Customer - Toolquip Marketing & Sales
Toronto, ON, Canada
You can see Aaron getting his coffee at Tim Hortons in the morning, while he's driving right past the exit on his way back from work on the 401 from Toronto.
See - Toolquip Agency Ltd.
Customer - Toolquip Marketing & Sales
Toronto, ON, Canada
See - Toolquip Intranet
Customer - Toolquip Marketing & Sales
Toronto, ON, Canada
See - Toolquip Intranet
We co-organized the Media in Transition 2007 Conference (MIT 06), hosted in Munich, Germany, discussing the structural transition in the media industry - how the Internet is modifying the way media is produced, distributed and consumed.
Partial attendance list: Fraunhofer Institute (IDMT), Django Project, Last.fm, Magnatune, Netlog, Creative Commons, GEMA, Social Computing Magazine, Intent Media, INSEAD ... see: Media in Transition 2007 Conference
We co-organized the Media in Transition 2006 Conference (MIT 06), hosted in Munich, Germany, discussing the structural transition in the media industry - how the Internet is modifying the way media is produced, distributed and consumed.
Partial attendance list: Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, Amazon, Last.fm, Magnatune, Torchbox, Bloombox.tv, GEMA, Eurosport, K7! Records ... see: Media in Transition 2006 Conference
(Partial list of speakers - from left to right: Tom Dyson, John Buckman, Matthias Koehler, Chris Dumke, Simon Willison, Bjoern Behrendt, Martin Stiksel, Ibrahim Evsan, Joachim Graf) - BTW: ALL of these guys are Entrepreneurs!!!
The new Oszillation Records Site includes a Ruby on Rails backend and MySQL database. Further, it includes Webstandards, such as CSS/ XHTML and new features like AJAX.
Web Link: Version 4.0 Oszillation Records
This updated version of the site is an innovation in two regards (see Oszillation): the site has a completely CSS driven layout, complying with the Web Standards initiative. There is a stylesheet-switcher visible on the left upper corner. It is possible to switch between text, print and web versions, because all styling and graphics are in the CSS file, while the XHTML 1.0 files only carry content. Further, there is a section called "Artist Room" where CSS is pushed to the limit with DHTML windowing in a fullscreen version. Other techniques applied include Dave Shea's (mezzoblue.com) "CSS Sprites", Zeldman's (zeldman.com) "CSS style-switcher" and a DHTML navigation that degrades gracefully as a list in older browsers or wireless devices.
The other innovation is that the web site is driven out of a custom-built XML content management system, last implemented for Dordan Mechanical (see below). Authors drop tags from an available list into a graphical editor. These XML source files contain information for multi-language support, content area in final web site, title and search engine information and final page content. A master sitemap file (sitemap.xml) controls allowed entry fields, while the backing XML schema (site.xsd) controls content creation. The site navigation is later on generated automatically using the fields in the sitemap file. The final site is generated from a central XSLT script, which assembles all sites including the site navigation. All XML files reside on a central FTP location where authors access source files.
Matthias, head of Oszillation Records, liked the whole thing very much: it loads damn quick, you can view it on any device, site update is easy, your not stuck into some content management system's external restrictions, allows for a centralized workflow. He's happy - next client!
Werkflow Inc. was the result of a two-hour brainstorming session with Werkflow's owner Christina Strack. We tried identifying areas of strengths and weaknesses in performance. The main strengths emerged being organizational skills and handling people, as well as an awareness for critical elements in a sequence of actions. We settled for the name "Werkflow" and found the Domain Address werkflow.net, which is suitable for a Systems Integrator handling networking issues. The name suggests thinking in context of the chain of actions and the chain of command, while the red "e" provides the context to information technology. Christina's customer's love the concept. She's happy - we're happy!
Dordan Mechanical Ltd. is an XML-driven web content solution. Altova XML Spy acts as a Content Management System. The information structure of the site content is defined in an XML Schema. Authoring is accomplished by dropping pre-defined tags from the XML Schema into the graphical authoring editor. The site is dynamically built using XSLT. Site content is accessed from a secure centralized web repository for editing and the generated web site is finally published to a web server. The solution makes use of XML technologies such as XHTML, SVG, CSS, XML Schema and XSLT. Further, Macromedia Flash MX Content and CGI Scripts are generated from XML source documents.
