Day 1
We made the mission to pick up our badges and battle the giant lines at the convention centre. Surprisingly the lines were short and we were simply in and out. I did get to make an awesome face for my badge.

Our first day opened with one of my favourite parties of SXSW,  Food Tech connect cocktails.  This event brought together folks from all over the world in food, open data, and technology to chat, mingle, and hopefully find situations to work together. (Oh yeah, and the empanadas were amazing.)
The rest of the night was quiet (lesson #1 of SXSW: don’t blow it on the first day) we ended up in an Irish pub listening to covers of awesome songs done on the harp.

Day 2
Day 2 kicked off just like I would expect for SXSW, with a party. The North of 41 Canadian Geek Event by Rogers Media brought out the Canadian technology innovators to have a bite, connect, and build more opportunity for Canadian companies and organizations. And they had a rocking Photo Booth. Big thanks to @michellekostya and @keithmcarthur.

Next up was the Elon Musk keynote and the lines were around the convention centre. Luckily through some fancy talking we found ourselves in the exhibit hall and seated waiting for Elon Musk to come on. Great interview, he spoke primarily about SpaceX (since the dragon is currently docked to the ISS), and discussed the snappy interchange with the New York post over the new Tesla sedan.

Al Gore had an interview next to talk about his new book, so we hung out in our seats for that to start. It’s always awesome to see Al Gore speak.
The Omni was our next destination after that to catch a panel moderated by Bruce Mau’s Hunter Tura. The panel discussed design for the aging world, as the aging population is going to start to to be a driving force behind design and innovation. After such an awesome panel by Bruce Mau it was a given that we would head to their party and continue the Canadian theme. Hush studios co-hosted the event, and there is an amazing amount of experience between these two agencies. I certainly did my best to absorb it all.
After that event, Danielle from Food Tech Connect was hosting an innovators’ dinner with some of the brightest minds in technology and food. We had the most amazing dinner and talked open data, education, and food with the likes of Tim O’Reilly, Danielle Gould, and Will Turnage. I’m honoured to have been invited and to have been a part of such great conversation.

Finally we crossed paths with the HootSuite team after missing the Hoot Bus many many times.

So it’s been a busy two days (understatement!) I can’t wait to see what today, tomorrow and next week throws our way.

Challenges and Lessons Learned.

We thrive on new challenges at bv02, and the Arctic Watch Beluga Cam live stream was one of those new challenges. So new, in fact, that we had to create a technical solution to address some very specific issues we, and the industry, have had little chance to grapple with: an extremely remote Northern location, cameras that would be placed on a tower in the middle of an inlet and the need for a self-contained power source. Given the timeframe, prototyping was limited, and a lot of the work was dependent on factors beyond our control: satellites in orbit being one, and Mother Nature being the other.

Satellite dish alignment.

Being so far up north, we needed to be very accurate to align the satellite dish. There are many satellites in the northern sky, so to ensure transmission works, alignment has to be accurate down to the tenth of a degree. It’s especially challenging with very little experience with it. We knew we’d need specialized tools, since the basic compass we have wouldn’t work that far north. A little hunting unearthed the ANIK2 satellite and its Azimuth and Beam angle. We calculated azimuth* with a GPS, and used a inclinometer app to calculate the angle of the dish. Then using an accuracy tool (and lots of trial and error) we were able to get a strong connection to the dish.

Predicting Nature

When we got to the Cunningham Inlet, the whales hadn’t arrived in the bay yet. Due to the warm weather, the bay was still completely packed with sea ice, which prevented the whales from coming. We had to take a gamble to get the hardware set up, and pick what we thought would be the most likely location for the whales to arrive, based on previous years’ experience. Much to our surprise, as we were setting up the first tower, a few whales poked their heads up next to us. Success! Unfortunately, the bad weather continued and more sea ice was pushed into the bay. This kept the whales away for what seemed like an eternity (accurately, it was closer to 4 or 5 days) but when you’re itching to get something up and running, it feels like forever.

Weather

I’ve learned to expect anything in the north, but I certainly wasn’t ready for what the Northwest Passage had in store for us. The weather started to turn during our last week at Arctic Watch and the system wasn’t up and running yet; I managed to get an email out to the team that the weather was deteriorating fast and that I might be out of contact for a while .

To give an idea of what we were dealing with, in the course of a few days the weather went from sunny and clear to snowstorms with winds gusting up to 80KM/h. This all peaked after 2 to 3 days of extremely high winds and swells when our installation was torn from its moorings and swept into the Arctic Ocean by the wind. To give some perspective, the installation weighed well over a ton.

We suited up in drysuits and lifejackets ready to wade out 500m into the tides to see what, if anything, of our tower was left. At the site, we only managed to recover the batteries and satellite tower. The remaining hardware washed up around 3km away on the other shore of the bay a few days later.

