There is still time for you to feel the power of democracy and VOTE in our Nerdiest Pumpkin Contest.
The Great Pumpkin, Nerdery Style from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
The winner will be announced at 4:30 at our Friday Bottle Cap Talk. There are two ways to vote: be here at The Nerdery to stuff the ballot box, or, leave a comment below.
We’ve had a pile of links piling up on us here at Inside the Nerdery. Since tomorrow promises to bring some nerdtastic Halloween fun on the blog, we decided to free the links a day early.
Over at AdvertisingAge Frank D’Angelo celebrates the 15th birthday of digital advertising. In the article D’Angelo explains how they were tasked with creating some sort of graphical ad unit to explore the new medium, specifically to create ads for HotWired, the first commercial web magazine.
If it helps you set this story more firmly in history one of the initial six companies to jump into the uncharted digital advertising waters was Zima. Oh, 1994 were the good old days weren’t they? (The other five were MCI, Volvo, Club Med, AT&T, and 1-800-Collect).
Read the article to find out what two words of copy managed to generate a 78% click-through rate on one of those ads.
Over at Slate today they have an excellent write up of the new Levi’s commercials created by Wieden + Kennedy. The commercials feature the poetry of Walt Whitman, and probably want to send a lot of lit-snobs running into their candle-lit rooms to write about their feelings. But not this one. These commercials are awesome, and Seth Stevenson, author of the Slate piece, succinctly sums up the internal struggle most ad people face:
Among those who work in advertising, there is an eternal battle between the desire to make art and the imperative to serve commerce. This 60-second film is, to me, a small artistic gem. Right up until that Levi’s logo at the end.
While the author is specifically talking about the “America” commercial, I like the “O Pioneers!” one better.
The Nerdery is twice as picky about hiring programmers as Harvard is about admitting students, according to our fact sheet, making it true. Harvard’s acceptance rate is 8% while we hire about 4% of applicants, putting us in an Ivy League of our own. Still, we need more and more nerds.
We’re looking right at you, graduates of Neumont University. There will be no “What’s your major?” icebreaking banter, either; we know full well Neumont only offers computer science degrees through an accelerated two-and-a-half-year program. Our current Nerdery class will tell you that the gig here is an accelerated learning program in-and-of itself.
By 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the need for more than 324,000 new software engineers. All we want is half. However, the Computer Research Association reported that major universities awarded just 10,000 computer science degrees last year. This Red Bull’s for you, Neumont.
“We don’t have sports, we don’t have some of the extras. If that’s a compromise, it’s one that results in a fast launch into an exciting career,” says Neumont president Ned Levine.
Pssst, hey kids, if you missed out on sports in college, the Pentathanerd Winter Games are coming (beware of the Ides of January).
When Google announced in July that they were creating an operating system (Chrome OS) that was essentially a browser, I’ll admit I was pretty skeptical. Then I started to think about what we nerds use our computers for and wondered, does this move by Google actually make sense?
First, we like to browse the web, something we typically do with a browser. We like being social with instant messaging… and Google has GTalk in the browser – you can also chat on Facebook in the browser, and you can connect to AIM or Yahoo with services like Meebo.com. Occasionally, we nerds use Microsoft Office-like programs to get work done. Google has Google Docs that does all that in the browser, too. The solution then dawned on me. We also like to play 3D games like Crysis or Batman: Arkham Asylum, Half-Life 2, etc. Flash can’t pump the polygons to make these quality games and there really isn’t anything else out there that can. The browser can’t do 3D gaming!
“Clearly”, I thought, “Google is making a mistake with this Chrome OS business because they can’t satisfy the 3D gaming market. Chrome OS won’t go anywhere.” I then smugly went about my business knowing that I had out-thought Google and my skepticism was well met. Google 0, Rex 1.
Much to my dismay, I saw this YouTube video showing of a technology called WebGL.
3D graphics…in a web browser?
I decided to look further into this technology and see how it worked. WebGL is a JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0. This allows for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in the browser without any additional plug-ins. This means that future games may not be shipped on a CD or be installed at all, just point your browser to a website and enjoy. Game releases could be essentially the same thing as a website launch. This kind of technology could go beyond games. What if your kids could open a webpage and see a rich 3D version of SpongeBob Squarepants’s world? Could you take a car for a test drive in the browser with 3D graphics and real physics data similar to the racing games of today? How about viewing consumer products in 3D before you buy? The possibilities seem endless.
When will this be available? It’s tough to say a hard release date, but this is already showing up in the nightly builds of Webkit (the technology that drives Chrome, Safari, and Palm Pre browsers, among others) and Firefox. I’d speculate advanced browsers will incorporate WebGL technology in 2010.
And as to the viability of Google’s Chrome OS… Well played, Google. Well played.
Yeah, we’re pretty pumped at being named #16 on the Business Journals’ Fast 50. Part of the honor will include being included in the Fast 50 Diary, where they take five businesses from the list of the 50 fastest-growing private companies in the area, and follow them monthly for a year (you can see our profile here).
We’re so pumped, in fact, a few of the Nerds went out celebrating and sang a little bit of Journey.
Don’t Stop Believing from DC_VIRUS on Vimeo.
Last Friday we got the inside scoop on the making of the Oregon Trail video game from our guy John Krenz, who was the lead programmer for the Apple lle version back when he worked for the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation (MECC), an organization that set out to teach kids life lessons like the value of strong oxen, a spare axle for your wagon, shooting wild game and steering clear of cholera. Show-and-tell also featured four of John’s former MECC colleagues: Rich Bergeron; Beth Daniels; Tom Zemlin; and Mark Paquette. Here’s a three-minute highlight reel from Friday’s BottleCap Talk, and also the unabridged video. On a personal note, I recently passed away. Cholera.
The Oregon Trail Bottlecap Talk: The Music Video from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
Just so you don’t think all we do is tinker with video games and train for Pentathanerd, for the record, we’re as busy building websites as we’ve ever been. Our sales staff is coming off of record month, which means this month developers are keeping strange hours (it also means we’re hiring). I came into The Nerdery the other morning to see programmers crashed-out on couches. This is home, these days, for about 60 ridiculously talented developers who’ll need some shut-eye before our next Overnight Website Challenge.
So this morning, our sales and marketing staff cobbled together the most important meal of the day as a small token of our appreciation for those who best personify The Nerdery. Then we showed no mercy by going back to the selling and marketing of The Nerdery.
On the heels of our augmented reality webinars last week, the hits just keep coming. John Mayer will use AR trickery to let his fans opt into his upcoming video (starring as themselves, as extras). “We won’t know what we’ve got until they run it through their new-fangled computers,” said Mayer against a green-screen.
© 2009 Sierra Bravo Corporation. Sierra Bravo, The Nerdery and Nerdery Interactive Labs are trademarks of Sierra Bravo Corporation. Subscribe to our RSS Feed.
