The Great Ape Run is a Dublin city-based virtual treasure hunt, using location-aware smartphones and cloud computing. Members of the public place virtual donations on the map on The Great Ape Run website while the runners try to get to as many of these locations as they can in one hour. Each runner will represent a different charity, so they will be competing to collect the pledges from around the city.
The year's Great Ape Run is happily hosting 3 celebrity runners with dedicated charities:
Shane Hegarty, Arts Editor of The Irish Times, representing A Little Lifetime Foundation.
Ray D'Arcy, TodayFM presenter, representing The Lauralynn House.
Teresa Dillon, Hack the City curator, Friends of the Earth
The project harnesses the latest in mobile and cloud technologies to provide an interactive and enjoyable experience in fundraising. It also provides donors a novel way of giving to charities. At the same time, it explores the generosity of the public - some donors will place easily attainable donations; some will taunt the runners with high-value donations on the limits of the map. The event itself is highly interactive: a twitter feed on the page allows the runners to communicate interactively with watchers as they go and, since the event can be watched from any PC or smartphone, donors can lure the runners past their locations.
The Great Ape Run platform was developed by Brian O'Driscoll. Brian is a software developer with 11 years of experience building high-performance, highly scalable server applications. In his spare time, he experiments with computer and social gaming under the banner of Apeworks. This event is supported by Portwest & Great Outdoors.
Go to http://aperun.sciencegallery.com/ right now to donate!