Blog posts from November 2012

It’s Friday. I wasn’t expecting that… It’s been a busy week. We’ve got demos any minute and so these are some links to give you a five minute break from your work too.

This week, Eddie shared a link to a game created for the Norwegian milk company, Litago, which uses players photographs to create playable platforming levels.

Andy shared a link ‘in equal parts OMG and WTF'; the papers selection for this years’s SIGGRAPH:

James found this Warner Brother’s site hiding at the back of the internet attic.

Phil G shared a Sound Slice, made by Adrian Holovaty, who (co)created Django, and ChicagoCrime.org and EveryBlock. A smooth interface, it lets you annotate guitar videos to help you learn new songs.

And Saar shared this a little while ago, but I’ve only just had time to watch it. Dumb ways to die.

I should to go. My head’s on fire. Have a great weekend.

It’s the three hundred and eighty ninth week since BERG began. Simon Pearson is down to do weeknotes but he is away with Matt Webb at Future London demoing Little Printer so I have swapped with him. Matt Jones is still away on paternity leave looking after two tiny humans. Andy is back after his stint of paternity leave and the studio also welcomes Kari who is back after what seems like a very long time away after her case of The Babies.

By project, this week is as follows:

Paiute work continues. Pawel has done some very slick looking graphics for it, Denise even did a weird squeal when she saw them (a pretty good sign). Jack continues to shepherd this project to it’s conclusion which I hope won’t be too soon because that possibly means Pav will have to go on to another contract in another place. And if Pav goes then who is going to get the pardy started?

BERG Cloud and Little Printer are very close to shipping indeed. I am putting the final flourishes to the front-end, James is getting his head into logging for the many bridges that will soon be connecting, Simon is coordinating factories and shipping containers, Helen and Kari are preparing themselves to give the best damned customer service this side of Newspaper Club, Alex is sending me the kind of ‘could this be two pixels lower, please, sorry, thanks’ emails that I know mean our remote site is going to look really good.
Nick is lining up interviewees for the position of The Next James Darling. If you think you fill this spot, head over here for more information.

Neil (now ships with custom BERG shop coat) is working on Auryn with studio friend Greg Borenstein in New York. This involves a lot of waving things at screens, much to my entertainment.

Director of Consulting, Mark Cridge, is taking care of business. He continues to show the office how the big boys do it in an array of shirt jumper combos and the occasional blazer. I keep trying to call his bluff and see if he is wearing a shumper, but as yet his shirts remain gloriously unstitched to his jumpers. What a pro.

Saguaro is beginning to look like a real thing which is lovely to see. Phil is implementing Alex’s design, the writing continues apace, all presided over by Matt Walton.

Sinawava is in the final push. Joe is doing a lot of gleeful dancing which I keep trying to capture a GIF of, but he’s too damn fast. Leo and Nick are finishing off the software, and Paul South continues to astonish with the things he pulls out of the bag.

Matt Thomas, Ollie Wright and Eddie Shannon are still grafting on Lamotte. There is a lot of very charming character design happening at that end of the room, which I enjoy watching evolve.

As always then, a busy studio.

Welcome to Friday Links. Today I am going to provide the links with wild assertions about what bigger categories of BERG interest they fit in.

Internet of Things Meta Watch

As the concept of Internet of Things continues to seep into more people’s brains (A waiting list of 57 for the next IoTLDN, with Matt Webb speaking!), naturally, the common patterns get pulled out and satirised. isittheinternetofthings.com does this well.

Music Hacking Watch

It’s been great to see Music Hack Days move from purely data driven (eg listening data) hacks to more artistic ones. My favourite meeting of the two so far has to be The Infinite JukeBox

Influencing Culture Watch

“Design is about cultural invention” is, to me, one of Jack’s founding principals of BERG. So you can imagine how excited we were to see that the new Avengers comic has Tony Stark owning a device that sounds awfully like a Little Printer.

Browser War Watch

As someone who wasn’t ‘in the business’ during the first browser wars, I’m more used to years of IE6 apathy. So watching the new browser war unfold, with adverts everywhere, very odd. But accompanying it is the commissioning of some great HTML experiments. Like Chrome Experiment’s ‘Stars’, this weeks example.

Infrastructure Hacking Watch

Any time I see a bit of software toying with massive infrastructure, I get tingles. This week’s tingle supplied by Randomized Consumerism.

Atom Watch

Shipping atoms is hard. Whilst I sat in my tower of software, watching the hardware being developed for Little Printer was a very eye opening experience. I hold a new reverence for atoms. Read about Jawbone’s process of developing Up to get a little bit of this.

3D Printing Watch

3D Printing. Proper good 3D printing.

Software Defined Radio Watch

Software Defined Radio is something that seems to rapidly moving from hobbyists to something that could be quite game changing for many products. See it’s first strides here .

