This year the European Commission is organizing the first ever European SME (Small and medium enterprises) week from the 6th to the 14th of May in Brussels. The week will promote entrepreneurial spirit and emphasize the contribution of entrepreneurs to the European economy. To mark the occasion, the EC has published a brochure with portraits of entrepreneurs from each of the 33 countries participating in SME week.
The goal of the brochure is to serve as a guideline to aspiring entrepeuneurs and to highlight the challenges and excitement of running one’s own business, and we are thrilled to anounce that our CEO, António Câmara, has been nominated by national and European experts to figure in the brochure for Portugal!
Opening day for the 1st European SME Week will kick off with an exhibition entitled “The SME experience – How it feels to be an entrepreneur” with all 33 successful entrepreneurs on hand to tell their stories, an art installation where visitors can experience a day in the life of an entrepreneur, and a ‘Portraits Hall of Fame’ complete with interactive touch screens for exploring each nominees’ portrait. Visitors to the event will range from journalists to groups of students interested in entrepreneurism.
The folks over at YLabs (our in-house R&D lab) wanted to show-off what our YVision platform could actually do so they put together this good-natured demo of the many ways people can interact in real-time with virtual elements in most any physical scenario.
Watch as the gang plays with something resembling a runny version of The Blob, has their minds read, volleys soapy bubbles about and oozes what reminds me of a virtual Slinky from both eyes, yet they seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves
António Câmara, YDreams’ CEO, and I headed out to Vegas for some gambling and a couple of speaking engagements at the Digital Signage Expo starting on February 24th.
Back in April 2008 we posted a video of our Augmented Reality mascot Flapi on YouTube, which was featured in popular tech blog Engadget, and other like-minded blogs.
Recently we upgraded our Flapi demo-video by bringing in our Creative Director’s daughter, as well as a couple of other virtual characters, to see exactly how they’d hit it off.
We’re glad to say things went well, and as you can see from the video below Flapi had no problem sharing the limelight, and the little girl seems delighted with her new playmates
Our CEO, António Camara, also presented the Flapi demo (based on YDreams’ SimVideo AR platform) at last month’s “Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage” conference at the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas.
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.
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 »
We’re embarking on yet another global adventure, this time with the NY-based Brand Experience Lab (BEL), by creating Audience Entertainment - a joint-venture to deliver interactive videogames for theaters, stadiums, music venues and others, all over the world.
BEL’s work with AudienceGames is pretty well known, especially since they won a Cannes Lion with their work for Volvo which also created the “Human Joysticks” buzzword. We’ve also been busy in the last year and a half developing projects for Vodafone in Portugal, and Dove, Ades, Sony Ericsson and Coca-Cola in Brazil, which made the headlines and captured clients’ attention.
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.
Wired’s June issue featured an inspirational letter by Louis Rossetto, one of the magazine founders, addressed to his children. The letter ends with this note:
[...]we were often accused during my time at Wired of being overly optimistic. But optimism is not false hope, it’s a strategy for living.
It’s interesting to think of optimism as a strategy for living (and, why not, business). We live in times where some people regard optimism as some kind of delusional behavior or, on a different angle, relate it to an esoteric outlook on life.
It’s important to realize that being optimistic doesn’t mean that you won’t fail. Nevertheless, if your long-run strategy is built on optimism, it means you will keep on trying and, eventually, increase your chances of attaining success.In this article about Top Gun Salespeople, based on Psychological studies, optimism is listed as one of the three critical elements that make a great salesman. And if you conceive “selling” as something larger than getting people to buy products or services, while also encompassing the promotion of ideas, values and yourself, well, a good chunk of optimism (and hard work, of course) can prove adamant to your success.
YDreams has occasionally been described as a company far too optimistic for its context. Well, we’ll take that compliment.
Darius Mahdjoubi, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, believes that YDreams is a “gazelle” type company: one that, after years of consistent development of intellectual property and products, will grow “explosively” in the global market. Darius will actually follow our development in the coming years to verify his research hypothesis.
YDreams founders are determined to contribute towards Darius’ research success. Like many “gazelle” companies before us (most historic tech companies were once “gazelles”), we have a strong vision, superb research and international class products and project development. YDreams intends to be the world leader in the creation of unique interactive objects and environments. References such as NOKIA, Vodafone, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola and Portugal Telecom in over fifteen countries have provided YDreams with the required credibility to claim such leadership.
A few months ago we realized we needed the help of a senior manager to take YDreams to the next level. We could not be happier with the person that is now our new Chief Operating Officer: Victor Centeno. Victor brings a wealth of management and marketing experiences from his tenures at companies such as Johnson and Johnson and Diageo in several countries. He will be instrumental in setting the environment for the success of the new YDreams products that will be launched in May 2008.
Not long ago YDreams had to suffer through cramped Portuguese offices located in Lisbon and Caparica. Today we are very happy with our new headquarters located on the campus of the New University of Lisbon in Caparica. The 2000 square meter building houses all YDreams divisions and displays most of our past and current work. YDreamers are also able to use the facility to support extra-curricular activities: our rock band will have a studio; we will have locker rooms for our surfers, bikers, tennis, basketball and football players. There will be also a bio-agricultural field for those inclined to cultivate it.
YDreams has entered a new era.
*[editorial featured on the fourth edition of our quarterly Newsletter]
I am reading the book “Cirque du Soleil: The Spark”. It’s a short book about a real organization and real people, showing that creativity and perseverance can make any person have an exceptional and thrilling life. It’s not one more book about management crap. You will find many similarities with YDreams I recommend it to everyone with an open spirit and the will to achieve great things.
