Our story begins outside of Subway on Nassau St where I was rather classily munching into a sandwich when I saw Darragh Doyle and Stephanie Francis walking by. I said hello and Darragh noticed that I was wearing a tux, uncommon garb for Subway sandwich stores. When I mentioned I was off to the DMAs Darragh asked if I could accept an award on behalf of Ronan Lyons in case he won. Ronan lives in England most of the time and Darragh had volunteered to collect it for him. I volunteered to step into the breach for Darragh and only then realised the oddity of what would happen if I accepted this award on behalf of someone I didn’t know.

So I got to the table and quickly asked fellow tech journo Eamon McGrane to give me a look at Ronan’s blog. You see I hadn’t actually ever read it before then (I have since and it is rather good) and was surrounded at the table by people that know Ronan in some capacity or another.  Sure enough he won and I went home with a trophy and bottle of vodka which very much didn’t belong to me.

I am now happy to say that last week  I met up with Ronan in Trinity while he was over on a break from his PhD studies in England. As you can see from the photo below he trophy and winner have now been united.

As you can also see in the bottom right hand corner of the shot, I also gave him his bottle of vodka as well, despite the strong temptation to yoink it. Congratulations again to Ronan from everyone here at Villa81.com.

Paddy Power provided Villa81.com with these odds:

More births in 2010 than 2009
1/3

Leaving Certificate 2028 Top Grades
6/1 Maths
4/1 Science subjects

Leaving Certificate 2029 Top Grades
5/1 Maths
4/1 Science subjects

Nobel Prize for Physics 2030
500/1 Irish Man born 2010
500/1 Irish Woman born 2010

“We at Paddy Power are all pretty excited about the possibility of a successful CERN test tonight. However no one could be more excited than the many physicists and other boffins around Ireland. As a result of a successful test tonight we foresee there could be plenty of happy nerds taking advantage of the euphoria,” said Michelle Daly at Paddy Power.

“Cliched as it may be it looks like there could be a lot of glasses getting steamed up after the launch tonight. Will the nerds get jiggy-jiggy? Could a boffin baby boom be upon us?”

While we certainly like the odds for Maths and Science subjects to rise up the Leaving Cert ladder in just under two decades’ time, Villa81 would advise against the Nobel Prize odds as it would take an exceptional Irish prodigy of globally unprecedented proportions to win the award before they turn 20.

No firm release date has been set but Microsoft say the game will be out some time in 2010.

We must extend our sincerest thanks to Ashville Media who provided us with stills, without which we wouldn’t have been able to complete this feature.

As part of the promotion 100 wallets containing €20 were left across four Irish cities, 40 in Dublin, and 20 each in Limerick, Cork, and Galway over the weekend. While this is far from a substantial sample we’re not going to criticise them for not want to leave €20,000 in cash lying around instead of the €2,000 they did circulate.

Sony Playstation placed a number inside the wallets for people who found them to ring hoping to test the honesty of those that found the wallets. According their results 54 people out of the 100 rang this number and they were duly rewarded with a €20 Gamestop voucher for their honesty.

After viewing the initial press release we had a few questions about the make-up of the wallet. Firstly we asked if there was any other material in the wallet to make it look like it wasn’t planted. A spokesperson for the firm told Villa81.com that extra items were placed inside to make it look more like an ordinary wallet.

There was of course one other important question and that is how the phone number was presented. We asked for an image of the wallets and they provided Villa81.com with such an image promptly. The wallets looked like so:

A sample of the wallets used in the Heavy Rain promotion

Having covered plenty of flawed corporate research stories over the years, I’m the first to scream bad science at the way the card looks. There’s no doubt that it’s a call to action, the likes of which typically would not be found in most wallets.

We accept that Sony Playstation had to put something there in order for the promotion to work but there were more plausible alternatives. A hand scrawled number would have been more authentic and plausible, or even and hand written number on a standardised looking card would have sufficed. It’s hard to believe the professional nature of the business card with the number printed on it didn’t pique the interest of at least some of those that rang it.

On the whole Sony Playstation ran an event that certainly piqued our interest and we have no doubt they didn’t have lofty scientific goals, it was after all a promotion. As a promotion they deserve credit for being open with this website about how it was conducted.

All of these devices are due out in the first and second quarters of 2010.

It’s no secret that we’ve had some rocky periods at times in the past 12 months so on a personal note I’d like to thank all of our contributors who have continued to help maintain this site throughout those times to ensure we were still able to deliver a product that was both entertaining and informative to our visitors.

Now that Villa81.com has a sister site in Action81.com up and running this website is in a position of strength to build on the success of this first year on the go and provide the public with yet more information, reviews, interviews and other features from across the world of technology.

BETT concludes on the 16th of January.

A full explanation of the format can be found here but suffice to say there was no room for dawdling.