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.

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.

Last week a YDreams’ team travelled to Cannes, France with one objective – show the TV and Entertainment content industry some of the coolest technology out there.

It all started on Tuesday afternoon – while the Grand Auditorium of the Palais des Congrès in Cannes filled up and waited for Sir Martin Sorrell’s keynote, everybody had the chance to interact with the virtual bubbles that filled the screen.

Later that evening we set up another interactive installation, this time at Digital Creative Party at the Carlton Hotel. The lively party was the perfect setting for our interactive waterfall, where guests could play with the water effect and splash each other.

The last event of the week consisted in the session Experience This! Content 360 Technology Showcase. Among several remarkable panellists and in front of a packed room, YDreams presented 3 real time demos that got the audience going.

The first one was our mind reader application that allowed us to add thought bubbles to our panellists for a few minutes (we found out that they all loved Cannes and thought YDreams rocked!). Our second live demo consisted in a shower of cubes, which the whole audience could play with. Last but not least we showcased SpaceDog, Audience Entertainment’s latest game, which debuted at Cannes. The audience was invited to raise and lower their arms, acting as a human joystick that guided SpaceDog safely to his Bone Planet objective.

The presentation ended with a showing of the Augmented Reality Interactive Playground featuring YDreams’ famous mascot Flapi. The audience was excited to find out that YDreams technology can mean inviting your favourite virtual character into your living room, as well as letting a real character become part of a fictional world, all of it in real time. We call it the future of television. I look forward to us making it happen sooner, rather than later.:)

YDreams’ CEO, António Câmara, Ivan Franco and Inês Henriques sat down with ‘Falar Global’, a program on SIC Notícias. which looks at the impact information and knowledge technologies have on our daily lives.

The interview covers a range of topics that include YDreams’ take on what we can expect from televisions of the future, as well as the company’s work in the field of augmented reality, and in transforming the objects and surfaces around us into screens people can interact with.

For more see video!

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.

We’re pretty excited about this cool piece of news! We just found out that our ‘Playing in an Augmented World’ demo-mix submitted at this year’s MIX09 Showoff contest, and presented to hundreds of peers in Las Vegas, received an honorable mention!

The demo put together by YLabs (our in-house R&D lab) shows-off some real- time interaction with 3D objects using a webcam.

Again, congratulations to all involved.

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 »

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

Playing in an Augmented World from YDreams on Vimeo.

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.

Day One started with the Seminar Revolutionizing Interactive Marketing in Public Spaces – the Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage Imperative. It was great to have a whole seminar dedicated to new types of interaction in Digital Signage. The list of speakers was a who’s who of the interactive world – Razorfish, Gesturetek, Total Immersion – and the discussion was lively and significant. Read the rest of this entry »

António Câmara, our CEO, will present the book tomorrow at Culturgest, in Lisbon. One of the collective plays (.txt) that was part of this project featured the technological support of YDreams (and the talented work of some YDreamers).

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

Real-time interaction with augmented reality mascots from YDreams on Vimeo.

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.

Digital Signage Expo 2009 is just around the corner. Underway from the 24th to the 26th of February at the Las Vegas Convention Center, this year’s expo is as much about the exhibition floor as it is about educational sessions focusing on interactive technology, self-service and digital signage.

Opening day, February 24th, will offer expo-goers a mobile and gesture-based digital signage summit entitled “Revolutionizing Interactive Marketing in Public Places: The Mobile and Gestural Imperative”. Experts from Avenue A/Razorfish, GestureTek and our very own António Câmara (YDreams CEO) and Marta Vieira (YDreams USA’s Director of Business Development & Operations) among others, will look at big brand successful case studies, and discuss new ways to engage audiences.

António Câmara will integrate the panel of speakers kicking off the conference with Part I of Generating Brand Power with Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage, and later on in the day Marta Vieira will expand on YDreams’ experience creating interactive solutions, design limitations encountered, and overcoming those obstacles to afford audiences ‘super-experiences’ in New Content Models for Mobile and Gestural Digital Signage.

Sounds like a great line up with plenty of promising content for interactive tech enthusiasts everywhere.

