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One of the easiest ways to get your email to stand out in your customers inbox is to use some personalisation. People quickly spot their own name when scanning down a list and it gives your email an instant credibility as the user knows they must have given you their name before, even if they don't remember your brand immediately.

We decided to take this idea a little further with one of our clients, Alliance Fund Managers. Each email contains a dynamically generated custom image. For their News email the newspaper has the recipients name scribbled on it, and the date of the mailout across the top of the paper. On the events emails there is handwritten invite made out to the subscriber and on their regular investment deals update, there is a cheque dated and made out for £1million to the lucky recipient. Click the images below for a closer look. If you want to know more, get in touch with us.

We've just announced our hardware hacking event, Howduino. It'll be on May 23rd at FACT Liverpool. Check out the website for more info. http://www.howduino.com/

We've just launched this viral game for the Tate Liverpool, to promote an upcoming exhibition of Glenn Brown. He was shortlisted for The Turner Prize in 2000.

So please do go and have a play at http://glennbrown.atthetate.com/

The 3D effects are done with Papervision3D, it's the first app I've built using this library and it was suprisingly easy to use. You may be able to spot some little quirks with polygons peaking through surfaces they shouldn't, it does struggle with a number of objects close together at slightly different depths, but considering it's a 3D engine built entirely in flash it's quite amazing!

When the iPhone 3G was announced with built in GPS, native applications and of course the same always online tarif, a lot of geogeeks got a little bit excited. We hoped it would be a great platform for tracking your location in realtime using services like mapme.at. Unfortunately it's just not possible in the way we wanted. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided to lock down the phone as much as possible and remove all the those places where third party developers could degrade the experience. One of the features to go was the ability to run an application in the background. Now you could keep an application running and still lock your phone, but as soon as you want to use your phone for something else you have to close it, then remember to open it again.

I didn't want to jailbreak my phone, so I started thinking of other ways I could locate it. One thing that occurred is that if you could pick up what IP address the device is getting online with you could use that to find a location. Geocoding IPs is notoriously flaky, but if it's just a limited set of known locations, such as home, office or your regular coffee shop, you could tie them to the locations and it would still be quite useful.

So how to get the phone to constanty report it's IP address? Well there is one background process that is allowed to run on the phone, and that's the mail checking. So all I needed to do was write something that appeared to be a mail server but simply tracked the IP address. After a little chat with John we decided the integrate this into mapme.at.

If you want to try it out, just set up an account on mapme.at, under the sources tab you should see an email address with a code followed by @email.mapme.at. Then on your iPhone set up a new POP account, the pop server is pop.mapme.at, and the username is the full email address from the mapme site. The rest of the details can be anything you want.

To start linking IP addresses to locations add new favourites on mapme, then click the "Insert IP tag" to link the network you're currently on to that tag. If you want to add other addresses you can type in the tags manually.

I think the next stage is to integrate (or even built) a shared database of geocoded IPs for public hotspots.

So Liverpool has just had it's first BarCamp, it didn't quite make the 200 attendees we were hoping for but it went great, I think 200 would have been too big anyway, it's much better when it's smaller and cosier. Maybe I'm biased since it's my home city, and it was great being able to go home to my own bed but everyone seemed to have had a great weekend.

It was good to have a chance to chat to Adrian about Ardunio since I'm going to get one for Chistmas :) Looking forward to having a play with it now. John was there representing OSM again, if you're into geodata or care about information that should be free then have a look at the OSM project.

As with every BarCamp, no matter what sessions I go to and enjoy there always seem to be more that I miss, Phils talk on how to give talks seemed to go down well and I probably could have done with seeing it and on Sunday there was a talk on Sex that seemed quite popular!

The Saturday night party kicked of with the Bitchin' Pitches sessions, which Adrian won with his power usage logging, then it ended with everone dancing around to D&B thanks to the endless flowing beer from Microsoft, we didn't even manage to drink it all! Thanks Steve :)

Waking up with a hangover on Sunday morning I suddenly remembered I had a multitouch screen I'd built stashed in the back of the wardrobe. So I set that up on Sunday afternoon and had a little crowd around it, I was surprised how well it worked!

After the talks someone suggested a big game of werewolf, as soon as we got going it was clear we were going to be there for some time, me and Phil had to leave during the game. I can't believe he was a werewolf! He was sat right next to me and I didn't have a clue! He is now a werewolf convert though, as is Chris, so about a Liverpool werewolf group?

Thanks to Katie and the organisers for all their hard work, and the sponsors for making it possible, and all the speakers that made it a conference worth going to!

I was really impressed with photosynth when they first released the previews nearly 2 years ago, it's taken them a while to get around to opening it up to the public but they've finally done it. Here's a quick go at synthing my living room, only took 94 photos.

Moo sent me a free sample of their new business cards. They're on the same stock as the original Moo card. Nice and heavy, good quality finish and they come with a really nice business card holder.

At the next Liverpool GeekUp we will be having a talk from Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage. It's on Tuesday July 29th, at 6pm in the conference room of the 3345 Parr St Bar. Please go sign up on the upcoming page. It's free and open to anyone to attend.

Had enough of blogger, now running BlogEngine.Net. I had to spend some time converting it into a VS Web Application from one of those annoying website projects before deploying it (download Web App here). Other than that I'm quite happy with it. This theme is called "The Green House" with a few tweaks, and I'm going to make some more changes when I get around to it.

Old blog can be found here.