We did it! We secured a position as one of the top five finalists in Engadget Expand’s Insert Coin competition and are off for the final round in San Francisco!^

Ziphius, all packed and ready to ship to San Fran!

The “Insert Coin: New Challengers” competition takes the most promising crowd funded hardware and takes it to the stage, with live product demos and a competition where your vote and a panel of judges combine forces to pick the best of the best. Our team is heading to San Francisco, on March 16th and 17th, to present Ziphius on stage and convince readers and judges that we deserve to take home the top prize. We’ll handle the stage part but YOU have a major role in it too: as a reader, you can help us get to first place by voting for Ziphius!

Online voting during the event is one of three criteria to win the top prize. The other two are audience voting and the judge´s opinion. We’d like to ask you to take a little time during your weekend, to go to http://myziphius.com and cast your vote for Ziphius!

The whole event will be live streamed during the weekend so you can watch all the action. Tune in here: http://www.engadget.com/event/engadget-expand/about/. If you want to watch Ziphius highlights, you can tune in online on March 16th from 3PM to 3:45PM (Pacific Standard Time) to watch us presenting Ziphius. On the March 17th, from 5:30PM to 6:15PM (Pacific Standard Time) the Insert Coin Award winners will be announced. With your support we can be one of the winners!

WHEN: Final Voting will take place March 16th, 8AM onwards (Pacific Standard Time) & March 17th till NOON (Pacific Standard Time).

WHERE TO CAST VOTE: http://myziphius.com

On behalf of TEAM ZIPHIUS, thank you all for your support!

The folks over in the Brazilian offices came up with an original gift for some of their clients and partners during the holiday season – thermo chromatic mugs! Upon filling the mug with hot water, a key word and phrase, associated with the particular recipient, ”magically” appears.

Check out the video below for a better look!

A YDreams volta a acolher o conceito Fab Labs. A empresa receberá o evento nas suas instalações (Monte da Caparica) no próximo dia 11 de Dezembro, em parceria com a Fab Lab EDP e Escola EDP.

O Fab Labs (Fabrication Labs) são uma iniciativa do professor Neil Gerschenfeld, do centro de Bits and Atoms do MIT, e visam encorajar o fabrico digital pessoal, proporcionando os meios e incentivando à criatividade tecnológica.

A YDreams tem impulsionado esta acção desde 2009. O seu lançamento oficial da rede em Portugal, decorreu em 2010 e em 2012, a YDreams volta a potenciar o evento, para os quais são convidadas várias entidades públicas e privadas. O Fab Labs decorre nas instalações da YDreams na medida que a Universidade EDP visa levar os seus alunos a espaços, contextos e organizações que lhes proporcionem um estímulo à criatividade e que os inspirem.

Para saber mais sobre a rede global Fab Labs, vejam os vídeos através dos links abaixo:

O que é um Fab Lab?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOPGJ2VBCPo&feature=player_embedded

Neil Gershenfeld, criador do Fab Labs:

http://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_labs.html

Inovação é a palavra de ordem do seu dia-a-dia? 

Sonha em desenvolver um produto/serviço global?

PARTICIPE NO CONCURSO INOVPORTUGAL! 

Inscreva-se hoje (em 30 secs) em www.inovportugal.com! Prémios até 150.000€.

O Concurso InovPortugal é uma iniciativa da Associação Acredita Portugal que se destina a empreendedores inovadores. Dele deverão resultar negócios com potencial de internacionalização, intensivos em inovação, de qualquer sector de actividade.

Todas as ideias são válidas, independentemente da fase de desenvolvimento em que se encontrem, por isso, devem fazer a sua candidatura em inovportugal.org até dia 4 de Dezembro:

• Pessoas com uma ideia empreendedora;
• Pessoas com uma ideia e o respectivo plano de negócio;
• Pessoas sem uma ideia/projecto empreendedor, mas que gostavam de se juntar a uma equipa existente.

Pode candidatar até 3 ideias/projectos!

Após a fase de inscrições a Associação Acredita Portugal dá acesso, de forma gratuita, a um Curso de Empreendedorismo online, denominado de DreamFactory, que ajuda a estruturar ideias em planos de negócio.

