So, the #digitalgokarting 2 event happened last night. At a different track, and with a different race format… which lead to, uh, mixed results. Still, fun was had by all, even those of us who crashed! There was a nice mix of new faces and people who came to the first #digitalgokarting over at 3 Sisters. This time we were racing at Daytona in Manchester, on their 450 meter track, and we were racing in a Grand Prix format instead of a team endurance.

14 people raced in all, with best lap times in the 28 – 33 second range. Best lap time goes to Rob Hayward, who came second over all, losing out to Alan Williams (A full results table will be live soon). So congrats to those two! But, you know, it’s the taking part that counts… (we would say that; our best position was 5^th!)

We’ll get stuck into organising the next #digitalgokarting soon. We’ve taken on board peoples’ comments about both races so far, and will be scouting out a new track and having a bit of a think about race formats and so on. Keep on talking to us about it; there’s a lot of chat on Twitter, just look for #digitalgokarting. We’ll keep you posted about the next race… hopefully this time we’ll manage to rig it properly so we win!

Everybody will get:

* 5 minute practice
* 3 x 7 minute heat races
* 12 minute grand final

It will be great to see everyone down there and as Daytona is indoor we don’t have to worry about Manchester’s winter weather getting in our way.

Event Details:

* Time - 19:30

* Date - 18/11/10

* Location - Daytona Manchester (Google map)

To book you place on the grid complete the form below.

There’ll also be a light training session to provide a taste of the Mozzies’ usual training regime. People who have previously played the game are more than welcome; anyone who wants to get involved is invited. It’ll be held at Burnage Rugby Club. Start time is 11am and it’ll be running until 1pm.

It promises to be a fun day, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to learn something, even if it’s just that the Aussie Rules scoring system is a little bit more complex than most games that involve kicking a ball! All the times we’ve been down to Burnage Rugby Club to watch the Mozzies play we’ve had a whale of a time, so expect fun, as well as a good work-out.

The Burnage Rugby Club bar will be open once the training session has finished, so there’ll be a chance to relax and chat with the team. Remember to congratulate them on their recent championship win!

Thursday’s torrential rain also made for a wet track at Three Sisters, but it dried out as the race continued. There were a few spin-outs, but luckily nothing more exciting than that. Everyone seemed to be having a lot of fun during the race – it’s hard to tell when everyone’s got a helmet on – and there was definitely some good chat going on in the pub afterwards.

Although we had to cut the race a bit short because of traffic on the way, there was still time for a good 44 minutes and 52 seconds of racing. 13 teams competed – 26 people in all – with Joe Critchley and his partner finishing the endurance race as the fastest team. But it’s the taking part that counts, isn’t it? Mike from Fudge (he’s @13twelve on Twitter) has put together a results table, so you can see exactly who came where.

We’re already talking about organising the next one, so watch this space (and Twitter – #digitalgokarting). We think the next one will probably be indoors, and we’re not sure if we’ll stick with the endurance race / team set-up or go for something different – let us know what you think. On a more general note, if anyone fancies organising some digital paintballing (sorry, #digitalpaintballing) we’d definitely be up for it!

The Mozzies definitely deserve their position as league champions, having won every match since the start of the season and the beginning of our sponsorship. They’ve done us – and themselves – proud.

As well as the impressive result, it was also great to see the Mozzies getting a bit of publicity. The BBC covered the build up to the final on TV as well as the online. As this article on the BBC news website says, Aussie Rules Football is becoming increasingly popular. In fact, one of Moo Marketing even joined in with a pre-match kick-about at the final… (he did need a bit of a breather afterwards).

The Mozzies have completed their season in the best possible way. Moo Marketing would like to say a big congratulations to the whole Manchester Mosquitoes team; it’s not just the people who play on the pitch, after all. Well done to all of you. We’re already looking forward to the next season, and we’re glad our sponsorship helped the Mozzies make it to the top!

Race-day is going to be Thursday the 12^th of August. We’ve set up an eventbrite page for it, but the order form is at the bottom of this blog as well (because we know what a lazy lot you are). The race will be taking place at Three Sisters in Wigan; check out their website – looks pretty good, doesn’t it?

