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!

Seth Godin, über-marketeer and coiner of the Purple Cow term, (re)posted quite an inspirational end-of-the-year piece, which I leave you with as the year draws to an end (or as a new year is just starting). Enjoy and have a great 2008:

Taken from Seth’s Blog:

«Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.

While your company has been waiting for the economy to rebound, Reebok has launched Travel Trainers, a very cool-looking lightweight sneaker for travelers. They are selling out in Japan — from vending machines in airports!

While Detroit’s car companies have been whining about gas prices and bad publicity for SUVs (SUVs are among their most profitable products), Honda has been busy building cars that look like SUVs but get twice the gas mileage. The Honda Pilot was so popular, it had a waiting list.

While Africa’s economic plight gets a fair amount of worry, a little startup called Kickstart is actually doing something about it. The new income that its products generate accounts for 0.5% of the entire GDP of Kenya. How? It manufactures a $75 device that looks a lot like a StairMaster. But it’s not for exercise. Instead, Kickstart sells the machine to subsistence farmers, who use its stair-stepping feature to irrigate their land. People who buy it can move from subsistence farming to selling the additional produce that their land yields — and triple their annual income in the first year of using the product.

While you’ve been wishing for the inspiration to start something great, thousands of entrepreneurs have used the prevailing sense of uncertainty to start truly remarkable companies. Lucrative Web businesses, successful tool catalogs, fast-growing PR firms — all have started on a shoestring, and all have been profitable ahead of schedule. The Web is dead, right? Well, try telling that to Meetup.com, a new Web site that helps organize meetings anywhere and on any topic. It has 200,000 registered users — and counting.

Maybe you already have a clipping on your mirror that asks you what you did during the 1990s. What’s your biggest regret about that decade? Do you wish that you had started, joined, invested in, or built something? Are you left wishing that you’d at least had the courage to try? In hindsight, the 1990s were the good old days. Yet so many people missed out. Why? Because it’s always possible to find a reason to stay put, to skip an opportunity, or to decline an offer. And yet, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember why we said no and easy to wish that we had said yes.

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?»