This past year many cords were cut. With prices going down, CPU power going up together with battery life, people now prefer mobility to an old-school desktop. For the first time, global notebook sales exceeded the ones of desktops. But, even these are now challenged by the netbooks and the smartphones.
The affordable PC was attempted in 1999 by Oracle but it didn’t succeed. Later the OLPC idea by Nicholas Negroponte, prompted a few companies to retry the concept but, this time, a portable one. Asus was the first one to deliver and started a revolution with its eeePC.
The smartphone has also been around for a while but with little success. In this case, it was Apple that started the revolution with the iPhone. It succeeded in creating an interesting device and getting developers’ attention, making available hundreds of applications at its AppStore. Something that Nokia failed to achieve with the Symbian operating system. Others are now trying to follow Apple’s footsteps, like Google with the Android and Palm with the Pre.
2008 was a very interesting and inspiring year but, what does the future reserve for us? Mike Elgan, from Computer World, predicts that “it’s the end of the whole desktop-or-mobile concept, and the beginning of everywhere and anywhere computing”. I agree with him and the technology needed is already available. The big question is how users will interact with these devices. Keyboards and mice are out of the question. It will be based on gestures, voice, multi-touch, and so forth. Displays will have to be placed in unexpected places.
Found this a couple of weeks ago, a sensible set of guidelines to deal with negative, or positive, references in blogs and such, from the very own United States Air Force. They break it down into Discovery, Evaluate and Respond, and even address the problematic of ‘Trolls’ and ‘Ragers’. Advice such as this has been circulating for a while, but it’s interesting to see how different organizations are incorporating social media PR strategies.
In the beginning we sat on wooden chairs – the kind you find in most public schools. The Häagen-Dazs years were still to come, as we sweated out the summers and froze through the winters for lack of central air-con. During the monsoon season water occasionally dripped through the ceiling.
Back then, in our old building, the overcrowded YDreams “sala principal” (main room) was half empty. YDreams, then Ideias Interactivas, was yet to be registered officially but we were already working on the company’s first project, the gig that gave us a head start and kept us financially afloat from day one.
It was called “Canal Mapas”, a Lisbon and Oporto map channel produced for Telecel. YDreams not only delivered a web version (which was all the rage back then) for their online portal, NETC, but also and more importantly a mobile version.
Although a big challenge for a new company like YDreams, web map channels were nothing new at the time. Mobile ones, on the other hand, were almost unheard of. YDreams truly pioneered the field by producing not only WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), but also PDA versions of “Canal Mapas”. So innovative was the solution that, in three months time, Motorola gave our work a 5-star rating in the mobile sector, from a very select global group of leading companies. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve uploaded some new cases to our YDreams Life portfolio that illustrate well the company’s scope and vision. Among them the latest Virtual Sightseeing scenic viewer atop Lisbon’s Pantheon, and our Audience Games section profiling our work in that particular arena.
In the meanwhile we continue to work on our new website, which we hope to have online a few short months. Keep an eye out.
As a company specialized in interactive gesture-based technologies and innovation for indoor and outdoor surroundings, we couldn’t agree more, and are particularly fond of Trend #6, which stresses the advantages of bringing interactivity and measurement to digital out-of-home networks.
Below a look at ‘large scale’ outdoor interactive digital signage project we worked on with Carat media agency for Adidas during the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
For obvious reasons, and a lingering hangover mood, yearly turns are usually a good time to balance and overview.
2008 was a hard year for us, but one in which we achieved fantastic progress and good results. Revenue wise it was our best year so far. We’ve also set founding stones for great initiatives that we are confident will bear fruits in 2009. Audience Entertainment, our joint-venture with BEL, is obviously one of them. Invisible Network also has an incredible potential, and sets us on the course for something truly revolutionary, especially since we’ve registered some interest in related spin-offs. Read the rest of this entry »