What We Learned

When we first started work on this project, we knew we were building something that had never been tried before, much less implemented successfully. We took some chances and engaged in a lot of trial and error before we got to launch. Despite all of the testing in controlled environments, we were faced with environmental factors that were simply out of our control. While we knew that the cold and potential weather concerns would impact different variables, we couldn’t have foreseen the extent to which they impacted the hardware.

So this time, creating in the real world dealt us a much different hand than we had expected. We’ll be taking what we learned and using it to iterate an even better, more weather resistant solution for next year. We’ll make sure to keep you posted on what we learn.

*Azimuth is the number of degrees from true north that the satellite was located, not to be confused with the degrees of the beam angle.  Think of it this way: if you were turning in a circle, the azimuth would be how far you were turning away from true north.

Matt Arctic Watch Blog from bv02 on Vimeo.

Visitors to the Arctic Watch Wilderness Lodge get to experience a unique gathering of over 200 beluga whales, as they converge in the Cunningham Inlet to play and socialize.  It’s an amazing thing to see, and we wanted to help people experience it, regardless of their location.

Working with the Canadian Museum of Nature and Arctic Watch Wilderness Lodge, bv02 worked to create a technical solution that would allow a live video feed to be streamed over the internet and broadcast in the Museum of Nature’s Whales exhibit.  We were up against several specific technical issues, but through the use of a solar-powered satellite, a video streaming server and established systems, we were able to overcome the inherent challenges in internet broadcasting from the Arctic.

However, one variable that no amount of preparation could have controlled was the weather.  After we had successfully set up the hardware installation, which consisted of three interdependent towers to support the required technology, the weather deteriorated rapidly.  It went from sunny with highs of 20 degrees to snowstorms with winds gusting up to 80KM/h.  When we went to check on the hardware after the storms had passed, all we found remaining were some batteries and the lone satellite dish.

Although the hardware fell victim to the storm, we were able to capture some video of the belugas beforehand, and that video can be seen online on the Museum of Nature’s website.  Right now, we’re working on reiterating the hardware to better withstand the wilderness, with a few goals in mind: we’re aiming to successfully live stream the beluga whales in 2013, as well as set up a similar installation to capture and stream the caribou runs.

Going forward, this type of installation could allow unprecedented access to amazing wildlife and wilderness events.  Streaming video of these events can facilitate both education and conservation efforts by bringing people closer to the natural wonders in remote locations.

The bv02 creative digest is a compilation of thoughts, links, musings, and inspiration that has caught the eye of our creative team over the past week. A combined effort from Matt Davidson (New Media), Paul Wright (User Experience), Matt Ernst and Daniel Bianchi (Creative)

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UX discussion of the week

The big UX news this week was the Jakob Nielsen, longtime web usability expert declared that you should, “Build a separate mobile-optimized site if you can afford it”. This set off a fierce storm on Twitter, especially among proponents of mobile-first and responsive web design who argue that except for in certain extraordinary situations you should do the exact opposite. Open-web evangelist Bruce Lawson leans toward that camp, arguing on Smashing Magazine that, We Shouldn’t Make Separate Mobile Websites and that (I’m paraphrasing heavily here):

• we’ve been there before on the web and maintaining two sites can lead to out-dated and/or missing content
• we can’t always check for mobile users and redirect them in a reliable, future-friendly way
• some mobile users want the full context/experience (we don’t always know their browsing context – perhaps they’re at home, on fast internet)
• we shouldn’t be arbitrarily splitting users along this “mobile” line. The line is blurry and will only get more so in the future.

A good read on an important subject for web makers and users.

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Photo of the week

Amazing stereographic (think tiny planet) photo that captures all four dimensions. You can see the day and night pass in the same photo. Breathtaking.

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Video of the week

Dumt & Farligt – Phantom Flex Highlights

You’d think ultra slow motion videos are a little passe, but these guys really did something different, and the video kept me totally engaged for the entire 5 minutes. Basically, they set up the most dangerous things they could do inside/around a house and filmed it all with a Phantom high speed video camera – beautiful destruction ensues.

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Illustration

The Star Wars Day is coming and the illustration of this week in a series of posters called “Star Wars Identities”. A great mosaic that uses elements from the movie to compound each character. Well done!

Check all posters here

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Typography of the week

While Adelle is a slab serif typeface conceived specifically for intensive editorial use, mainly in newspapers and magazines, its personality and flexibility make it a real multiple-purpose typeface. The unobtrusive appearance, excellent texture and slightly dark color allow it to behave flawlessly in continuous text setting, even in the most demanding editorial applications. Its energetic character, so inherent to slab serif fonts, becomes evident as the typeface is used for subheadings and headlines.

