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We’re also making some exciting announcements today. You can read all about BERG Cloud becoming available for everyone.

Thanks for visiting, and see you at bergcloud.com!

Everyone at BERG.

Sad news folks, in order to preserve sanity and attention we have to shut the SVK shop. The good news is we’re running a half price sale on our remaining copies! The shop will close at midnight GMT on October 31st and SVK will be £5 plus postage and packaging. Get em while you can!

SVK is a collaboration between writer Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Gun Machine, RED), artist Matt Brooker (Stickleback, Lazarus Churchyard, 2000AD) and BERG. You can pick one up at the SVK shop. Thanks to all involved in getting SVK into the world, it was a massive privilege to have made a comic, especially with Warren and Matt.

And as a lovely thing to end on here is a beautiful video Timo shot when we got it printed and his write up.

SVK at the printers from BERG on Vimeo.

An incredibly terse set of weeknotes, as we’re all busy bees this week. In no particular order (actually its the order we sat round the table):

JS – Chaco
KS – Prep for MW’s return
NL & ASJ – Sockets
MC – Sinawava
DB & TH – Chaco
PG – Various LP Publications
DF – Chaco
NU – Chaco
LM – Animations; More 2D than 3D
DW – Cloudy Wireframes
AJ – Exhibitions & Sinawava
HR – Backdated company admin
FL – Zendesk & gathering LPs from the globe
JM – Sinawava wireframes
AH – Devkits & supply chain

We also have a new Laser Cutter, and for the most part it’s going to be cutting things.

“I don’t know why I find pictures of robots so exciting, but I do” – is a conversation I can hear going on right now. This week the studio is excited about film special effects and Grand Theft Auto 5. I am trying not to get sucked into a conversation about Breaking Bad. Don’t tell me.

What else is going on? Well, roughly this:

Little Printer
ASJ / NL: New Little Printer back end stuff, fixing bugs, finishing web sockets and generally making everything better.
AJ: Getting a stand ready for Future Fest
AB: Getting ready to go to xoxo in Portland. (Are you going too? Make sure you look after Alice and say hello. She has Little Printer badges.)
DW: IA, planning and writing.

Chaco
DF / DB / JS / NU / TH are all working on this. There’s a lot going on and it’s looking really nice. (I can say that without boasting as it’s nothing to do with me.) MC is overseeing things from one side, and DF has the other side covered.

Sinawava
AJ / JM are working hard on various aspects of this. Laurence is still with us too – “working on cloth and hair simulation”. This is something that surprised all of us. MC is overseeing things here too.

Devboards
AH is working on these – he’s also giving a talk at the V&A.

Pretending to be Matt and Helen
MW and HR are both away this week. We have JS covering in their absence and he seems to be doing quite well. We’ll never tell him though, it just goes to his head. KS is also working on this, doing a sterling job of email wrangling, so that MW doesn’t drown on his return.

Onwards!

I’m doing weeknotes this week, Matt is away on holiday in the US somewhere between deserts and mountains. I’ll be kicking off a new chaco brief we’re hoping to talk about in a month or so with Neil and our friends Tom and Durrell at Luckybite. Helen and Fraser are fighting institutions, HMRC and DHL respectively. Helen and I are also filling Matt’s shoes in his absence. Berglett, Gyfo, and Denise are working on bergcloud and little printer stuff. Adam is around 90% of the way through the new architecture and now has only the remaining 90% to finish. Joe and Laurence continue their epic journey in tech and animation for Sinawava.

Nearly… bloody… there….

It’s been a busy week as ever here, and so I’m writing these quickly while I’m backing up my laptop.
Why don’t you read these while you back up yours?

Here are the links this week as they arrived in our inboxes:

Monday
Dw: An overview of a new font design app

Tuesday
MW: The acquisition of Lanyrd by Eventbrite (Congrats from all of us!)
AJ: Surreal Animated GIFs of Faceless People With Moving Mechanical Parts in Their Heads
DW: Following on from a lunchtime discussion about the aesthetics of deserted cities in Elysium
MW: The Q Camera

Wednesday
DF: Zip bags from Japan (not to be confused with Heatherwick’s)
HR: Lovely drawings created by an illustrator and her four year old child

Thursday
KS: Technology Will Save us Makathon

Friday
MW: An oral history of Apple design, in six parts. First four parts have been published so far, two to come next week.
Part one
Part Two
Part Three
Part four

That’s all for now.

Another four day week for #429 as we were all off yesterday enjoying the sunny Bank Holiday Monday. The 429 is a bus that goes from Crockenhill to my home town of Dartford, or the other way, of course. It’s also the model number of a rare Ford Mustang variant named the Boss 429, which is one of the better looking muscle cars. Oh, and a Bell 429 Helicopter, which is less interesting.

Work themes this week: Chaco, Siniwava, Little Printer, Lawyers, insurance.

Music themes this week: A lot of people are going to see a lot of bands (with guitars) that I’ve never heard of. Adam’s going to see a band I’ve never heard of here, which looks pretty good.

New trends this week: Fraser’s been walking around with half a stamp stuck to his elbow. Bold, take note.

People not in the office at the time of writing this blog post: Kari, Nick, Phil.

