Seth Godin, über-marketeer and coiner of the Purple Cow term, (re)posted quite an inspirational end-of-the-year piece, which I leave you with as the year draws to an end (or as a new year is just starting). Enjoy and have a great 2008:

Taken from Seth’s Blog:

«Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.

While your company has been waiting for the economy to rebound, Reebok has launched Travel Trainers, a very cool-looking lightweight sneaker for travelers. They are selling out in Japan — from vending machines in airports!

While Detroit’s car companies have been whining about gas prices and bad publicity for SUVs (SUVs are among their most profitable products), Honda has been busy building cars that look like SUVs but get twice the gas mileage. The Honda Pilot was so popular, it had a waiting list.

While Africa’s economic plight gets a fair amount of worry, a little startup called Kickstart is actually doing something about it. The new income that its products generate accounts for 0.5% of the entire GDP of Kenya. How? It manufactures a $75 device that looks a lot like a StairMaster. But it’s not for exercise. Instead, Kickstart sells the machine to subsistence farmers, who use its stair-stepping feature to irrigate their land. People who buy it can move from subsistence farming to selling the additional produce that their land yields — and triple their annual income in the first year of using the product.

While you’ve been wishing for the inspiration to start something great, thousands of entrepreneurs have used the prevailing sense of uncertainty to start truly remarkable companies. Lucrative Web businesses, successful tool catalogs, fast-growing PR firms — all have started on a shoestring, and all have been profitable ahead of schedule. The Web is dead, right? Well, try telling that to Meetup.com, a new Web site that helps organize meetings anywhere and on any topic. It has 200,000 registered users — and counting.

Maybe you already have a clipping on your mirror that asks you what you did during the 1990s. What’s your biggest regret about that decade? Do you wish that you had started, joined, invested in, or built something? Are you left wishing that you’d at least had the courage to try? In hindsight, the 1990s were the good old days. Yet so many people missed out. Why? Because it’s always possible to find a reason to stay put, to skip an opportunity, or to decline an offer. And yet, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember why we said no and easy to wish that we had said yes.

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?»

Finally I found some info on this much discussed subject.

It was done by an UK company, Musion.

It’s basically about bouncing off the light from any projector or screen.

They say they have a patent on it, altough this technique has already been extensively used in the past.

http://www.bigscreamtv.info/tv_tricks.html

I suppose their claims come mainly from the film properties.

It was the morning after the Christmas Party and this was Production room at 11 o’clock in the morning (courtesy of one early software engineer):

The Virtual Sightseeing concept, back in 1990, by Jeffrey Shaw:

http://www.inside-installations.org/artworks/artwork.php?ref_id=&r_id=15

A brand new 3,300 m2 bookstore, Byblos, opens later today, in Lisbon’s Amoreiras Square. Besides 150.000 books, Byblos offers customers five didactic and recreational based interactive solutions conceived by YDreams.

A yStores Shop Window won’t let you miss the store when walking by on the street. Accessible from the street, this interactive touch sensitive interface enables customers to access Byblos-related content anytime of day or night. Inside Byblos, you’ll find an yMagic Book by the auditorium with the scheduled activities.

A specific area designed for kids includes the yLight – a magic lantern whose light source is used to drop the pieces of a thematic virtual puzzle into place; the yWalk – an interactive walkway representing a virtual garden; and a virtual board game – aTrivial Pursuit’ style board game based on kids’ literature.

Congratulations to all YDreamers involved in this successful project!

For more info on this project go to www.ydreams.com.

Our colleague Sérgio Estevão won the Forum Nokia November contribution award with his Blog “MIDP Adventures“. Sérgio is one of the most outstanding software engineers I’ve ever come across and also a good friend. He’s been working with YDreams since 2002 and was involved in almost all our games: Undercover, Undercover 2: Merc Wars, LexFerrum and spooks:mobile among many many other projects.

As if there weren’t already plenty of gadgets and gizmos out there for us to choose from, check out this article on Top 10 technology wonders that don’t exist yet.

A quick glance at one or two:

B–Membrane Computer: personally it reminds me of a kitchen appliance gone askew, but this oddly shaped contraption will dispense with monitors and beam images onto any surface via a built in projector. Cool, huh?

Timeflex Stick on Watch: at first glance wearable tattoo came to mind but no, apparently it’s a real bonafide watch you can stick anywhere on your skin. Kids are bound to love this one!

On the 28th of September, Eduardo gave a conference at Picnic’07 about Augmented Reality. The event had some considerable media exposure and apparently caught the eye of Ben Sutherland, a journalist from The Economist, who was preparing a piece about Augmented Reality. The reporter called up YDreams wanting to know more about our work in Augmented Reality. The Virtual Sightseeing caught their eye.

What ensued was a mention in the Technology Quarterly edition of one of the most renowned newspapers in the world, er, yes, The Economist is a newspaper =) :

‘Augmented enjoyment’

“The technology also has less serious uses, however. YDreams, a marketing and digital-media firm in Lisbon, Portugal, has developed an AR sightseeing viewer called VSS. The first such machine, bolted atop a battlement on the 12th-century Pinhel Castle in north-eastern Portugal, delights tourists who tilt it up, down and around for an augmented view of the castle and its surroundings. Place names and explanatory text are superimposed over objects seen through the viewer’s screen, and animated graphics show how some structures were built or destroyed. The number of visitors has doubled since the viewer was installed in July 2006, says Isabel Almeida, who manages the castle.”
(excerpt, read the full article)

OFFF, design conference, multimedia trade fair and digital animation festival all rolled into one, is described as an “enthusiastic celebration of a new visual culture” and “one of the essential meeting points for the international scene of post-digital creation”.

Next spring sensational OFFF is coming to Lisbon 8, 9 & 10 May. The event promises sensorial exercises in synesthesia, stage performances comprised of computer code and legendary participants from the fields of graphic design and visual communication.

I am personally looking forward to OFFF Lisbon 2008 and would love to see YDreams amongst the headlining participants because from the sounds of it, this one is right up our alley. Read more about OFFF.