A Acredita Portugal é uma organização sem fins lucrativos que tem como objectivo apoiar o Empreendedorismo em Portugal. Mais informações em  www.acreditaportugal.pt ou  inovportugal@acreditaportugal.pt.

Bill Buxton will be in Lisbon from the 16th to the 18th of May for the User Experience Lisbon (UXLX) conference as one of its guest speakers. On May 17th at 3 p.m. the Canadian computer scientist and designer, will also be coming to the Faculty of Science (New Lisbon University) campus, where YDreams is coincidentally headquarted, to give a talk on The Nature of Natural User Interaction.

Mr. Buxton is currently a Principal researcher at Microsoft Research and is known internationally for being one of the pioneers in the human–computer interaction field, which YDreams often incorporates into its interactivity projects! Hearing him speak will be a real treat!

More info here: http://citi.di.fct.unl.pt/seminar/seminar.php?id=198&bio=1169

Today, we are celebrating the 12^th World Intellectual Property Day! This year’s theme is “Visionary Innovators” and because visionary innovation is such a huge part of our DNA, special thanks go out to all the YDreams’ collaborators whose inventions have so contributed to shaping the  company into what it is

We were excited to hear that on a March 6th visit to the Brazilian pavilion at CeBIT 2012, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sat down to try out the Alphabet Table, an augmented reality educational game, conceived and developed by YDreams for Positivo Informática, one of Brazil’s largest computer and educational technology manufacturers.

As you can see in the photo below, Dilma and Angela actually completed an activity using the didactic tool to better understand and experience what the innovative Alphabet table has to offer young learners.

The Educational Alphabet Table, which was also awarded a Gold in the Informatics category by IDEA/Brasil in August 2011, an organization endorsed by the Industrial Designers Society of America, works by combining colorful animations, video and sound to create an interactive environment. The table features a webcam, 32 inch LCD screen and Augmented Reality markers that represent characters in the story. The 2D markers are captured by the camera and transformed into real-time 3D images, which can be treated as “virtual marionettes” on an LCD screen. The educational game, which can be played by up to six students at a time, is ideal for promoting collaboration, exchanging knowledge, and teaching children and students with special needs their “ABC’s”.

Our YVision team has been pretty busy these last few months replacing some of the engines to make sure YVision is executable on as many platforms as possible. The work’s paid off! This latest release brings better support for Silverlight 5 and mobile devices in the near future.

Check out the features for the latest release:

• Support for Silverlight 5 final (RTW) – Now you can run your 3D interactive applications in the browser. Extensive work has been done to make sure you app compiles for .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 5 with minimal code changes. Check out a couple of demos on our cases page.
• SLARToolKit on .NET 4.0 – Now you can take advantage of the popular augmented-reality engine on other platforms other than Silverlight. SLARToolKit is now included in the SDK, you don’t need a separate download. Be sure to check the SLARToolKit license to make sure it fits your needs.
• Steering behaviors – These allow you to apply behaviors (defined by Craig Reynolds) like seek, flee, pursue, evade, wander, arrival, obstacle avoidance, containment, wall following, path following and flow field following to your objects. These can be combined in behavior trees to achieve complex behaviors like flocking, queuing and many more.
• Settings and visualizers – You can now easily expose settings to users so that they can customize/calibrate the application.
• New project templates, item templates and code snippets – In our continuous effort to simplify your work, we added many more templates.  The samples are provided as templates so that you can mess around with them as much as possible. All the samples work on Silverlight and Windows.
• Multiple bug fixes – The framework has proven to be very robust but not without a few issues. If you find any new issue, please report it to us.

This release is only for Windows but we hope to have the Mac OS X release soon. We are working on optimizing the ‘build process’ so we can have simultaneous and more frequent releases in the future.

Go to our download page to get this latest version. We hope you have as much fun trying it out as we did developing it!

Associação Salvador realiza hoje cerimónia de entrega de Prémios

A Associação Salvador, com o objetivo de estimular a investigação no domínio da reabilitação psicomotora, promove anualmente o Prémio “Ser Capaz – Investigação e Tecnologia” que tem um valor de 10.000 euros. A cerimónia pública de entrega dos galardões realiza-se hoje, às 18h30, no Espaço BES Arte & Finança na Praça Marquês de Pombal, 3, em Lisboa.

