Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

Wimbledon – hopsitality and Henman

Posted by Roo - 29/06/06 at 05:06:45 pm

Yesterday was something a bit different for me. I’d never been to Wimbledon, and I’d never taken part in a hospitality event before either.

When I arrived (a short walk from Southfields) Ricky kindly gave me a tour, including the amazing setup downstairs where all the things I’d read about on the Wimbleblog happen. I was struck by the number of ThinkPads spread out (Ricky pointed out that laptops are great, since their battery acts as a pretty decent UPS if the power were ever to fail). I was also impressed with the machines that create the on-screen graphics for the BBC, watching the frightening number of hits arriving on wimbledon.org, seeing the stats provided for the commentators, and.. well.. all of it really.

Since it was my first trip to SW19, I remembered to take my camera. Of course, I couldn’t take photos of the really interesting things I did (like talking to customers) but I got a chance in the afternoon to take some snapshots of the grounds.

Don’t be fooled – I didn’t spend all day taking photographs. I worked too, although the work was very different to what I thought work was when I was at school. Most of the day I was chatting with customers, attempting to be interesting about Emerging Technologies and Second Life, particularly the virtual Wimbledon demo. There were some excellent conversations, and quite a few people who really seemed to find the whole virtual worlds thing not just unusual, but interesting and potentially useful too. If you’re not already familiar with the work done for Wimbledon do take a look.