare for desserts (if you don't know that place rocks for sweet stuff).
The funny part during dinner was when we noticed chris021 using his Pocket PC and taniwha with her Palm T3 - at the same time - to access their servers via SSH connected through UMTS and CDMA respectively. What a coincidence, and how techie is this?
Thanks to Telecom New Zealand we had a Wi-Fi access point available during the meet up, connected to their CDMA EV-DO network. And Microsoft helped too by paying the dinner part of the event.
Based on the feedback of people present there, I am thinking of creating a full day event that brings together a technology showcase where service providers could show their products, and a discussion panel for our users - liek a live forum (perhaps even record it and make available as a download).
But this is probably for the next year. Stay tuned.