A atribuição deste prémio prevê o financiamento de projetos que contribuam para o desenvolvimento de produtos, instrumentos, tecnologias, metodologias, equipamentos ou sistemas técnicos que previnam, compensem, atenuem ou neutralizem a incapacidade de uma pessoa portadora de deficiência motora.

O período de candidaturas da segunda edição do prémio decorreu entre 23 de maio e 14 de outubro de 2011, tendo o júri, composto por Salvador Mendes de Almeida, fundador e presidente da Associação Salvador, por António Câmara, presidente da YDreams e por Fernando Lobo, professor -DEEI-FCT– Universidade do Algarve, selecionado três vencedores de 22 candidaturas rececionadas.

Declarações de Salvador Mendes de Almeida, presidente da Associação Salvador: “Faço um balanço muito positivo desta segunda edição do Prémio Ser Capaz pois recebemos um elevado número de candidaturas de projetos com elevada qualidade, que espero virem a contribuir para o desenvolvimento de novas soluções que favoreçam a vida das pessoas com deficiência motora na sociedade.”

Prémios

1º Prémio – Valor € 5.000 – Miguel Silva /Jorge Martins/Paulo Melo/Carlos Vasconcelos
Projeto “DACHOR – lntegrated Design and COntrol of Hybrid Active Orthoses”

Menção Honrosa 1 – Valor € 3.500 – Projeto IntellWheels
Luis Reis/António Moreira/Marcelo Prety/Brigida Faria /Sergio Vasconcelos

Menção Honrosa 2 – Valor € 1.500 – Projeto Living Home Center
Carlos Pires/Fernando Pinto /Victor Teixeira (Microsoft)

Click on image but for the full effect turn on webcam & sound

The video powered by YDreams’ technology:

Ynvisible (YDreams’ first spinout company) in collaboration with Enfucell and IDTechEx, produced close to 1600 interactive badges to distribute to participants and attendees at the upcoming Printed Electronics USA 2011 tradeshow.

Ynvisible's Interactive Badge for the Printed Electronics Tradeshow

The badges contain three interactive graphic layers, activated by the push of a button. Each layer, designed specifically for the event, conveys IDTechEx’s marketing messages. Technologically, the interactive badges are a hybrid solution, based on a combination of printed electronics  ̶  Ynvisible’s electrochromics-based interactive graphics and Enfucell’s SoftBattery®  ̶  and traditional electronics, namely the printed circuit boards, buttons and wiring. Designers from Ynvisible and IDTechEx jointly designed the interactive badges, with the final assembly of badges carried out by Ynvisible.

“The combination of established color printing and printed interactive graphics brings new levels of interaction and communication power to everyday items. Consumers who enjoy the interactivity of on-line content and services will now increasingly start to find such features also in printed products”, said Jani-Mikael Kuusisto, Chief Business Development Officer for Ynvisible.

IDTechEx Printed Electronics USA 2011 conference and tradeshow is the biggest event in the world on the topic. This year’s tradeshow will be the largest Printed Electronics exhibition to date, with 105 exhibiting companies already confirmed. The tradeshow is on from November 30th to December 1st, 2011 at the Santa Clara Convention Centre.

The following video gives us a comprehensive overview of printed electronics spin-out Ynvisible and its relationship to parent-company YDreams:

Sport Club Recife, a football team in North-eastern Brazil, recently posted the video below showing the club using YVision’s free Beta version of its software development kit (SDK) to create a Boxfall application featuring 3D Augmented Reality cubes customized with the team’s logo!

Yvision, a YDreams’ spinout, is dedicated to the research and production of software development kits. To find out more about them, or download their SDK, visit their website at http://www.yvision.com.

A few posts ago I mentioned that the YDreams Group was expanding; turns out our family across the Atlantic has also been growing. Both YDreams Brasil affiliates (Rio de Janeiro & São Paulo) have taken on new members over the past months and in part because of it, they’ve decided to implement the Close Encounter (CE) sessions originally launched here at Lisbon HQs a few years back.

