Team Rubber BlogTeam Rubber talks on the Internet in a blog

Last night #Kittencamp returned to Goldbrick House, fueled with beers, a talk from Matt Golding, LOL cards, the latest memes, plenty of chat and music.

The meme battle between *Meme-Master-Meow* and *ROFL Rex* came to a tied ‘LOL card’ Vote by Kitten campers… leading into extra time for the deciding Meme-battle showdown!

Thanks to everyone for joining us and we hope to see you again!

More info and news available on our #KittenCamp Facebook page.

I watched The BBC program “Kidult: Beautiful Young Minds” on BBC iPlayer tonight with strong personal emotions.

The show covered the final selection stages of the UK’s team for the international maths olympiad (2006) – an annual event where the best mathematically minded teenagers compete for medals on an international stage.

Although I chose to read Mathematics at university, I didn’t ever get through quite that far in the mathematical olympiad. My focus, right up until my 20s, was always on Physics – and I did get to the final selection stages for the UK physics olympiad team – the final group of 20 or so people being whittled down to the six that would be flown over the world to compete for their country.

All the elements that were captured in film for the BBC program brought back memories of my time there, and the intense emotions that were going on.

Why didn’t I get through? Well obviously I was up against some brilliant minds, but I really think it was because of myself that I didn’t stand a chance. By the time it came to the final selection process I had discovered more typical teenage activities – and I was under the impression that I could focus on Physics and maths during the day, party like a typical teenager, and still perform like the best. I was wrong – and it took me a good few years of my life to discover that fact.

What really brought tears to my eyes was when the candidates discovered who has made it through to the team. The pain of getting knocked back is intense when you’re not used to it – and that shows on film when people discovered they did not make the team. I still remember that pain.

Do I regret not focusing on physics entirely – sometimes, but just as often I’m as incredibly grateful for the choices I made and how they affected my confidence later in life. No matter how good you are, you’ll always get beaten by someone sometimes – and as the old  adage says, the higher they climb the harder they fall – and getting used to recovering from setbacks is an important skill – especially in academia.

The full show is available here (inside the UK) until the 13th of April.

I went to a fantastic panel today at SXSW in which Gaby Brink, Eric Doversberger and Ingrid Kopp discussed a new open source tool they have created called the IMPACT DASHBOARD.

Although not launched yet, the tool aims to allow anyone who wants to to monitor the outreach and effects of content they place online. The tool can track most of the stuff you’d want to (video platforms, facebook, twitter, and many more) but given its open source the community will be able to extend this as people work out exactly how they want to use this tool.

The concept of this is not wholly original, but the execution means it looks hopeful this is a major leap forward, especially for content creators and storytellers in general – for two reasons.

1: Ease of use. Its designed to be set up by anyone
2: Visual appeal. It has been designed to be easy to engage with by the non-technical.

It turns the outcome of things your content achieves online into something easy to engage with and active (you can link to direct action from the visualisations it delivers)

This is especially powerful for storytellers working in issues based or social change areas, where they can monitor (and show to their community and their funders) the results of their activity, and engage them with further action off the back of it.

Whether or not the tool lives up to its promises, it opened a whole can of interesting worms in my mind in showing how data around your action can be used very publicly to open, increase and deepen the conversation between storyteller and audience. It makes seeing what’s going on online because of things you’ve done, fun, shareable, and easy. And that’s a whole new layer of conversation right there.

Something I found at my grandmother’s house over Christmas that made me chuckle – I’d never taken the idea of a computer file so literally before:

If you don’t know what it is, It’s an EOF punchcard to mark the end of a computer program (back when code was on card).

It’s an IBM 80-column card – if you ever wonder why programmers keep to an 80-character limit, this is why.

Your computer still uses the same kind of feature internally to mark the end of every file, although cardboard isn’t needed any more.

This post has been a long time coming, it’s been a busy few months! Here’s all the reasons why we get excited about the opportunities to do research and development…

Prototyping
Testing our ideas is really important, we need safe environments to explore, make discoveries and/or mistakes (fix those!) before they get anywhere near the outside world. It’s a long road from a prototype to product development, we want to keep our eye on what the market will want in the future and develop towards it.

Collaboration and Networking
We get to make new friends, find stuff out – get exposed to different kinds of thinking.

Keep our people fresh
We work hard at making some pretty serious software, it’s to take time to do something different, learn new skills and flex muscles.

Create knowledge
Doing things outside our everyday practice extends our skills and allows us to do and sell new things, maybe not tomorrow or next week but sometime soon. Or it gives us the chance to say no, we now know this thing, it isn’t for us. Most importantly, we need to work hard to embed this new knowledge, a tricky thing in a fast moving organisation – we hold flash talks PetchaKutcha style to spread information quickly.

PR
PR comes in two flavours – general – just getting our name out there and project specific. We want to be out there talking about our work and generating excitement. R&D gives us the ideal opportunity to do that.

Developing new ways of working
A rolling stone gathers no moss, we like to evolve our processes, methods and approaches. Covers all the above really.

The benefits are huge, what’s not to love? There are tons more opportunities coming up soon, I am properly excited.

Last night was Dave Ashby’s (aka LiquidLizard) launch night for his illustration project ‘Versus’ (see past post: Versus Illustration Exhibition 11th Nov for details of the project). If you couldn’t make it here are some pictures to see how it turned out.