On Friday, Team Rubber were involved in helping raise money for ActionAid as past of it’s Pover Tie Day initiative. The idea was simple; dress up smart for the day!
Team Rubber scrubs up pretty well, although wearing suits in summer is hot!
Archive for the ‘Events’ Category
World Cup Giant Screen in Queen Sq
Robin Greene - June 11th, 2010Just outside the Team Rubber office, there is a HUGE £80,000 screen in Queen Square, courtesy of Hyundai. They’re expecting 11,000 people, so could get a bit noisy….!
6’66″ – Sympathy For The Devil (…or how to make Powerpoint interesting)
Rory Ahern - May 26th, 2010Originally posted at Rubber Republic
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[Image courtesy of : Wendelboe on Flickr]
The *devil* in question was indeed the force of office evil that is Powerpoint, and Tom Alcott from the Social Network Company gave us a masterclass in how to keep presentations succinct, engaging and conversational while remaining in total control of your material.
His PechKucha style talk on social network analysis lasted exactly ’6 minutes & 66 seconds’ and covered everything from a crash course in social psychology, the ambiguity of what being ‘connected’ actually means to mapping the *viral* spread of information within networks.
At the heart of it was that key question: Who is the most valuable node within any social network? The ‘hub’ (the most connected individual within a community). Or the ‘broker’ (the person who bridges between two communities and therefore allows that idea to spread to new audiences)?
Finding this overlap is something we are fascinated by, as it potentially allows the conversation to evolve and new participants to join. This was also a central theme to ‘Connected’ our last Rubber Book Club mail-out which explains the various ways information travels with some very entertaining illustrations.
So all good stuff and many thanks to Tom for coming in on a very warm and humid Friday afternoon.
Incidentally if ’666′ is the number of the beast, does that ’668′ the neighbour of the beast?
Leaders’ Debate Live Blog from Bristol
Andy Parkhouse - April 22nd, 2010Politics is changing – and it’s happening right in our backyard. Follow us live blogging from the venue of today’s leadership debate, and on Twitter.
Photos from SXSW
Chris Quigley - March 14th, 2010I reckon the formula for making the most out of SXSW is the following:
(Listen + meet+drink) x share
So here you go – some sharing of mine (and Ally’s) listening and meeting and drinking from the past 3 days (in pictures)
Arcattack – singing Tesla Coils
Midnight pancakes
A conversation with Michel Gondry
Bre Pettis – Maker, hacker, inventor, and founder of Makerbot
Crash-Talk: David Gilroy from Conscious Solutions on effective selling
Adam Cardew - March 2nd, 2010A couple of weeks ago, David Gilroy from Conscious Solutions came to give a select few of us at Team Rubber a crash-talk in selling. I won’t give away any of the secrets shared with us in this post, but it focused on the different approaches to sales that his company uses. Detailing to us how his team is built in such a way to take prospects through the sales pipeline and underpinning attitudes enabling them to achieve their targets. Other, less obvious techniques (all above board of course) were equally intriguing, and those who were fortunate enough to be in the crash-talk certainly came away with heads buzzing. Even two weeks after, new ideas inside Team Rubber are still emerging from the talk and I think it’s safe to say that it really helped many of us.
Many thanks to David for taking the time to come and chat to us. Crash-talks are definitely of great use – more of the same please!
Delib’s Dialogue App makes debut at GSA webinar
Ben Witnall - February 26th, 2010We were excited this week to have the opportunity to introduce Delib’s Dialogue App to a whole bunch of US government staff at a GSA webinar. It was slightly strange talking to an audience that you can’t see or hear but I think it went well. We set up a demo especially for the occasion – check it out at http://www.dialogue-app.com/gsa-demo
You can also take a look through our slideshow if you want:
Hopefully, it got people thinking about how they can use the internet to improve their decision-making/policy processes anyway 
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The Dialogue App is another cool thing built in the open source web framework Plone.
