The privacy concerns prompted by the image acquisition for the Google Street View service, has been controversial and some very funny images have been captured. Recently, the Google cars were seen cruising through Portuguese roads. This time the victims were two YDreamers…

YDreams’ headquarters are located close to the beach. A big number of YDreams’ employees take advantage of this and go surfing or body boarding, early in the morning and at lunch time. These two were caught just after a morning session.

YDreams’ employees are big sports fans and practice all kinds of sports: mountain bike, BMX, tennis, skate, kiting, kite-surfing and boarding, paint ball, kart racing, etc. The headquarters are equipped with showers so that afterwards they can head back to work, fresh and smelling good…

YDreams’ Solidarity Movement has been up and running since 2007; the initiative involves raising funds and donations (such as clothing, books, CDs, bikes, computers, DVDs and so forth) from the folks at the company. The donations are then channeled to those who most need them through Solidarity and Charity Institutes in the Lisbon area.

The text below in Portuguese, courtesy of our HR department, explains in greater detail the aim and results of the project. The pics below tell the rest of the story.

“Decorreu mais uma edição, a 3ª consecutiva, do YDreams Solidarity, um projecto iniciado em 2007 pelos Recursos Humanos da YDreams. O grande objectivo deste projecto é anualmente proporcionar a pelo menos uma instituição de solidariedade, a oportunidade a todos os que por lá vivem, uma vida um pouco melhor, um dia repleto de alegria. Assim, é pedido a todos os YDreamers, que tragam roupas, livros, CDs, aparelhagens, bicicletas, computadores, DVDs, etc, no fundo tudo o que já nos foi útil e que hoje podemos e queremos dar ao próximo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Moving to the new building in the FCT campus was a very important milestone for the company’s corporate culture.

Our old offices couldn’t keep pace with the company’s growth, people were sharing desks and the Alcântara’s office (central Lisbon), albeit strategically located, was slowing creating the feeling of a YDreams that was physically divided into backoffice (Production and R&D) and front office (Sales and Marketing). Project Managers where in the middle, almost literally, since they spent more time going back and forth the Tagus bridge than anyone else.

So it was great when all the company came to be reunited on one building. Moreover, it was a building that we designed and conceived to fit our own needs – band studio included.

Nevertheless, after the reunification joy settled for a bit, we realized that with the explosive growth, new people constantly arriving and frantic work rate, we were in danger of losing a bit of the DNA that defined us as a company.

Looking around at all the shiny gray walls that were now surrounding us, some YDreamers realized that they needed some life and provided a great canvas for some funky signage to shake things up. Moreover, why keep the initiative to walls and not devise a series of actions to shake everything up? This is how YShakeIt – Project 363 was born.

Entrance to the Quality Test Room (left) and the Sound Studio (right)

Staff Only Door

The project is really a series of activities aimed at keep corporate culture and foster creativity, involving people from all departments which “lead” each activity. There’s a Project Manager also, of course, someone needs to keep an eye on the budget.

Some of the stuff we’ve been organizing so far:

- Close Encounters Sessions

Close Encounters are small internal weekly conferences we have. The format varies, it can be a round table discussion, a talk about a specific topic or an artistic presentation. Speakers can be YDreamers or external guests. Nuno Artur Silva (Produções Fícticias), Artur Arsénio (Robotics), Manuel Lima (Data Visualization) or Prof. Rui Aço (Oficina do Desenho), are some of the guests we were lucky to have so far. Internally we’ve also had people speaking about Interactive Narratives in Cinema, the Power of Collaborative Tools, Digital Art, Finances for non-financial People, among many others. As you can see the idea is not to discuss work, but to inspire and inform in different ways.

- Cinema Sessions with commentary and discyssion

Kicked off recently, some of the movies included Switching, by Morten Schjødt and Man with a Movie Camera, by Dziga Vertov.

- Friday After Work Caipirão

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.

- The Other Side of the YDreamer

YDreamers often have hidden talents, this way they can share them with the rest of us. The photography exhibition is a good example.

There are many others kicking off or in production like podcasts or arduino workshops, and maybe Close Encounters will soon have an external format. Keep tuned!

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.

I always download the “This Week” show, with Dan Fernandez and Brian Keller, onto my portable player and listen to it during my commute. They mentioned the “Show Off” contest on one of the last episodes and I thought it was a great opportunity to literally ‘show off’ YDreams at the Microsoft MIX09 event.

I was busy and left it for later but after a sleepless night preparing a presentation, I suddenly noticed it was the last day to submit a video, so instead of going to bed, I screen captured a couple of demos we’d made using our YVision platform, quickly edited the video on Movie Maker and sent it off.

Only after receiving an email from Dan the following day, ‘asking if the video had no audio’, did I notice that I had an extra day (I had read the deadline date after midnight, thus the date mix-up!) The good news was that I had time to find a great song in Jamendo, add it to the video and re-submit it (thanks Dan).