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Blog post of the week

“Startups, this is how design works” is a very instructive guide for non-designers. This very inspired post by Wells Riley leverages the importance of design and how it contributes to solve problems with originality and creativity. A definite must-read.

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Website of the week

How many slaves work for you? That is a hard question to ask maybe because you have never thought about this before.

The Slavery Footprint website does a great job raising awareness to this theme by helping people to find the answer in a very appealing and interactive way.

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Vol: 001 | Issue: 007

The bv02 creative digest is a compilation of thoughts, links, musings, and inspiration that has caught the eye of our creative team over the past week. A combined effort from Matt Davidson (New Media), Paul Wright (User Experience), Matt Ernst and Daniel Bianchi (Creative)

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UX discussion of the week

In Multi-Device Layout Patterns, Luke Wroblewskii takes us through multiple layout patterns used in responsive web design and how many designers are choosing to reflow content across device sizes. He argues that “as more designers embrace this technique, we’re not only seeing a lot of innovation but the emergence of clear patterns as well.” This is an important topic for all parties involved in web design, especially content and business strategy departments. Treating content as modular blocks and thinking about how that small block fits into the overall page hierarchy is the only way to ensure that the most important content gets seen by the majority of your users. Just sliding the sidebar underneath the main content doesn’t suffice if that sidebar has content important to the site (and business’) functioning like calls to action, navigation and advertising.

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Photo of the week

Pulpit Rock in Norway

Just to give everyone a bit of wanderlust, this weeks photo comes from the fjords of finland and the breathtaking views on The Pulpit Rock.

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Video of the week

Beauty is Embarrassing – A trailer for a documentary that takes us into the mind of visionary creative Wayne White. Wayne started his career as a cartoonist, but rose to fame as the set/puppet designer for PeeWee Herman. Looking inside the mind of a creative such as Wayne helps us all see how we can be a little more creative.

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Typography of the week

Helvetica, a font we all know and love is actually just a digital interpretation of a classic pre-digital font. Type designer Christian Schwartz has newly restored the origitral, Neue Haas Grotesk in digital form. Although the differences may seem suble they have some pretty big impact shen compared to Helvetica Neue.

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Website of the week

Shopify - I have a business idea

Shopify recently created a landing page that allows potential Shopify customers how to move through the stages of business development. (Ultimately ending with opening your Shopify store) The site is super dynamic and interactive, and may be one of the most bullet-proof implementations of CSS/JS/HTML5 that I have ever seen. The team over at Shopify has also published a how-to for the page that explains their tactics and techniques for page development. I think its high time for an all city developer challenge.

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Went to a panel where Al Gore and Sean Parker were discussing social media and the democratic process. Both firmly believe that SM is the first step towards reforming the democratic process in the US and helping remove control of the country from big corporations or lobby groups.

Met Gary Vaynerchuck on 6th street (without the entourage) nice to see how down to earth he is. I ended up going to a panel later where Gary was talking with Tim Ferris, Chase Jarvis, JR Johnson, and Tony Conrad about venture capitalism, high profile advisors, and how to survive the startup/advisor relationship.

Got to talk video and opportunity with the Bui brothers who were just featured in Vimeo video school.

Went for a ride in the HootSuite bus, and got to talk social with Matt Switzer about business and HootSuite.

Spent a day in sessions where I went from Tim O’Reilly, to Ray Kurzweil, to Biz Stone, to Al Gore. What a brain explosion.

Met all kinds of fantastic and awesome folks. Had dinner and talked shop with some of the brightest minds in the business, making me realize bv02 is on the bleeding edge of what we are doing with culture, transit, and the web.

Seriously though. Al Gore! WTF.

It all started with Bio-hacking from Dan Wetmore of Sheepdog Sciences. Bio-hacking is a process which makes your mind sharper and faster. Using computers, electronic stimulation, and training, you can literally increase your IQ, and ability to get into a flow state.

Our good friend Mike Lee of StudioFeast gave a panel talking about his efforts to create an app to break down the barriers of the kitchen and help everyone learn to cook fantastic food.

I had the chance to see a panel narrated by Jimmy Fallon about how real world data is being collected by companies like Nike and EA and how they are using it to change the world of their customers (for the better). And I scored a Nike Fuel band (yet to be released in Canada)

Andrew and I even popped into a session where the CEO of dropbox was being interviewed about what makes them a differentiator in such a viscious marketplace (hint: Its how fantastic their user experience is)

That pretty much sums up my panel experience so far, but panels are really a pretty small part of SXSW. There are so many amazing events, like the Bond Influence event where Frank Warren of Postsecret talked about his project, or the Cheezburger party where we were given RFID tags which instantly tagged us in whatever photos of us were taken on Facebook.