As well as a chance to zip about in a 70mph twin-160cc-engine Go-Kart, it’ll also be a good opportunity to catch up with some other marketing and design types. We’ve already had confirmations from people from a number of other agencies around here, so you’ll be in good company.

Fancy it? You know you do. We’ll do a follow-up blog afterwards – with pictures, if someone remembers a camera – so the winners will get the recognition they deserve. And we’re talking about it on Twitter, as you’d imagine. All the tweets are being tagged #digitalgokarting. Have a look, join the chat on Twitter, and come down for a race.

“In a survey conducted just before Google Street View launched across the entire UK, a fifth of those surveyed said they had used the service for househunting [source: YouGov Plc February 2010].”

That’s from Google’s Lat Long Blog. Which is also quick to point out the ways in which property search syncs with other Google Maps services:

“Search can be refined by choosing features like sale or rent, bedrooms, bathrooms, and price. The map will update to show the properties matching those criteria – and also dynamically update as you scroll and zoom around the map…layers and features like Photos, Videos, Satellite, and Earth view can be turned on as well.”

Not that we’d expect anything less.

It’ll be interesting to see how Google develops property search from here. They’ve been testing location tagging in the USA, which allows business owners to Tag their premises with extra information and custom messages on Google Maps. For a fee, of course. How long will it be before Google launches paid upgrades to property search listings?

We’re really excited about it, and not just because it promises to be a bit of a party. The 2010 Big Chip awards are the first awards that we’ve ever entered, and to make it on to the shortlist is pretty good going. At Moo we’ve just begun a very exciting stage in our growth as a company, and we’re looking at our shortlisting for Big Chip 2010 as a sign that we’re heading in the right direction.

There’s already a lot of chat happening on Twitter about the Big Chips; people are using the tag #BigChip2010. It’s more than likely that the tweeting is going to go on all night, so have a look if you want to find out the results as they’re announced, or read tipsy nonsense as the night progresses.

We’ll post another blog tomorrow to let you know what happened – fingers crossed! – but until then we’ve got some work to do. Good luck again to everyone else who made the shortlist. We’ll see you at the Palace.

Andrew Brooks talked us through some of his insanely detailed photographs, and generally dazzled/inspired everyone with his skills and the results of the hours he puts in to each piece. It was interesting to hear from someone who is straddling the worlds of both commercial projects and artistic commissions. We can safely say that pretty much everyone in the room was stunned by the attention to detail in his hyper-real digital art. Wonder how many office and studio walls around Manchester will be featuring one of his prints sometime soon?

After a brief break, during which everyone flooded out into the street for some fresh air (Madlab is a cool place but it was very busy, which meant that it was very warm) the second speakers of the evening took over. Hellicar & Lewis took us through their background, their impressive achievements so far, their ethos in general – including some big statements about selling software – and what’s on the horizon for them.

It was a great event, and the hot weather (and much appreciated refreshments supplied by the event sponsors) provided a rare opportunity for some “continental-style” outdoor networking. Keep an eye on the Northern Digitals site for more info about the next one; we’ll see you there.

“What is a Zettabyte? Let’s start with the more commonly known gigabyte and work from there.

Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes

Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes

Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes

Exabyte = 1000 Petabytes

Zettabyte = 1000 Exabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes”

Fastforward to now, 2010. According to the latest figures available, the “digital universe” is currently approx 0.8 zettabytes; around 300 exabytes larger than we estimated it would be by 2012. It’s forecast to exceed the zettabyte at some point this year.

While we may have got the figures wrong – and by quite a margin – we were right on the causes behind the increase in information on the internet. In our 2007 blog we pointed out the huge impact of “Web 2.0”. Web users have embraced social networking. The increasing prevalence of rich-media content being created and shared by both individual users and organisations has also had a massive impact. And that’s not to mention the mobile web explosion…

So, yes, we weren’t exactly spot-on with our estimates. But in this instance we’re more than happy to be proven wrong. We’re excited about the implications that the web expansion has for the creative and analytical aspects of our industry, and also excited on a purely geeky level; a zettabyte is an insane amount of data.