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Prefer to spell it Dialog App? We’ve got you covered
Bath openMIC #4 – Mobile Web, HTML5 and CSS3
Robin Greene - February 12th, 2010
Yesterday, I attended the Open Mobile Innovation Camp at the innovation centre in Bath. The event was hosted by Chris Book and had talks from Giles Turnball (Freelance Journalist), Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke (both from Opera). The focus of the day revolved around the current trends in mobile app development and the tensions between Native, Web and Widget apps.
The day kicked off with tech writer Giles Turnball talking about how technology has turned the press industry upside down. He recounted tales from the 90s of infra-red modems, Palm Pilots and GoType keyboards, and being one of the first journalists to actively embrace remote reporting and email. Although initially laughed at, remote journalism is now standard and Giles encouraged us not to neglect advancing technologies, but to learn about them and look to integrate them into our businesses and working lives.
Next up was Richard Spence who ‘controversially’ spoke about non-iPhone development. He reminded us that only 8% of the mobile market is iPhone whereas 71% is browser based. Richard didn’t slag of the iPhone, on the contrary, he “thanked Apple from the bottom of his heart” and agreed with Stephen Fry’s eloquent observation:
Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?
Richard went on to give a brief history of mobile development platforms and where they are at now. J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian were all covered and commended for their recent improvements in the light of the ‘iPhone effect‘.
The final talk of the morning was from Bruce Lawson from Opera. Bruce was in jovial mood and was quick to evangelise the latest Opera Beta which claims to be the current fastest Javascript engine. Bruce championed the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices and also highlighted some of the UX and accessibility challenges that await. Bruce emphasized the importance of optimization and minimising HTTP requests. He went on to talk about future advancements in HTML5 and CSS3 and the features that the latest Opera already supports. One particular point of interest for me was the use of Media Queries to change CSS layouts dependent on screen size, without JS sniffing. Bruce finally talked about the potential of Widgets, that Opera are involved with in editing the W3C standard.
After a lunch at the local chinese and heated debate on technology, we broke into smaller groups for our barCamp sessions. The philosophy of barCamp is to create open group dialogues about an agreed topic and to work / explore collaboratively. I attended a discussion on HTML / CSS3 with the guys from Opera, and for my second session W3C Standards for Mobile Web. Both sessions were really insightful and was particularly interesting to hear peoples’ comments from the mobile industry on mobile web.
I also picked up a couple of useful tools:
Native Mobile Development Platforms for Web Developers
W3C Mobile Validator
http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
Perhaps most surprising, coming to the event as a pure Web Developer (with past dabblings in mobile), I certainly didn’t feel like an outsider or feel like the technology was flying over my head. In fact, I came away with an increasing awareness that, whether I like it or not, Web Development is not simply going to be solely about the Desktop. As hopes of an archaic browser death is on the horizon, another friend is also lurking. In our discussions on Mobile Web Standards, we were reminded that the largest mobile usage is not in China, the US, or Europe, but in developing countries. If the days of IE6 support is numbered, then the days of mobile WAP support may be coming back from the dead!
Team Rubber defeats the (mostly) undefeatable
Alex Pitkin - December 18th, 2009Yes.
It did happen.
We won. In the match that I introduced in my last post, we turned up and we scored a goal and didn’t concede any. Now that’s winning. We’re now joint second in the league and on good form so we should win the league, definitely.
Team Rubber in second place, still.
Ok, so we lost last week but we played well and it was unfair, in a totally-within-all-rules-but-really-annoying way.
A special mention for Tom’s quality left-footed strike should be made, and there it just was.
Team Rubber FC challenging for honour(s)
Alex Pitkin - December 4th, 2009Following a string of good results and pretty consistent set of players, Team Rubber has been holding down the second spot on their Soccer-Sixes-Pro-Star-FA-AnotherSponsorProbably premier Thursday 6-a-side league. The one we all know and love:
Team Rubber FC in second place
We’re currently behind the holders and previous season’s winners and the-season-before-that’s winners and the season-before-that-one’s winners and some more wins, Brucey Boys. It just so happens we’re playing them in 2 weeks in what has been dubbed as “a game between first and second on the 17th of December”.
Adam Cardew, Team Rubber FC’s newest recruit from Delib, sums it up perfectly: “I wish I had some new size 9 football boots so that I could play but I haven’t got time to buy any”.