The best part of all of this though: Its only just begun. Theres still 2 more days of awesome to go.

Here is a couple photos I snapped over the weekend:

The bv02 creative digest is a compilation of thoughts, links, musings, and inspiration that has caught the eye of our creative team over the past week. A combined effort from Matt Davidson (New Media), Paul Wright (User Experience), Matt Ernst and Daniel Bianchi (Creative)

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bv02 project sneak peek

Project sneak peek of the week is a site that is currently in the development stage of its life cycle. Heritage Passages is an interactive website that tells the story through a series of intertwined narratives of how the Bytown locks shaped the city of Ottawa. HyperLab and Carleton Immersive Media Studio provided some amazing 3D renderings from their detailed architectural models of the locks and associated buildings that are used throughout the site.

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Industry news of the week

The new Todo application called Clear has launched and it’s making lists and todos fun again!

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UX news this week

UX Yoda twitter account is a dandy. Recent tweet: “Harder to destroy a design if emotionally attached to it you become. And destroy it you must if it fails.”

Thinking about touch? Check out .Net Magazine’s article about designing for touch. “Great mobile designs do more than shoehorn themselves into tiny screens: they make way for fingers and thumbs, accommodating the wayward taps of our clumsy digits. The physicality of handheld interfaces take designers beyond the conventions of visual and information design‚ and into the territory of industrial design. With touchscreens there are real ergonomics at stake. It’s not just how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand.”

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Inspiration of the week

http://htmlandcssbook.com/buy/ – beautiful book about learning css and html

http://patterntap.com/ – long standing inspiration site relaunched as 2.0.

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Illustration of the week

That’s a very nice work by “El Grand Chamaco”. The artist uses only iPhone to create these amazing illustrations. First he uses Google search app (http://www.google.ca/mobile/google-mobile-app/) to find the right image, then he uses Brushes (http://www.brushesapp.com/) to draw over the picture. Finally, he uses Instagram (http://www.instagr.am/) to add some effects and voilà!

Check this gallery to see some iPhone illustrations: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Bad-Finger/3053435

About the Artist
Grand Chamaco was born in 1982, in Los Ramones, a municipality of the State of Nuevo Leon, in Mexico. He says he first learned to draw then he learned to write.

To know more about this talented artist, visit his website http://www.grandchamaco.com/

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Photo of the week

Photo inspiration of the week is of people watching “The Clock” a video art piece on display at the National Gallery of Canada. The Clock is a 24 hour film that looks at our perceptions of time in modern cinema. See more about The Clock here

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Video of the week

Another Super Bowl video this week from Chrysler; This video literally took my breath away. Produced by Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, the video is a rallying cry for America featuring Clint Eastwood. The bit compiled photos and video of supposed real life americans going about their day to day. Solidifying the purpose of this video, some real emotion is evoked by Clint’s narration (though that may happen even without the video overlay).
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Web-font pick of the week

Proxima Nova by Mark Simonson Studio is a very versitile family that looks great as body copy or headings and everything in between. Lots of weights, widths and options with 42 fonts in this family.

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Gear:

We primarily shoot with Digital SLR cameras. After breaking a handful of expensive bodies, we settled on the Canon 550D, which balances video quality and price quite nicely.

For interviews we always shoot prime lenses, switching between the Canon nifty fifty, and the Sigma 30mm 1.4

All of our audio is recorded separately on a Zoom H4n using Sony Lavalier microphones. This ensures high quality, noise free recording.

And of course transportation. All of our gear is transported using Pelican 1510 cases. These cases have taken us from the heat of Silicon Valley, to the ice and snow above the Arctic Circle.

We light all of our travel shots with the Kino Flow DIVA light 401 kit. This allows for a wide even portable light source, that can be broken down quickly without damaging the bulbs.

For synching audio and video we have a purpose built iPad app called Syncslate. This gives us timed beats and their matching numbers in the video to make it easy to match up. You can download Syncslate here

The Shoot

Our interview setup is fairly straightforward, but has many variables. Cameras are set for minimal depth of field, so ensuring the talent is in focus in a serious job. All audio is recorded separately, so syncing must be done in post.

Talent is set up beside each other at an angle, and both cameras are set with the same lens to focus on the subject. Introductions and establishing shots will be recorded after the interview. The location of the light is also fluid, dependant on the lighting of the room, depth of the background etc.

On Thursday, November 3rd, join host Darren Pang at LAGO bar and enjoy the martini sampling station, see art from local artists (rumour has it I might even put together some work for the show), and bid on some fantastic silent auction items.

Tickets can be purchased online at martinimadness.ca or send me an email – matt.davidson@bv02.com.