The proposal of the GVCA web solution makes use of the Content Management client from Dordan Mechanical. However, the XML processing is accomplished using the XML application framework Cocoon from the Apache Software Foundation. Cocoon also aggregates information called from external XML Web Services such as Moreover News Feeds, or Amazon Web Services. Furthermore, HP Semantic Lab's Jena RDF framework is used by calling RDF queries from Cocoon's pipeline as XML over HTTP. HP's Joseki RDF Server acts as the front end to retrieve queries from Jena's virtual layer over MySQL. This architecture was used successfully in the building of the Content Management Solution of the Seattle Law School, which was presented at the recent XML World Europe conference. The graphical front-end makes heavy use of CSS by generating the visual layout completely out of the site stylesheet. Eric Meyer's CSS Zengarden was used as a reference.
We developed a minimalist Bauhaus inspired Logo for the KW Linux User group - www.kwlug.org
Definiens AG's Knowledge Management product PolyMind (PolyMind was phased out in 2005) was initially targeted as a Question-Answering System for the financial domain. PolyMind processes natural language queries and retrieves matching documents. PolyMind is a Java based solution using a semantic network (ontology) as a configuration file for search in document collections. Our contribution to the development of PolyMind is the construction of a large financial ontology called EconomyNet based on the Reuters 21578 test collection corpus. The ontology was merged with Princeton WordNet. The CIA Factbook and Bloomberg's financial glossary, as well as macroeconomic and financial modeling theory were used as additional references. EconomyNet is constructed in a XML data format using a Java client authoring editor. PolyMind scored equal on the benchmark performed by Accenture with IBM's Intelligent Miner and Autonomy. Definiens AG is a recent artificial intelligence start-up company founded by IBM's Nobel Laureate Prof. Gerd Binnig and a research team composed of former IBM employees. Naturally PolyMind is now included in the IBM life sciences suite.
Blockbeat Music was a concept for a Online Music Portal offering MP3 downloads, internet radio, streaming, education and virtual studio technology. After securing Evosonic radio's staff and receiving a letter of intent for the official youth portal of Germany's former leading political party www.YoungNet.de a business plan was conceived. Bertelsmann Ventures made a Venture Capital funding offer. The portal was to be aligned with other BMG online media activities. Finally seed capital financing from Feedback Media venture capital was secured in 1999 and the programming of the platform was initiated. After the CEO of the project resigned the team broke up and the project was terminated in early 2000.
Our contribution included being part of a team of three founders: Idea generation, market analysis, statistics, business plan development, internationalization for European and US market, branding, networking.
Oszillation Records web solution was an experiment on testing the limits of browser technologies. At first a fullscreen modus DHTML windowing solution was developed using Dan Steinman's DynAPI library. The solution proved to be to unstable across different browsers. So a fullscreen modus based solution with multiple windowing using popup-browser windows and Javascript was developed. The key was using invisible frames that would call new popup windows from a Java navigation menu. The main window would maintain a current count of the open windows and keep them visible until the user chooses to exit the fullscreen modus. The solution makes use of Java for media player applets and navigation applets. PHP and MySQL were used for the forums. The non-fullscreen version of the site uses a layout inspired after Alias Wavefront's former web site with a navigation on the right side. The Flash presentation of Oszillation Records shows pictures and music content from the BladeNight 2001 city skating event, where mobile sound-wagons were playing music from the label along with a crowd of 30000 people on every Monday during the summer.
The Institute for International Economics at University of Munich publishing solution included a web site and course materials, journal articles. The web presence won the third best web site from all Institutes at the Economics faculty, although other Institutes received larger budgets for their PR and publishing needs. The navigation was substantially modified allowing only up to seven categories of entry points. The institute staff was given a uniform presentation template, covering all areas of their CV. Content was re-written according to the new categories in place and translated to offer two versions in German / English to visitors.
Course materials and journal articles were constructed using the TEX publishing and documentation language and later transformed to Postscript and Acrobat. The Institute managed the transition from using MS Word for all their publishing needs to using TEX during the time span of a half a year. Now it is common practice for researchers to write joint documents, collaborating with colleagues across the globe without experiencing loss of formatting, or information.
The Institute's main research activity is a ambitious project analyzing foreign direct investment in Eastern Europe from Germany and Austria. A web-based data entry software solution was developed using Perl and MySQL to record survey data. A separate web site was developed to accommodate the needs of the research team. Furthermore, data mining activity was performed on the extensive data set using mostly SPSS Syntax Scripts. The research project resulted in the first microeconomic theory on barter networks, published in American Economic Review and as a book at MIT Press.