The honorable mention awarded the video, by our peers at MIX09, goes directly to the great team that YDreams is. Their commitment to excellence allowed me to create this video in just a couple of hours.

Have a look as one of our YLabbies tests some YVision-based apps on Magalhães (the made-in-Portugal classmate pc) with an Intel(R) Atom(TM) N270 CPU @ 1.60GHz and an Intel(R) 945 Express chipset.

Camera-based interaction on a netbook from YDreams on Vimeo.

My last week was spent at the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin Texas. It’s a full week of events with three main subjects: interactive, film and music. It’s really a magnificent event that completely overtakes Austin, with people from all around the world presenting their work both as panelists or performing artists. I came to present my own panel on “New Interfaces for Performance” at the Austin Convention Center. Soon I realized that with simultaneous panels happening in around 20 different rooms, there’s so much going on that you just wish you could be in more than one place at a time.

Interactive is mainly dedicated to tendencies revolving around new technologies. There was a big focus on web 2.0 and social networking. It’s not a subject that particularly interests me so I looked for good alternatives. Read the rest of this entry »

Our offices were still lodged in university buildings, and our CEO, Prof. Camara was already talking about the library we would have once at the new building headquarters. Our future library would serve to gather all of YDreams’ bibliographical resources, as well as large numbers of books Prof. Camara had acquired over the years.

By the time we’d settled into the new building, I had already earned a “bad reputation” as the person who would steal books from the professor’s office. Maybe as a form of “punishment”, Prof. Camara and Ivan (our Director of R&D) invited me to implement and manage the YDreams’ library – an invitation (and challenge) I accepted gladly! Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, all the men at YDreams Portugal were entitled to a (pre)Valentine’s day treat: a heart-shaped candy and personal message, signed, sealed and delivered by all the girls at the company.

You may argue that Valentine’s Day is just a marketing gimmick to boost greeting card sales, fill up restaurants and make people rant about what a marketing gimmick Valentine’s Day is, but it made every guy’s Friday even sweeteer (while probably reminding some of us that they better get that card or reservation going for the next day).

This is what my work station looked like when I arrived from lunch. The card read: "André, for you, we'd blog everyday. YGirlfriends". How's that for commitment to a Social Media strategy? :,-)

YDreamers react in different fashion to the perennial sensation of falling in love.

Early into his Memorabilia of a Company post, Sergio mentions that ‘The Häagen-Dazs years were still to come’. I thought I’d reminisce a bit and explain why he dubbed them as such.

In mid 2001, the company consisted of little more than the five founders and a handful of staff – there were maybe about 12 of us. In keeping with the spirit that we were from the get-go a less than conventional start-up, our CEO, António Câmara had a Häagen-Dazs ice-cream freezer brought in and placed at the entrance to our work-space (yes, the one Sergio refers to as ‘the main room’). That’s right, ‘in the beginning’, for close to a year and a half, everyone was free to gorge on Häagen-Dazs morning, noon and night – and some did! For the calorically-challenged it meant staying clear of the ice-cream ‘treasure trove’ but for those who could afford to indulge it was quite the treat.

I remember what a kick clients and partners got out of it when they came to visit, and since we were located at the heart of a university campus I also recall the occasional student popping in to say ‘he’d heard we were giving out free ice-cream’!

The contract we had with the Häagen-Dazs rep in Portugal required us to replenish our stock every three weeks or so. Needless to say that by the end of week one we were usually down to 3 or 4 mini-cups of Lemon Sorbet (clearly the least popular flavor in the house). I also remember that the rep would occasionally pop in to check that the freezer was being properly stocked and maintained; there was this one time when she unexpectedly showed up and we had a hec of time explaining why the thing was stocked with Manuel Costa’s fresh-fish catch of the day, and Sergio Cardoso’s Alheiras (traditional sausages from northern Portugal)! She eventually calmed down after we explained that they were being temporarily stored for the company’s 1st anniversary celebration the very next day – of course we had to place a new order right away and promise that the freezer would be adequately ‘fumigated’ Ah, the good ol’ days

(Maria la Palma made me write this post…)

In the beginning we sat on wooden chairs – the kind you find in most public schools. The Häagen-Dazs years were still to come, as we sweated out the summers and froze through the winters for lack of central air-con. During the monsoon season water occasionally dripped through the ceiling.

Back then, in our old building, the overcrowded YDreams “sala principal” (main room) was half empty. YDreams, then Ideias Interactivas, was yet to be registered officially but we were already working on the company’s first project, the gig that gave us a head start and kept us financially afloat from day one.

It was called “Canal Mapas”, a Lisbon and Oporto map channel produced for Telecel. YDreams not only delivered a web version (which was all the rage back then) for their online portal, NETC, but also and more importantly a mobile version.