Two main work streams this week that don’t involve lawyers or insurance consolidation. Denise, Alice, Adam, Fraser, Alex (me), and Andy are working on Little Printer / BERG Cloud things including: servers, hardware, social media, customer service, hackdays, design. Jack, Neil, Andy, Dan and Mark are working on various aspects of Chaco, whilst Joe, Charlie (remotely), Laurence (remotely), Saar (remotely) and me (Alex) are working on bits of Siniwava. Helen is keeping the office running perfectly and making sure we all get paid, as usual.

We haven’t had that much music on in the office lately, but I’ve been digging through past FACT Magazine Mixes for some background music. If you like that kind of thing, you might also enjoy MJ Cole’s Panoramic EP, which is brilliant.

Bye!

He’s already received his shop coat and has teamed up with Alice to form BERG’s crack cryptic crossword team, so after a good 4 months of working with us it’s high time I gave our newest team member, Phil Gyford, a proper welcome post!

Phil has been an extraordinary presence in the UK web industry ever since I first got to know him back in the late 90s, and I’ve admired his work throughout the intervening time. He’s not only a first class Creative Technologist, having designed and implemented many beautiful, innovative websites, he’s also been an actor, model maker, illustrator and futurist. This diversity is rare to find in somebody who is also capable of focus and execution. His own website gyford.com is testament to his vast back catalogue.

For me one of the most valuable things Phil brings into the team is an incredible attention to detail. You only have to look at his recent work on our Github account to see that in full effect. When creating the relatively straight forward Little Printer Miniseries engine in PHP Phil’s written over 3000 words of documentation and examples as well as fully commented code. This is great in and of itself, but the fact that it immediately opened up Little Printer to people who’d previously considered it out of their reach proves how powerful great documentation can be.

As BERG Cloud grows in terms of capability and features, demonstrating and communicating these becomes ever more important and Phil’s going to be key in making that happen.

‘Tis the season for summer holiday, and we are operating with a skeleton crew this week.

Mark, Denise, Joe, Andy and Neil are all enjoying some well-deserved holiday. Matt is sorting a house move. Jack isn’t on holiday, but he isn’t here either due to the fact that he is Stateside for Chaco purposes. We’re wishing him “Happy birthday!” from afar today.

Which leaves the other seven of us plus the delightful contractors (namely Charlie, Saar and our long-term buddies Fraser and Phil W) who are gracing us with their presence these days.

Nick, Charlie, Saar and Alex all have a hand in Sinawava this week. At the moment, it seems to be a lot of iPhone and Bluetooth and getting graphics to work right. We had a lovely message of appreciation from the client on that project at the end of last week, and the recognition of the incredible work that our crew has been doing was gratifying, to say the least.

Alice, Alex, Adam, Phil G, Phil W and Nick are doing their regular superb work on various bits of BERG Cloud and Little Printer. Phil W is revising screens on the dev board in order to provide physical things with their own BERG Cloud address. Alice is working on messaging and developer relations and doing some general needed maintenance on the site. Adam is keeping an eye on everything as more Little Printers come online to make sure that nothing falls over. Nick is implementing updates to make it possible for Little Printer to upload as much data as it downloads. Alex is doing some design around messaging and is helping with a bit of ad hoc packaging design. He’s also been playing a bit with a brand new A1 printer that was just randomly given to us. (Right place at the right time, that.)

More Little Printers arriving in people’s homes means lots more questions about what Little Printer can and can’t do and why it’s not doing what its owner expected it to do. Sometimes that’s because of misplaced expectations. Sometimes it’s a matter of wishful thinking and we agree that yes, it would be great if Little Printer could do that and it may well be able to do that someday, but in the meantime, look at the awesome things it does RIGHT NOW! And every now and then it’s because there’s actually a technical glitch (often to do with connecting to the owner’s internet router) and we do the best we can remotely to troubleshoot and try to get the Little Printer and his/her owner humming along together as quickly as possible. That’s what Fraser and I have mostly been doing. Fraser is also busily keeping the BERG Cloud blog updated with fresh content. (That’s me practicing lingo for my next career as a social media consultant. Seriously, though, it’s good. You should read that blog too.)

Last but most definitely not least, Helen is heroically defending us from suppliers whose customer service – to put it mildly – leaves something to be desired. At least we’re learning a good lesson in what not to do when you’re providing customer service. She’s also doing her usual bang-up job of making sure that all the pounds and pence are accounted for and slotted in exactly where they should go.

We’re having the first proper grey, rainy day that we’ve had in weeks, but in lieu of sunshine, we all had free cake. Which was nice.

I think that’s it from our little corner of Shoreditch. Have a good week wherever you are!

This week you find us in a hot and humid London. Rumours of thunder and lightening abound, and as ever with the weather around the city, there’s disagreement as to whether we really had a storm last night or some people just have an overactive imagination. Last time I checked it was raining frogs – it’s not my fault people were too busy with ‘computers’ to see it for themselves.

There’s a lot of people in the studio this week, all hands on deck on the following projects:

Sinawava: Charlie / Mark / Joe / Laurence / Nick / Saar / Alex

Chaco: Daniel / Neil / Jack

Customer Service: Fraser / Kari / Helen

Little Printer: Phil G / Alice / Adam / Denise / Nick

Finance: Helen / Matt

Fulfilment: Helen / Andy / Matt

Birthday: Andy

Keen eyed readers will spot a few people working on multiple projects, dashing from one to the other like the kids that used to appear in both sides of those long, long school photos. I’d better go before one whizzes past and all the papers on my desk swirl off into the middle distance.

Week 424, we are in you.