Photo: Between eight and nine by Paul van de Velde

NS Pro-Rail coded spaces
On thursday, we received the great news that NS and ProRail (formally Dutch national railways) selected us as their partner to improve the customer experience for a specific collection of their coded spaces. We can’t say too much about it currently other than we are looking forward to collaborate on design, prototyping and testing the experience for their wide variety of travelers and visitors. To celebrate the day ended with a nice drink at our neighbours, Biergarten Rotterdam.

Retelling oral history
The past weeks Wouter has been working on a collaborative proposal for preserving and oral history in one of most beautiful parts of the Netherlands. Our focus will be on retelling the stories on location to a wide audience using their smartphones as a magical lens to see back into time. Creating mixed reality experiences like these is something we enjoy working on since the mscape project for Hewlett Packart in 2006. If all goes well, we will be in a cabin in the woods this autumn.

Meeting fellow makers and creators of “e-culture”
Pieter visited the first Dutch edition of Makersclub organised by former Sofa and Facebook designer Jorn van Dijk. This meetup “for anyone who makes things” started in San Francisco but judging by the attendees and their conversations late into the night has found a nice home in the Netherlands. We are looking forward to the next one and continuing conversations with Gibbon, Hackers and founders Amsterdam, Awkward, Phusion, Jonno Riekwel and many more.

Wouter and Mattijs participated in discussion organised by Stimuleringsfonds voor de creative industrie. A wide range of artists, agencies, institutions and policy makers discussed the current meaning and developments in “e-culture”. Full video coverage can be found at http://www.stimuleringsfonds.nl/nl/actueel/nieuws/terugblik_bijeenkomst_e-cultuur/

Next Train and time
With day light savings time kicking in, we were confronted non ISO compliant use of time formats by the NS API. (Which in turn led to a lunch discussion on Unix Time and in what timezone it originates.) A small update server-side by Tjeerd resolved the problem and meant our users only briefly experienced a hick-up without the need for an app update.