Although a big challenge for a new company like YDreams, web map channels were nothing new at the time. Mobile ones, on the other hand, were almost unheard of. YDreams truly pioneered the field by producing not only WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), but also PDA versions of “Canal Mapas”. So innovative was the solution that, in three months time, Motorola gave our work a 5-star rating in the mobile sector, from a very select global group of leading companies. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

A special thanks to all our readers! Your support, time and interest over the past year have meant alot.

Stay tuned for more – Happy 2009!

This past summer YDreams launched an interactive applications creator called Architek, which in short is a web-based software platform that lets users create customized YDreams apps such as interactive walkways, magic books or orbits without even the faintest programming know-how.

To put their money where their mouth is, the platform production team launched an in-house Architek Design contest challenging any YDreamer to participate and come up with creative and original solutions for the apps creator.

There’s nothing like a little competition to get the creative juices flowing! People paired up into teams and really got into the project with entries ranging from personalized ‘magic’ cook books to psychedelic interactive walkways, plus the contest proved to be an excellent test bed for the product.

However, there could be only one winner – drum roll please – and the winning entry went to Team Rui Malvarez, Karina Israel and Leonel Duarte for their brilliant Cluedo-style Magic Orbit revolving around the mystery of “Who stole Arthur’s Crème Brule?”, which by the way remains unsolved

Cluedo-style Magic Orbit Took First Place



Production team anounces the winner

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.

The public announcement was made some days ago, you can check the press release here.

And here is a video created by tv show Imagens de Marca which features some past projects by YDreams and BEL:

‘Lumière meets Turing’ was the theme YDreamer Fernando Nabais chose to address at one of the company’s in-house ‘Close Encounters’ – informal sessions where folks present topics that are of special interest to them but also connected to what we do here at the company.

The title of the talk evoked “What happens when you merge the vision machine (the camera) with the Turing machine (the computer)?”, an introduction to Narrative filmmaking for computational media, a class by Michael Lew at USC School of Cinema-Television | Interactive Media Division, and serves as a basis to analyse a series of art pieces and artistic motivations that emerged from this dual approach to Cinematic Art.

In Peter Greenaway´s, article “Towards a re-invention of Cinema”, the director and now New Media Artist, presents what he considers the four “tyrannies” from which Cinema will have to be released in order for a new cinema to emerge: the tyranny of the frame, of the text, of the actor and of the camera. In the same text, Greenaway, states that cinema “died on the 31st September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living-rooms of the world”. He is, of course, referring to cinema as a passive medium and opening up new venues for the effect of the introduction of interactivity, recombination and all the new characteristics that a medium in digital format can inherit.

The ‘Close Encounter’ served as an intro to YCinema, sessions where we will watch and analyze works by Abel Gance, Josef Svoboda, Peter Greenaway, Michael Naimark, Jeffrey Shaw, Lev Manovich and Brendan Dawes, among others, to trace the result of these concerns throughout the history of Cinema.

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.

When a child looks to a candy she smiles and thinks…I would like to have that! Well, in a non scientific way, that’s who we look for out there. Someone who says, “YDreams is what I want”, someone whose eyes shine when talking about us.

Nowadays the market is extremely competitive, and we want to have the best working with us. To be the best, for YDreams it’s to put passion and creativity in everyday tasks. It’s to see the big picture and say “how can we do this, even better”.
When we meet someone who wants to join our team we consider the education, job experience and interests, like hobbies for example, everything that can bring value to the company. But, fundamentally we believe in people’s potential, in what she or he can do with everything learned, with all past experiences.

We look for YDreamers!

(*Filipa works in the Human Resources department, with a focus on personnel recruitment. For career information at YDreams follow this link)

We are currently hosting an internal photo exhibition, featuring selected shots from some of our talented in-house photographers. Here’s a little taste of what’s hanging around (click to enlarge):

Wrasse, Portuguese Coast (João Pedro Silva)

View of Lisbon from Santa Justa Lift (Pedro Cardoso)

Cape Verde, Santo Antão island (Luís Carvalho)

Mombai, India (Tiago Fonseca)

Excuse the pun but we pulled this rabbit out of the hat to remind everyone how much of an impact our first interactive floor projection had on the company, our partners and more importantly our clients.

Virtual Garden developed back in 2003, starred a virtual agent in the form of a cuddly bunny rabbit (who challenged audiences to a game of catch) and colourful flowers that mysteriously blossomed beneath your feet. Ultimately the app was more than an interactive floor projection; it was our foray into the world of conceptual environments.

The app, an excellent ice-breaker for most any setting was immensely popular with kids of all ages, immersing audiences in a wonderland all their own, and more importantly helping us realize the potential that lay in applying creativity, technology and design to countless venues. In sum, Virtual Garden was part of what led us to where we are now: a company dedicated to crafting interactive conceptual environments and experiences for audiences the world over.

Meet the rabbit!