‘Plussing’ Watch

We’re a big fan of Walt Disney’s ‘plussing’. So we admire this.

Toys with AI Watch

Speaking of Walt Disney… loosely… there’s a new company making some promising looking AI toys.

Have a great weekend.

There are four major projects in the studio at the moment.
There are twenty three people working hard to create beautiful and inventive products.
There has been a studio reshuffle so everyone has new neighbours.
We’ve seen exciting drawing sessions, electronic prototyping, cardboard models, coding, meetings, group lunches, wooly hats, graphics, new shoes, 3D prints, business strategies, pints, project planning, engineering, Frazzles crisps, CAD models, Lemsip, PCBs, presentations, GUIs, video games, characters illustration, information design and more.
All to a milling-machine soundtrack.
Oh, and we’ve just found out that we’ve been drinking double-strength tea.
Probably a major reason the studio such a busy and exciting place to be.

This is my first Friday links. First up is attention to detail which is something we all take very seriously.

Joe found this brief DVD extra from the excellent (and very Scottish) Brave from Pixar where they went to extraordinary levels of detail right down to the modelling of individual threads

A slightly longer example of this level of detail was picked out by James from back in the day on Wall-E.

It’s always nice to see something that we’ve put out in the world get picked up and adapted somewhere else. Timo found this library of objects inspired by our own iPad light painting.

This example even has an audio guide track to help with the painting.

Running Man from Hugo Baptista on Vimeo.

I’m writing this whilst BERG drive time plays in the background so it is fitting that two musical links tickled our fancy this week. The first found by Fraser suggests that;

“Now, for the first time in history, this compilation uses innovative digital techniques to convert historic “pictures of sound” dating back as far as the Middle Ages directly into meaningful audio.”

Not sure what that actually means but worth a look at dust-digital.com/feaster

At the other end of the spectrum the good folks at Google Creative Labs have put together another Chrome experiment so you can ‘Jam’ in real time at jamwithchrome.com. I have it on good authority that if you hold down the keys A. C. I. D. at the same time you get an 303 drum machine as an easter egg (but that may not be true).

All around us we see the cost of new technology dropping precipitously, not least with the Txtr Beagle e-reader costing a mere £8 and which Jack found recently reviewed in the Guardian.

We were really impressed until James noted that;

“The txtr beagle can be offered at such a low price because its cost will be subsidised by mobile carriers. The beagle itself won’t be sold individually; you’ll only be able to get one is by purchasing it when you sign up for a mobile phone contract on specific carriers.”

So how much does it cost really?

Finally I’m very relieved to say that even your Jeans can now get involved in Social Media.

Denise found this over at PSFK and I’m sure you will be glad to hear you can share your ‘happiness level’ featuring eight different modes to choose from – how did we ever cope until now?

We’re looking for someone to join our engineering team to work on Little Printer and BERG Cloud!

This is a full-time role in our London studio, and is primarily focused on the backend systems that power Little Printer and all other BERG Cloud products. You’ll need a strong core knowledge of Ruby on Rails, and a few other skills we’ve listed in our Stack Overflow Careers job listing.

http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/26841/backend-ruby-engineer-web-connected-physical-berg

Little Printer is the first of many ideas we want to bring to life. If you’re the kind of person who’s fascinated by the prospect of writing code not only for the Web but for actual physical objects, then we’d love to hear from you.

Email us at jobs@berglondon.com to get in touch.

This week we’ve clicked on:

The ‘two-screen’ video game ‘Forza Horizon’ and it’s partnering ‘Smartglass’ app.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/10/30/forza-horizon-smartglass-experience-app-now-available-on-windo/

App-controlled lighting from Philips.

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/48209/philips-hue-led-bulb-customises-your-homes-lighting

BUY DREAM NOW! Suidobashi Heavy Industry is offering the chance to buy a functional mecha suit.

http://suidobashijuko.jp

If this dream is yours, it’s likely to have been shaped by the long lineage of ‘Mobile Suits’ in Manga such as Gundam or Evangelion.

Cousin of The Caterpillar P-5000 Powered Work Loader in Aliens.

Which is still inspiring Halloween costumes twenty-six years later.

http://i.imgur.com/0Mh6G.jpg

We read how a Videogame God Inspired a Twitter Doppelgänger — and Resurrected His Career

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/10/ff-peter-molyneux/

Also, http://www.webe.at launch a dramatic launch video for their customisable calendars.

http://vimeo.com/51447275

Which rivals Kanye West’s ‘All of the Lights’ for title of most intense psychedelic typographic bombardment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAfFfqiYLp0

A striking reference to the title sequence of Enter The Void.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL0lNGXoP8E

And we’ll leave it at that.