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

Outside the Expo proper, next to one of the entrances, was the brilliant Digital Water Pavillion (DWP). Part of a future technological park project called Milla Digital (designed by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning), the DWT showcased an array of interactive water curtains.

By means of asking the pavilion’s staff, you could have a word of your choice appear written in the curtains.

Specially at night, when lighting played a big role, the effect was very unexpected, seamless and poetic (except for the “slippery when wet” yellow signs). Video here.

Find the complete credits here.

Check out the video below of YBand’s stellar performance at the semi-finals of the Fortune Battle of the Corporate Bands last Saturday, the 23rd.

Our guys came in a notable second, but from what we hear it was a pretty close call! You represented us well and made us proud!

Also congratulations to The Consumer Republic and good luck to them at the U.S. final!

Tomorrow, Saturday the 23rd, the YBand will rock for a place on the American final of the Fortune Battle of the Corporate Bands 2008 edition. Those of us unable to attend London for the European semi-final, wish the band the best of luck! If anyone wants to stop by: The University of London Union – ULU, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HY, starts at 6.pm.

SXSW Interactive 2009 is already gearing up and we’ve got some YDreamers applying for panels. Though not as widely popular as its Music counterpart, SXSW Interactive is one of the most conceited interactive media festivals around. From March 13 to 17, Austin will be buzzing with media entrepreneurs, curious geeks, technology evangelists and any other interactive aficionado variants you’d care to make. We’d really appreciate it if you’d give us a hand by voting for our panels.

Marta Vieira has two submissions for the Mobile / Wireless category. Since her early days at the company, as an Account Manager for our Entertainment division, Marta has amassed a profuse knowledge on location-based systems and gaming, both panels propose to put some perspective into current state-of-the-art and future trends.

Ivan Franco, our Research & Development Director, is set for the New Technology / Next Generation category, where he sets to share his expertise in new interfaces, DIY concepts and his own musicianship (check out Ivan’s blog for more info).

More info and voting links below:

Inches vs Miles – What Makes Location-Based Games Fun? (Marta Vieira)

Is accurate location what makes a location-based game “real”? Or can we broaden the concept of location until it fits our idea of what a fun game design would be? In this panel experts will discuss location-based gaming, its present and possible evolution.

(click to vote)

Location-Based Applications – Dead on Arrival? (Marta Vieira)

Location based applications have long been hailed as the wireless industry’s “next killer app”. But will they disappear before they’re ever big? In this panel the experts will discuss if location is likely to emerge as a powerful genre or be used as a feature boost for applications.

(click to vote)


New Interfaces for Performance (Ivan Franco)

Realtime computation allowed new media artists to develop interactive performances but typical computer interfaces don’t offer appropriate interaction models for these contexts. In the DIY generation artists learned new techniques to build their own instruments. Novel interfaces have surfaced and this presentation is a reflection on New Interfaces for Performance.

(click to vote)

The iFest ’08 event, organized by Infonomia, had its fourth edition held in the Forum Building in Barcelona between the 10^th and 12^th of July. After the amount of attention attracted at the 2007 edition, YDreams Med returned as an interactive technology partner, with the yFaces. Participants would write down free comments about the event on nearby post-its, that would then appear almost instantaneously on a giant 103” plasma, gently provided by Panasonic Spain.

iFest aims to accelerate business growth through innovation and creativity. There were over 25 speakers present including: Hiroshi Tasaka, David Weinberger, Alberto Alessi, Peter Watson, Tom Kelley, Antonella Broglia, Ricardo Baeza-Yates among others. Our own Miguel Remédio made a brief presentation about YDreams.

Some interesting bits:

- The Sustainable Dance Club (vid 1) (vid 2), from the Roosegaarde Studio (2). A dance floor geared with sensors and piezo-electric components that can power an entire disco, sic, and make it interactive. Opening next September, at the Watt in Rotterdam.

- Just rub yours against mine and we’re done. It’s “E“, the gadget set to replace business cards.

- A lot of content on fabrics and textiles: the entrepreneurial Sensing Fabrics with stylist Joan Fabregas, the free-minded XS Labs (vids) from Joanna Berzowska and two Dutch girls and their Taeppedyr that keeps babies from crying. Even Philips had something to say on the subject.

