YDreams’ CEO, António Câmara, chats with Camilo Lourenço, host of Portuguese financial news show ‘A Cor do Dinheiro’, about the company’s short and long term goals. Clip also includes footage from a typical workday at YDreams’ headquarters in Lisbon.

It’s not easy to patent in Portugal if the subject matter is not Chemistry or Mechanics.

YDreams’ first effort to get a patent started in 2005. We submitted a text with ‘claims’ that basically described augmented reality. Such claims were undisturbed until an International Search Report quoted the Azuma paper ‘A Survey of Augmented Reality’ as a direct prior art. We realized that our claim had to be corrected.

The Virtual SightSeeing ® device was then described in more detail, and 2007 saw YDreams get their first patent granted. In the wake lay many hours of programming, design, quality control, and sheer will. Paramount to any patent effort is time. Lots of it. That seminal patent still awaits approval in some countries, and YDreams proceeded to file application after application, with some decisions taking a bit longer than we had hoped.

With the disparity in legal systems, the long-standing struggles about software patents, and more recently business method patents, what policy is a small company with a big heart to take in regard to IP?

When researching or trying to convince oneself that something really is new and original, thoughts are sometimes mingled with a vague ancestral image that the logic has been done before and one is just applying it to new ends, just as answers to some questions are found in old books holding Latin mottos like est modus in rebus.

We are currently hosting an internal photo exhibition, featuring selected shots from some of our talented in-house photographers. Here’s a little taste of what’s hanging around (click to enlarge):

Wrasse, Portuguese Coast (João Pedro Silva)

View of Lisbon from Santa Justa Lift (Pedro Cardoso)

Cape Verde, Santo Antão island (Luís Carvalho)

Mombai, India (Tiago Fonseca)

Shopping just got a little bit more exciting at Jumbo, MediaMarkt and Rádio Popular markets in the greater Lisbon and Porto area. YDreams and Krups-Nescafé Dolce Gusto came up with a unique concept for promoting the latter’s coffee machine and capsules at Point-of-Sale displays in central and northern Portugal.

Displays featuring built-in giant screens covered in multi-flavoured Nescafé Dolce Gusto coffee-capsules seemed to make even the caffeine averse curious. As people drew near the capsules drifted apart to uncover real-time video feeds of shoppers in the background. The YDreams app, dubbed YFaces, pinpointed their position and popped comic-strip style balloons up over their heads with fun, catchy phrases like “I dig this machine – I’ll take it!” or “I could go for a Latte Macchiato right about now”.

Not bad for an afternoon at the market – sampling free espressos and getting your mind read