Ever since moving into our new headquarters on the FCT New Lisbon University campus, just across the river from Lisbon, we’ve made a point of keeping our company culture well and alive.

We play just about as hard as we work. After all the time spent programming, pitching presentations, brainstorming, developing concepts, crunching numbers and so forth, fun and healthy outlets are required to keep things balanced.

While we may not be located amidst the hustle and bustle of a big city, we are about five minutes away from some of the best beaches in Europe, as well as some pretty great hiking and biking trails just outside the nation’s capital.

So given our serendipitous surroundings, it wasn’t long before people started to get together to organize some pretty cool extracurricular activities.

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Those were my exact thoughts when Ivan Franco, our R&D Director, told me he was off to Lisbon’s Electricity Museum to give a talk at Pecha Kucha Night about interaction design, its potential consequences and how it relates to the work we do here at YDreams.

Well, the name alone was enough to trigger my curiosity, especially because I thought he was referring to some vanguard Karaoke trend or something (I’m a big fan )…but no, Pecha Kucha (which is Japanese for conversation) is a “patented system where each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving participants 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.”

The Japanese have long been known for reducing the subject to its necessary elements. In this case they inspired Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, ‘founders’ of Pecha Kucha Night to take minimalism beyond design and architecture, and the Pecha Kucha system seems to be catching on just fine, having so far spread virally to close to 200 cities in little over six years.

Interesting post with plenty of visual examples by Ori Inbar, from Games Alfresco, on how Augmented Reality may be used to reinvent a number of industries .

Here.