Soda loves art, learning and play. Our Journal combines News with other entries by Team members.
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Soda Rocks (or Pops) Cannes 23 April 07
Alex and Fiddian went to Cannes last week for the Content360 pitching competition at MipTV and won the Children’s Content category. They pitched ‘Rock or Pop’ a fast paced online game comprising a series of user generated multimedia ‘this or that’ mini games. The prize is a development contract with the BBC with the aim to find a way to make ‘Rock or Pop’ work across CBeebies and CBBC. Rock...........or Pop!
Digitally Ours 30 March 07
Soda is appearing in Digitally Yours, an international digital art exhibition collaborated by Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova museum and The Regional Art Council of Southwest Finland. As well as featuring Sodaplay the exhibition has been an opportunity to work with Zach Lieberman on an all new version of Ed v Zach.
Quickfire Fiddian 30 March 07
Fiddian presented at Quickfire last night on how Soda interfaces with many facets of the ‘Creative Industries’. Run by Katz Kiely, Quickfire uses a punchy 14 slide, 30 secs per slide format which is challenging for presenters but makes for an incredibly informative energetic event. Amongst the inspiring speakers were Charles Cecil MD of games co Revolution, Richard Adams Digital Strategy Director at Chemistry and Matt Hanson from Swarm of Angels the fab ‘crowdsourced’ film production project. Funded by London Westside the evening was an entertaining discourse on how the creative industries are evolving and boundaries blurring.
An architectual association 7 February 07
On the afternoon of Wednesday 14th February I’ve been invited to give a lecture at the Architectural Association. This open event has been organised by the AA’s New Media and Info Systems Research Cluster led by Joel Newman, Theo Spyropoulos and Vasilis Stroumpakos.
Is subscription the next search? 19 January 07
Richard Sedley, director of cScape‘s Customer Engagement Unit, asked Soda to contribute a few thoughts for a small end of year brochure reflecting on the space we are working in (or rather one of the spaces soda is):
Search is key to the internet - it has been for a while and it will be for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately the very nature of searching always requires the user to have quite detailed knowledge of what he/she is actually looking for. Subscription is an powerful alternative way to access the vast amount of information on offer. Rather then searching for specific information you subscribe to a trusted source of information. Just like search, subscription is well established and supported already. There are few online publishers left who do not yet offer their content for subscription via RSS, atom, or email.
The challenge lies in helping users to identify the trustworthy and valuable sources and more importantly, to manage and maintain a vast collection of these sources. The real danger we need to mitigate against is that of loosing control, not because there is too much noise but because there is a such colossal quantity of potentially valuable signal.
‘Wave’ to Dublin 17 January 07
Fiddian and Soda with artist Siobhan Hapaska have just unveiled ‘Wave’, a large sculptural low resolution screen for Dublin’s newly revamped Ilac Shopping Centre. The ‘portrait’ format screen is made up of 64 vertical Aluminium 5.5 meter extrusions each containing 96 four LED clusters thus making a huge, super bright 96 x 64 pixel screen. The extrusions are arranged in a wave form so at a distance and face on it appears as an ordinary screen but from the side appears as an abstract light sculpture.
The launch video content for ‘Wave’ reflects the Ilac’s environment and much of it was produced with Dublin school children. In the next phase we hope to use some of Soda’s skills and experience with computer vision generative art software to enable the Ilac’s audience to interact in real time with the screen.
Soda also produced custom playout and administration software that enables control of the screens content over the internet. Technographic did a fantastic job, as ever, with the screen’s production and it has been a real pleasure working with the Ilac’s architects Benoy.
Soda Excites Minds 27 November 06
We were delighted to be invited to exhibit at Creative Partnerships’ Conference and Arena this week. In inflatable pods the Arena showcased some of the most innovative creative work currently going on in partnership with young people. Soda was honoured to be exhibiting alongside such company as The British Council, The Guardian, The Royal Shakespeare Company, Arts Council England, Futurelab, FACT, etc. etc. Groovy artist architects Muf were recreating a dramatic and colourful school installation they have been working on and grand verbaliser Mickey was heroically captaining Talkaoke The event was produced to inform creative teachers from around the country about the work of Creative Partnerships and engage them in debate about future best practice.
Irrepressible invitation to developers 1 November 06
Due to the massive success of irrepressible.info’s launch earlier this year the site was swiftly internationalised with the addition of French, Spanish and Arabic language versions. Irrepressible’s continued appeal has now driven the release of another suite of features to further boost the acclaimed campaign against Internet related censorship and repression.
The site has seen tremendous growth in the last few months and ranked amongst the 5,000 most popular web sites worldwide (source: alexa.com). Irrepressible.info’s database of censored material has been accessed globally more than 39,000,000 times through it’s supporting blogs and websites (new feature). Crucially the campaigns’ popularity has led to more than 50,000 people signing the pledge, greatly exceeding the original goal of 30,000 signatories.
paying attention to attention 30 August 06
Tried out a recent version of Touchstone briefly and although it’s got lots of interesting ideas (and quite a bit of implementation as well), it won’t yet work for me until it has a few key features - technically, the ability to work with https-delivered and authenticated feeds are mandatory for the way I subscribe to feeds now, and from a interaction point of view the ability to manually segment (or mark up) feeds (on subscription) into different types with different attention-management heuristics - news, events and alerts…
Fiddian at BNMI’s Interactive Screen 06 21 August 06
Last week I was very privileged to again attend the Banff New Media Institute’s annual Interactive Screen Workshop. Incredibly situated in the Banff National park high in the Canadian Rocky Mountains Interactive Screen brings creative digital media practitioners and theorists from all over the world to share work and related discourse, some pics are at iascreen06.
It was great to have an opportunity to play Blast Theory’s ‘Can you see me now’. I really felt for Matt and Ju being ‘runners’ in the game for an hour at 5,000 feet.
Simplicity or Optimization? 9 August 06
When refactoring to a good (or at least better) design, how do I know if the decision of improving the code is coming from premature optimization & thinking ahead too much or from an agile-acquired sense of feel & smell?
Creative computer cartoons? 8 August 06
Do you think computers can be creative like humans? Cartoonists are creative people. If a computer could draw caricatures of people as good as people would that count as being creative? We have created an Artificial Intelligence program that draws cartoons of people, choosing the most distinctive features of their face and exaggerating them just as human cartoonists do. Why not get it to do a caricature of you and decide for yourself whether it is creative or not.
A Soda take on agile process 8 August 06
For some time now we have been looking at our design and development processes. We have also been talking to trusted advisers, clients and partners about different elements of this and have finally come up with a form of words to describe our revised processes. Our desire is to ensure that the way we work should allow us to play to our technical strengths and our creative culture whilst making sure that our partners and clients needs and requirements are always at the centre of our design and development activity.
The PDF file here is the latest version of this and we are now using this with clients. However, we welcome further comment and input as we will continue to review our processes.
Download Soda’s Iterative design and development process Aug 2006.pdf.
Standpedia.com 3 August 06
Standpedia.com - a wiki-style encyclopedia of controversy - allows users to ask and discuss difficult questions, all nicely presented via an interactive visual map. The ambition for these maps is to represent a well balanced range of views rather then a single definitive answer. Already there is a very interesting set of maps available, some of which have already started to ponder the system (standpedia.com) itself. See also Standpoint.com. (via solutionwatch)
Sodaplay hiccup 24 July 06
Something serious has happened to the server running Sodaplay.com and Sodarace.net. Soda apologises to everyone looking to play today; we’re working hard to fix the problem as soon as possible.