At the end of last year, the editorial team at Condé Nast Traveller Magazine drew up long lists in the following 10 categories – Aviation, Communications Technology, Culture, Gourmet, Infrastructure, Leisure, Sustainability, Retail, Style on the Move, Transport.

We were thrilled to find out that YDreams’ Santander Interactive Guest Assistants (SIGA) project for Ciudad Grupo Santander, on the outskirts of Madrid, was short-listed for this year’s Communications Technology category of the Conde Nast Traveller Innovation and Design Awards.

The long lists put together by the magazine’s editorial team were then sent to an illustrious panel of judges which includes Sir Nicholas Serota of Tate; Paul Thompson, Rector of London’s Royal College of Art; David Rowan, Editor of Wired magazine, to name a few.

Condé Nast Traveller magazine’s Innovation and Design Awards has become a fixture in their editorial calendar and are now in their sixth year. Past winners have included such design luminaries as Norman Foster; Zaha Hadid; John Pawson, Ross Lovegrove; David Chipperfield; Jack Dorsey, Jonathan Ive, Heston Blumenthal; Tom Dixon; Christopher Bailey; Thomas Heatherwick; Miuccia Prada; Yotam Ottolenghi and Alan Yau amongst others.

In 2011, the award for the Communications Technology category went to ‘Square Inc’ an iPhone application payment platform created by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that allowed anyone to process credit cards payments on the go.

The shortlists across all 10 categories will be published in the Innovation and Design supplement inserted into the May 2012 issue of Condé Nast Traveller on sale April 12, and available online with pictures at http://www.cntraveller.com.

Lego World is a building site like no other. Thousands of children of all ages are invited to play, test and experiment with millions of Lego bricks. The sky is the limit and imaginations are encouraged to run wild.

This year, we are thrilled to announce that YDreams will also be there thanks to Intel’s interest in piloting our interactive Virtual Aquarium at its Lego World booth!

Intel, whose technology is used in Lego Digital Signage as well as other Lego products, has showcased its technology in past editions of Lego World. This year Intel invited YDreams to adapt and bring a Lego World version of its Virtual Aquarium (first developed and deployed for shopping centers Forum Sintra (Portugal) and Marmara Forum (Turkey) in 2011) to exhibit at the Intel booth at this year’s event.

The Lego-adapted Virtual Aquarium at the Intel booth will enable Lego executives to test the concept by demonstrating to guests how innovative technologies may be used to promote the classic Lego building brick and simultaneously offer Lego fans new creative and memorable digital experiences.

The experience, will offer guests to Lego World 2012 the chance to create and thoroughly customize virtual pet fish based on Lego building bricks. A touch console, located alongside the virtual aquarium, comprised of nine 46” monitors, will invite guests to create their new friend from scratch – they decide on the shape and color of the Lego brick that will determine the fish’s body and fins, as well as the color of its eyes and stripes. The variables available will enable guests to create a multitude of distinct fish, so the risk that any two fish will be identical is minimal! Once guests finish creating their Lego fish, they release it into the Virtual Aquarium, sit back and watch as their new friend explores its new environment.

Lego World 2012 opens February 16th and runs till February 19th at Bella Center, Scandinavia’s largest exhibition and conference center, located in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The EU recently considered Speed-FX, an R&D project developed by YDreams and Barcelona’s Universidad Pompeo Fabra for UK-based Filmlight, as one of the 15 key success stories in recent years.

Millions of people saw the 2011 Academy Award winning film, The King’s Speech but few people know that this box office hit was made possible, at least in part, by a groundbreaking R&D project funded by the European Commission.

In 2002, startup Filmlight carefully targeted EU funding and teamed up with then startup YDreams and Universidad Pompeo Fabra (UPF) to revolutionize the world of cinema post-production. The resulting R&D project, dubbed Speed-FX, provided the basis for FilmLight to develop a more efficient, flexible and cheaper system for cinema post-production than anything previously available.

Between mid 2002 and mid 2004, experts at YDreams and UPF provided Filmlight with the technical research and development input needed to produce the new required application that became known as Baselight, and ensure that the new open architecture system would be entirely reliable. The impact of this development was to bring post-production within the reach and the budget of far more users than ever before, and propel FilmLight to recognized industry leadership.

While FilmLight’s founders had the vision and commitment to spearhead the project, it would not have been possible without YDreams’ and UPF’s R&D capabilities and of course EU co-funding. The EU funded 2.1 million euro of the 3.5 million euro SpeedFX project. As a result FilmLight was able to out-compete more established players and establish itself as a clear market leader, quickly achieving sales that dwarfed the initial project cost.

The SpeedFX project further contributed to FilmLight’s winning a highly prestigious UK accolade – the 2006 Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade. In addition to this, in 2010, it won four Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Scientific and Technical Awards. The SpeedFX project’s vision was, without a doubt, an important part of FilmLight’s dramatic rise to international success.

We recently launched our Digital-out-of-home (DOOH) website. The site highlights our most successful solutions – solutions we have integrated into our projects over the years, and have been paramount to shaping interactivity paradigms.

These solutions, with a special emphasis on Natural User Interfaces and Augmented Reality, include screens, kiosks, billboards, wall, floor and ceiling projections and many others.

For a better look at our solutions, as well as practical applications for each one, visit http://www.ydreams.com/products/