New Media Mantra

Our good friends over at ecocr have been picked to visit Silicon Valley: 

Manchester-based web 2.0 start-up, edocr, has been selected to join a showcase of UK internet talent visiting California this month to meet potential US funders.
 
Dubbed the new ‘YouTube for pdfs’, edocr allows users to upload and share documents online. It is one of just 20 UK companies picked to attend the seven-day Web Mission 2008 - and the only one to make the cut from the North West of England.
Web Mission 2008 takes place between 19 and 25 April in San Francisco and is designed to put start-up companies in front of Silicon Valley’s leading innovators, funders and backers and help them secure US publicity.
edocr creator and entrepreneur, Manoj Ranaweera, who is originally from Sri Lanka, set up his company 12 months ago as a way for businesses to post, share and search for pdf documents.
Once uploaded, edocr generates a thumbnail and flash document that can be embedded onto corporate websites, blogs or e-zines. Other users can then interact with documents through commenting, ranking, tagging or book marking.
Ranaweera believes Silicon Valley is still very important to technology companies because it is home to a risk culture that nowhere else in the world has managed to replicate.
 
“This event will bring significant publicity to edocr, but more than anything else it will fast track the release of edocr version 2, enabling us to make revenue from the product,” he says.
 
“The next version of edocr will allow companies and professionals to sell documents, promote documents and obtain significant intelligence for lead generation, which are all revenue contributing.”
From day one, having access to the brightest technological minds to help grow edocr has been a critical part of the plan for Ranaweera who chose Daresbury Science & Innovation Campus in Cheshire to base the company and sought the involvement of the North West’s most prominent web innovators, including Rhys Jones who recently sold his second company, e-invoicing company, accountis, for £5m, and Mike Carter and Chris Haslam who founded Ixis, an IT, web development and hosting company.
 
The decision to base edocr at the Daresbury Campus quickly reaped rewards for the company, thanks the campus’s work to give resident organisations access to networks of funders, backers, advisers and peers from different technological sectors throughout the world. Daresbury Science & Innovation Campus, along with NASDAQ-listed technology solutions company, Sun Microsystems, have also become users and sponsors of edocr.
Ranaweera hopes to follow in the footsteps of fellow Manchester internet company, Yuuguu, which became one of the fastest-growing web 2.0 companies in the world last year after it launched on the west coast of America in September 2007.
“The West Coast is the centre of the web 2.0 universe,” says Yuuguu’s CEO and co-founder, Anish Kapoor. “For us there was no better place to launch. Meeting with many of the most influential decision makers and innovators in the technology sector and getting great press in the US has been our springboard to success.”
“Yuuguu has been a great inspiration to us and we’re excited by the prospect of flying the flag for web 2.0 innovation in the North West,” says Ranaweera.
 
Former Dragons’ Den dragon and technology investor Doug Richard was one of the judges selecting companies to attend the Mission. Richard said of this year's selections: “Some of these companies are as good as anything coming out of the Valley.”
To be picked, businesses had to be innovative; have two years' trading history or compelling early-stage potential; demonstrate some commitment to sustainable business practices and be ready to do business in the US or be potentially attractive to US investors.

Have you ever wondered that? We’re exposed to so much “Design” these days, it seems that for the most part, expectations are pretty high, but not always closely followed by clear understanding of what “Good” design actually is.

I’m on shaky ground here, I know.  For openers, I’m using the word “Good” in the title and lets face it, if anyone wants to get into subject / object dualism, I’m screwed – but bear with me.
I’m going to list two examples of design, which to me are near perfect solutions, because they have something in common.

 
Photo: (c) flickr.com/people/bru

1.    The Starck Lemon Squeezer
The problem which this piece of design is solving is this – “How do I extract the juice from citrus fruit”. Not the most exciting problem to solve, but oh how it was solved! Look at the form of this and try to simplify it. Not possible!

2.    The humble Pencil
Like all excellence in design, the pencil is designed to do one thing very, very well. It’s simple and to me, beautiful. Stick a rubber on the other end if you must.

What do they have in common?

Simplicity. It would be very, very hard to simplify either of them without rendering them non-functional. It looks childishly simple, doesn’t it?

In hindsight.

But of course, that’s the trick with design. Getting to the beautiful, efficient simplicity from the mess of conflicting agenda, functionality requirements and the wishes of the dreaded committee.

Einstein said “solutions to problems should be as simple as possible, but no simpler” and he had a point. Picture the lemon squeezer with one less leg, or the pencil without the wood..

We made a site live today, http://www.eco-environments.co.uk.

From start to finish, the project took 4 weeks or 2 weeks if you forget the time we were waiting for approvals at various stages.

  

The BBC have featured our interactive Liverpool skyline project, MyLiverpoolSkyline.com on the new flagship Liverpool 08 site.

Cool :)

I got back from a snowboarding trip to Morzine a couple of weeks ago.

I’d been looking forward to it, and in particular, getting to do “The Satellite Run” on a powder day again. Its been 2 years since I first experienced the childlike joy of floating down this legendary off pister so I was perhaps a little… over-enthusiastic.

Well, 30 seconds in, I managed to dig the nose of my board into the powder and perform an involuntary double front somersault – fairly spectacular, I’m sure.

On the first rotation, I managed to take my full weight on my back leg which hit the deck at about 30mph and compressed with a nice, ligamenty squelch.

A torn medial meniscus, no less.

2 weeks later, the limp is getting better and I find out tomorrow whether I get the joys of an arthroscopy or not.

 

Science fiction fans among you will like this one.. You’ll no doubt be familiar with the way Minority Report, The Matrixes and Perhaps even Vernor Vinge are treating interfaces.

Immersive but also on demand – in the future, we will not be constrained by clunky screens (according the these visions anyway..).

Imagine being able to simply look at an object to Google it. Imagine being able to private message someone by looking at them. Or call up their linked in or Facebook profile by looking at them.

Impossible?

Odds are you’re carrying a computer in your pocket which is more powerful than your desktop was 5 years ago. Your phone is already capable of wireless comms, right?

The main problem is display.

University of Washington have just made a breakthrough that is taking us very strongly into this future.

 

 In short, this is a contact lens which contains a circuit and a number of LEDs - a rudimentary display. All it needs is power and theyre working on that.

Just got a new sign for the office. Mark at Phlex Imaging sorted it out for us.

Lovely :)

  

Brighten up your office with this festive fireplace

For all our friends this holiday season we made a festive screensaver. You can turn your computer into a warm glowing fireplace.

Like so:

 

Neat huh, if a little kitch.. 

You can get it here: http://christmas.glow-internet.com