- Unlock your cell-phone just by staring at it, with VFacer (download available for the N70), from Visual Engineering.

- Philips’ drive for innovation was put forward by Emile Aarts, founder of Philips Home Lab. See if this sounds familiar in any way.

- And then there was the toy section. ALAVS (Autonomous Light Air Vessels) and their funny Blubber Bots. Goofy looking toy robots that look paradoxically vintage, from Fadisel. Download a bed-time story and stuff it into the storytelling Nabar teddy-bear. The oddly real and sensor filled Pleo dinosaur, 2007 Engadget Robot of the Year, from Ugobe.

- Telefonica I+D showed off a very prototypical Visual Search Engine, where a photo taken by your own cell phone can act as the “key word” for the search: take a photo of a CD cover on a shop-window and immediately buy that CD online…

- The solar powered scooter, from Sun Red.

YDreams’ interactive installation at the Portuguese pavillion in Zaragoza’s international exhibition is drawing a lot of media and public recognition. An 18-meter wide wall projection, allows visitors to ‘grab’ words that fall from the sky directly into a Guadiana River image. The public interacts by moving their hands over the screen, selecting and watching as the words splash in mix of sound and light, amounting to a better understanding of sustainable development issues.

You can read all about it in our press release and, judging from all the comments featured in the media so far, it’s a definite highlight of the whole exhibition. Even the Portuguese Republic President, Cavaco Silva, interacted with it on the inaugural day and seemed to enjoy himself.

And please do check João Vitória’s, our Zaragoza project manager and in-house illusionist, interview to SIC tv channel, which you can find right here.

“Now watch closely as I make your logo disappear!” João Vitória, Project Manager at YDreams, offering to use his incredible magical skills to make SIC’s logo disappear into thin air.

By António Câmara’s request, YBand applied to fight in the 8th edition of the Battle of the Corporate Bands – a contest promoted by Fortune magazine, seeking to find the best band formed mainly by amateur musicians working in a given company.

Well, that’s an order any of us at YBand were more than happy to fulfill! Not only there’s a personal joy to it, but a huge marketing potential as well, if we go any far in the competition.

So, we embraced the challenge with a sense of responsibility towards the company, and a great dose of childish excitement, for having an opportunity to do something different with our amateur skills for music.

First step was to decide how we would start the whole process. Each band needed to send 3 songs to the promoters. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Keep in mind that there are 32 members in YBand. We needed to pick 3 songs, and that meant leaving some of us out of the fun.

Through a voting pole, we decided that we would pick the 3 songs without worrying about who would eventually record them. Luckily, the 3 songs that were selected in that pole were songs that we already recorded for the Xmas CD. Thus, some of us went back to the studio to either remix, retouch or even re-record the song altogether.

Next step: send it to the jury. In order to participate, we were required to create a Sonicbids EPK (www.sonicbids.com/yband2006) and wait for the results. I was always very confident that we were going to be selected, and we all started believing when the promoters sent me some emails asking whether we need to have 32 members on stage.

And then, bingo! We got the news that we were selected! You can check for yourselves at www.sonicbids.com/yband2006 how our re-recordings worked out for the jury – (please do, it sounds a lot better than the CD, I think)

Next step in the competition is to play live a 20 minutes gig in London, August 23^rd, were other 5 bands will also be playing. If we win that competition, we will play the final in Cleveland against yet another 7 bands, selected throughout the United States.

I got the confirmation that we could not change band members during the London semi-final, so we went through the unpleasant task of selecting who will go and who will not. Democracy played an important role again, as we voted the formation that will represent YDreams in the London gig: Petra Pais, Luis Ferreira, Fernando Gomes, Luis Vargas, João Afonso, Octácio Rodrigues and Bruno Neto are the lucky ones.

This week we finally got toghether to agree on a set list. Here it is:

1 – Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out 3:30

2 – When Love Comes to Town 6:00

3 – Head On 2:00

4 – Everlong 4:00

5 – Mojo Working 4:00

Rehearsals will start in mid-July. If any of you can be in London next August, 23^rd, please do, we appreciate your support!