We had an excellent meetup. We started in the bottom floor of MBK, at The Coffee Bean and Tea leaf. I gave my tips for taking photospheres, and showed my Ricoh Theta camera.
Then Sumridl gave his insights, and he had tons of awesome tips, and gave a lot of demonstrations on how he does photospheres. He even took a couple with his tablet. I didn’t realize that Streetview worked with tablets. Sumridl is pretty amazing with everything that he knows about Google Maps. He’s prepping for the Summit application, and showed us his video that he made.
After the discussion in the coffee shop, we headed upstairs to the third level to take pictures and add missing business listings. Usually I’m a little nervous with asking businesses if I can take their picture, even though no one has ever said no to me. We asked a tailor shop, which had a ton of cool fabrics, and ended up taking a lot of pictures and a couple photospheres. We all swapped phones, to get an idea of how photospheres worked on different phones.
We then went to the Bangkok Hard Rock Cafe, which is very close to the MBK Center, and listened to a great band and had great food. I haven’t had real American-style nachos, or spinach artichoke dip for a year and a half. The band was awesome, but a little loud to have an intense conversation. But luckily we’d already had a great discussion on the finer points of contributing to Google Maps. This was very fun, and I’m definitely going to do more of these. Thanks everyone for the great meetup!
This was my first meetup, so here are my lessons learned, and thanks KiiE for helping me with these:
- Before doing a meetup, make sure that the Google Maps listing for where you’re meeting up is correct. The MBK Center actually had the wrong address, so people going just by the address probably got lost.
- Include contact information in the Meetup. Google’s Meetups don’t have a way for you to contact people, so it’s better if you give people lots of ways to contact you. In particular, I’ll be giving out my phone number and Line for the next meetup.
- Ask people to contact the organizer. Especially in a big city, it’s easy for people to get lost.
- Have a well-planned out agenda