Close Encounters are small internal weekly conferences whose format varies; it can be a round table discussion, a talk about a specific topic or an artistic presentation. Speakers may be volunteer YDreamers or invested guests. Nuno Artur Silva (Produções Fícticias), Artur Arsénio (Robotics), Manuel Lima (Data Visualization) or Prof. Rui Aço (Oficina do Desenho), are some of the wonderful speakers we have had the privilege of having at our CEs. Internally we’ve also had folks talk about ‘Interactive Narratives in Cinema’, the ‘Power of Collaborative Tools’, ‘Digital Art’, and ‘Managing Your Personal Finances for the Financially Challenged’, among others. As you can see the idea is as much to discuss themes related to our core business as to inspire and inform!

Brazil’s first Close Encounter is underway in São Paulo as I write. It’s actually been a day and a half affair, and from looking at the program it sounds much like Orientation meets Team-building Seminar! The session includes an inspirational interview from co-founder and CEO. António Câmara, presentations of the company’s more emblematic cases and talks about, amongst others, “how we as a society have moved away from a ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’, hardware-focused modernity to a ‘light’ and ‘liquid’, software-based modernity” (from Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘Liquid Modernity’).

Sounds like interesting stuff! Here’s to the first of many CEs in Brazil!

Ynvisible, YDreams first spin-out company, and Inês Henriques, its CEO and Virgina Tech alumna, were recently profiled on the university’s website. To read the article click HERE.

Ynvisible, YDreams’ first spin out, was recently at LOPE-C (Frankurt’s Large-area, Organic & Printed Electronics) Convention from June 28th to the 30th, 2011 to showcase the printed electronics developer’s various prototypes.

Ynvisible’s revolutionary technology was a key factor in convincing Jani-Mikael Kuusisto to come on board as Chief Business Development Officer, a position he previously occupied at VTT Finland. Mr. Kuuisto officially joins Ynvisible on August 1st, 2011.

The video below shows Ynvisible CEO Inês Henriques explaining the prototypes developed thus far:

Parent-company YDreams now counts three spinouts and one joint venture

The YDreams Group is proud to announce that its members are growing in number. A joint-venture with a North American partner brought us Audience Entertainment in December 2008; Ynvisible, dedicated to developing and producing electrochromic displays was officially launched in early 2010, and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in February 2011.

2011 ushered in two more spinout companies – Yvision, developer and producer of software development kits, and more recently YDRobotics, which will specialize in robotics and mechatronics fields.

More information about each one HERE!

YVision was created by the company division that focuses solely on Natural User Interfaces (NUI) application design and software architecture. The innovative development framework has been efficiently deployed in engaging and robust NUI applications that have been, and are, the motors behind many of YDreams interactive solutions.

Click HERE to experience YVision firsthand on your browser. (Note: webcam needed!)

For more detailed info about YVision, go to: http://www.ydreams.com/yvision/

We also recently demoed the YVision app at are2011. You can check it out at the following video link. Demo starts at 05:06 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsN0tCkAR-Y

O Concurso «Realize o Seu Sonho» é uma iniciativa que apoia a estruturação de ideias e projectos em planos de negócio viáveis. Temos como Júri o Dr. Francisco Pinto Balsemão, Prof. António Câmara (CEO da YDreams), Prof. António Gomes Mota, Dr. Manuel Forjaz, Dr.ª Vera Pires Coelho, Prof. Tomaz Morais, Dr.ª Isabel Jonet, Dr. José Miguel Queimado e Dr. Paulo Taylor.

Candidate já o seu projecto! Inscrições grátis até 15 de Maio em www.sonho.org. Demora só 30 segundos! Prémios até 60.000€. Pode ver aqui o vídeo promocional do Concurso. Os parceiros deste projecto são IBM, Ericsson, Grupo José de Mello, SIC Notícias, Metro Porto, Metro Lisboa, Carris, NYSE Euronext, entre outros.

A Acredita Portugal é uma organização sem fins lucrativos que tem como objectivo estimular o empreendedorismo e apoiar na realização de projectos. Mais informações em www.acreditaportugal.pt ou realizeoseusonho@acreditaportugal.pt.

Tem um projecto ou ideia por implementar?

PARTICIPE NO CONCURSO REALIZE O SEU SONHO!

Pode candidatar até 3 Projectos!

Inscreva-se hoje (em 30 secs) em www.sonho.org!