Cameron Friedlander, VP, Creative Technology, and Chris Stewart, Associate Creative Director will judge this year's Seattle and Cleveland ADDY awards, respectively. Occuring in the communities worldwide, the competition - one of the largest in the advertising world - explores creative excellence at all levels. Click here to learn more.

The team's outstanding work on the HP project "Everybody On" garnered attention at this year's Caples Awards, and Designkitchen is a finalist in the Integrated Campaign category! The campaign celebrates how people around the world use HP technology to pursue their personal and professional passions. You can see a list of all the finalists here.

This week a group from Designkitchen attended CES, a major electronics trade show held every January in Las Vegas. The team took in all the latest and greatest in technologies and innovations in order to better serve our clients this year! To learn more about the show, check out the official site. 

The DK Holi-Cray-Matic™ is an open-source, Twitter-controlled, Arduino-connected (http://arduino.cc/), node.js (http://nodejs.org) application.

There is a self-hosted Node.js web server sitting at holiday.designkitchen.com that is the central hub of the project. It opens up a connection to Twitter’s Stream API and listens for any tweets mentioning @designkitchen and creates a random event job for them – snow machine, table lights, wall lights, beacon lights, inflatable sky dancer. Every 40 tweets, an all-on-holicray event is triggered. Once the jobs have been created, an event is broadcast via websockets to all the webclients (the website) to update the real-time website. These jobs are processed one at a time and sent to the Arduino node.js application sitting in the conference room.

On the Mac Pro, there is a local Node.js application that is connected to the web server via websockets (socket.io). This server is responsible for accepting job instructions from the web server, turning on Arduinio for 9 seconds, and then turning it off, and then reporting back to the web server to say the action took place.

We built out our own power circuits using PowerSwitch Tail II hooked up to an Arduino Uno board connected to a Mac Pro in the conference room. All of the holiday decorations are then plugged in downstream on those PowerSwitches, always on, waiting for the control pin on Arduino to complete the circuit and make stuff go HoliCray!

We’re letting clients, friends and the general twittersphere take control of our holiday happenings this year. Tweet at @designkitchen to activate a holiday zone in one of our conference rooms. Once we hit that magic number the room will get Holi-Cray! Watch the live feed while you tweet so you can see your favorite employees go Holicray for the Holidays! Because simply celebrating just isn’t enough.
http://holiday.designkitchen.com/

The 2012 International CES, the world’s largest consumer electronic tradeshow, is kicking off Tuesday, January 10th with speakers and panelists ready to discuss our future with smart devices.

Wrapped up in our lives as a form of entertainment and relied on to help make us better at our jobs, these devices shape our lifestyles. And these sessions address the newest technologies, and explore how smartphones and tablets are revolutionizing the consumption and monetization of content.

Tuesday at noon, moderator Shawn Gold of Cocodot will lead CES attendees in “iPad-Tablet-Smartphone Advertising – The Premium Advertising Platform.” Tablets are giving advertisers more options than any other smart device today. With its connections to TV as well as smartphones, tablets are proving to be more valuable given the constant changes in technology.

Discussing the versatility of tablets in advertising are panelists Yahav Isak, Digitas Health; Alexandre Mars, Publicis Group; Bryan Moffett, NPR; Mark Pavia, Starcom USA; Mandar Shinde, AOL; Ashley Swartz, Digitas; and Designkitchen’s own Cameron Friedlander.

http://www.cesweb.org

Come see Designkitchen’s VP and head of Creative Technology, Cameron Friedlander, as he joins the prominent ranks of South by Southwest Conference speakers. Cameron will present on the following topic: “A Tale of Loyalty: Virtual Brand Currency Wars”.  Next year’s SXSW is March 8-18, 2012 in Austin, TX. Visit the website for more details.

Patricia Odell of The Big Fat Marketing Blog recently recognized Wunderman3 and Designkitchen’s collaborative work on the “7 Wonders of the USA”, created especially for Wonder Bread. The promotion allowed users to nominate inspirational teachers as part of the Wonder Honors America’s Everyday Heroes campaign. In Ms. Odell’s words, “Since the start of the promotion in July and its end on October 24, more than 3,000 nominations came streaming in, exceeding a previous version of the program by 230%.” Great job, DK! To read more, check out her article here. 

Designkitchen’s very own Executive Creative Director, Scott Yanzy, will be judging Promo Magazine’s 2011 Interactive Marketing Awards. The contest aims to recognize the best in this year’s digital initiatives, especially those using interactive channels in direct-response campaigns. To learn more about the IMA Awards, check out the website here. 

October 17-20, Digital Hollywood will take over Marina del Rey, California to talk about how technology is changing, enhancing and shaping entertainment.

Speakers from across technical divides, like Matt Shaw, Mobile Strategist for Google and Ted Hong, CMO of Fandango will talk about next generation mobile devices and their effect on the entertainment industry. While our very own Cameron Friedlander, VP/Director of Creative Technology will discuss how consumer demand is driving the need for the perfect device.

Even Jon Favreau will take the stage to engage, debate and define the latest technological developments in entertainment, encouraging companies and individuals alike to capitalize on innovation.

A co-production of Variety and Digital Hollywood, The Variety Entertainment and Technology Summit is at the intersection of content, technology and entertainment and we couldn’t be prouder to be a part of it.  

http://digitalhollywood.com/varietysummit/