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.

Projects

We’ve completed a repositioning on where we stand regarding the market. YDreams Life is now our place to go for large-scale interactive architecture projects. Projects like TMN’s Interactive Store, Coca-Cola’s Happiness Factory Brazilian Interactive Cinema Campaign, EGF Interactive Roadshow and a series of museum and heritage projects located all over Portugal, solidified our new positioning as “interactive technology designers”. This repositioning did not happen overnight. But we realized that there was no use trying to pin ourselves into fields such as “advertising” or “entertainment”. Our scope is much more encompassing than that. And unique as we move from being a technological company to a company specialized in Interactivity. You’ll soon start hearing about our upcoming 2009 projects, in which we take the next logical step and become “interactive architects”.

Products

We’ve also refocused our Products area, with a fully fledged Strategic Development Marketing team, which works closely with YLabs (R&D) on the development and future roll-out of products. Due to Intellectual Property issues we must be careful regarding what we disclose, but we can say that part of it involves exciting stuff with Augmented Reality.

Competition

As always, we’ve been paying close attention to our competitors. Amazing stuff is being done all over the world, using technology similar to ours, or different stuff that achieves similar objectives. This really motivates us to get better. Lot’s of companies are also cropping up in Portugal in these new fields. I took notice of some of them at this year’s Portugal Tecnológico fair. It’s really interesting to note how they are marketing themselves. Some of them are more obviously trying to get into our segments and positioning, while others are exploring new approaches and niches. There’s always room for originality and quality.

YVision

Technology wise we took an important step with the ongoing stabilization and enhancement of YVision - our proprietary computer graphics software platform. YVision now allows us to work with a vast library of different technological applications, such as Augmented Reality, gesture-based interfaces and image recognition features, the possibilities are endless.

Media & PR

We finished 2007 with a brief mention in the Economist’s Quarterly Review, which isn’t easy to top, but we can’t complain about 2008. Highlights would definitely be the Engadget post about Flapi, our AR mascot, Digital Signage Today describing us as “Portugal Gesture-Based Innovator”, Global Innovation Report’s feature on Bluestore TMN and France 24’s YDreams profile. We’ve also continued to be a regular feature in the Portuguese press.

Our social media forays have also proven interesting, albeit not explosive. We should keep in mind that YDreams is a business to business entity, so quality is much more relevant than quantity.

This blog, which turned one last November, attracts a modest but steady number of subscribers and readers. It has also proven most interesting in the optimization of search engines, one of which resulted in TMN’s project feature at the global innovation report. The fact that the blog is mainly written by the Corporate Communications department (Maria and me) is something that goes against many “social media experts” theories, but the truth is we have fun blogging for the company. Obviously we’ll keep promoting diversity (even if we have fun, we also have other stuff to do), so expect an increase in blog posts from people in different areas of the company. The YouTube Channel is also a very pratical way of having an instant shareable web portfolio. Obviously we also pay close attention to Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, but we’re not ready to appoint a Chief Conversation Officer, yet.

I’m also glad to say that in a few months we’ll have a new website, more in synch with what we do now and centered around the great portfolio we already have. Stay tuned.

Tags: audience games, gesture based, interactive architecture, interactivity, projects, ydreams 2008

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 20:04 and is filed under Business & Management, Company Life, Products & Projects, Science & Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.