this is an idea for a possible YDreams tshirt. would you wear one?


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YDreams opened an office in Austin, Texas last August. This office will be the center for YDreams’ North American operations. It was through YDreams affiliation with the Portugal - University of Texas at Austin Program that key doors were opened in Austin’s business community.

Austin is one of the premier cities in the World for digital media: major video gaming studios, advertising agencies, design companies, independent film makers and well known musicians are based there. Companies such as Dell and Whole Foods also have their headquarters in the city.

In Austin YDreams found a support ecosystem matched only by Silicon Valley at a fraction of the cost. This ecosystem includes media, software and hardware companies but also lawyer’s offices, communication agencies, business angels, venture capitalists, and a major University.

Austin will also be a key location for YLabs, YDreams research laboratory. Ivan Franco, YLabs Executive Director, lectured recently at IBM Research Lab and visited several other major companies in Austin. Texas based companies are already working with YLabs in the development of our next generation of interactive products. Our first quarter in Austin has shown that we selected the perfect location to launch those products.

“The west is the best, get here and we’ll do the rest”.

Jim Morrison, The Doors’ charismatic singer, referred to the American continent’s west… but this could also be applied to Europe’s west, and to Portugal more precisely.

Back in 1992 Portugal was awarded with the organization of the 1998’s international exhibition. I remember hearing about it on the radio just before a meeting with Professor Câmara at the National Geographic Information Center (CNIG). “Have you heard the news? That’ll be a great opportunity to show what we can do.”, he said. And the following years have shown just that.

In 1993, the Environmental Systems Analysis Group assembled the first Virtual Reality laboratory in Portugal. Equipped with a head mounted display (HMD), Polhemus sensors, a Silicon Graphics Indy workstation and two Pentium PCs, the lab was able to produce a lot of innovative concepts of simulation, interaction and information visualization. By innovative I mean these were real breakthroughs. And the fact that we were not working with high-end supercomputers pushed creativity to a whole new level.

One of the areas with impressive results was the level of detail (LOD) management for large digital elevation models. That’s what made possible to have a project like Portugal Digital at the Territory Pavilion of the Expo98. It was a real time 3D simulator of continental Portugal, with 1m spatial resolution in Lisbon and Porto and 30m elsewhere… made from scratch in 4 months by a team of 6 members (including sound design), stable enough to run for 6 months and used by over 1 million visitors. It was impressive enough to get F-16 air force pilots playing like they were kids, and robust enough to withstand real kids flying like fighter pilots.

Few believed it was possible to achieve this result in such a short time frame and with so few resources.

We knew it was possible. And we did it.

That’s the spirit YDreams is built upon.

This morning I gave one more invited talk, this time at Politécnico de Setúbal in the context of an entrepreneurship seminar. The theme of my presentation was “you dream. we make it”.

They have a nice auditorium at Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais (ESCE) and the audience was around 50-70 people. I am sure most of them, especially students, are now thinking about starting their own businesses (or sending their CVs to us ). Besides being an important MKT/PR component, these kinds of seminars can be seen as part of our social responsibility, inspiring young people to take risks, be creative, aim for the stars and run away from a mediocre & dull life.

I also liked the talk of Machado Rodrigues, Doctor at Hospital Pulido Valente, presenting a set of humanitarian activities his team has been developing in Angola. Another form of entrepreneurship: saving lives, and bringing hope where misery and disbelief rule.

It was the morning after the Christmas Party and this was Production room at 11 o’clock in the morning (courtesy of one early software engineer):

Our colleague Sérgio Estevão won the Forum Nokia November contribution award with his Blog “MIDP Adventures“. Sérgio is one of the most outstanding software engineers I’ve ever come across and also a good friend. He’s been working with YDreams since 2002 and was involved in almost all our games: Undercover, Undercover 2: Merc Wars, LexFerrum and spooks:mobile among many many other projects.

On the past 6 weeks i have been on the road a LOT.

7 countries: Portugal, London, Paris, USA, Mexico, London (again) and Germany! So what i thought i would do is share…..So let me start with the really interesting.

On the second week of November we were invited to present at the WPP Store Latam forum in Mexico City.There were many cool people presenting, among them: Chris Borek – Senior Manager In Store Digital Marketing, Target, Juan Carlos Contreras – President, JWT Glue/LATAM, Atus Palomo – Trade Marketing Director, Whirlpool, Alex Norman, CEO, LiveWorld-WPP among many others

Now the cool thing about these events is that not only do we get to present but you also get to watch other people’s presentations Mac guys note: i used Keynote which is MUCH cooler than ppt. Also find a couple of pictures of the stuff i saw in Mexico: