There were a few excellent speakers showcasing their recent work. Mark Walsh from Pixar gave an excellent behind-the-scenes look at his work on Ratatouille. All through his talk it was clear how dedicated the studio is to producing a great story. Simple reminder of what it takes to create fantastic content. I especially appreciated his response to a question about target audiences and demographics - “We want a story that everyone loves.”

The folks from Little Airplane gave a great talk about their work creating 3rd and Bird. I really appreciated their straight-forward approach to incorporating research into the development of their shows. It was presented as a collaborative, integrated approach. It’s common sense, especially for preschool properties, but here was a producer demonstrating success when it’s done right.

There was a bit of doom and gloom hanging in the air at the conference. I couldn’t help get the feeling of a children’s television industry struggling to maintain itself in the face of regulations, tight budgets and competition from new media. There were a lot of “we’re still relevant” comments that came across as defensive. There was also a good dose of fear mongering about new media and online safety. Of course, this isn’t anything unique to Showcomotion. As far as I’m concerned it’s a distraction from the bigger goal - making great kids media.

The size and format of the conference was excellent. Loads of opportunities to sit and chat with other delegates and a good mix of folks on the panels. There were a handful of independent folks based in the UK creating great stuff. I absolutely loved Pedro and Frankensheep from the Brothers Mcleod. Beautiful design, great dialog. Check it out!

Dewey was discovered in late 2005 by intrepid explorer, and builder of fine boogaloos, Jerrold Connors. Since then, Dewey has been hard at play hanging out with all sorts of kids online and at Toronto Public Library branches across the city. Each Dewey likes to do different things from reading, to bocce, to knitting, and they can also be distinguished by their handy numbered jerseys but no one has ever counted them all.

Word of advice. If anyone ever offers to send you to Cannes to pick up an Emmy you can sure as hell expect they’ll want something in return. Be warned. :)

A little over a year ago we received an email from a company working on ‘an open source consumer electronics device’. About a month later we got a package in the mail containing something that looked like a bean bag with an LCD screen attached to one side and a little label reading ‘prototype’. It was a Chumby. It ran Flash Lite and it was cute.

Not long after it arrived we had a version of our flashcan ecards system up and running on the Chumby. By wiring our flashcan system into Chumby.com visitors can create ecards and then ‘push’ them down to a friend’s Chumby. The Chumby is now showing up in more and more places (check out David Pogue recent piece called Please, do squeeze the Chumby).

“It has no meaning.”

“It was my the name of my great-grandfather’s third cousin twice removed.”

“What do you think it means?”

“You know – metal fish eggs.”

The truth is a little more straight-forward. The name came up during a semi-random conversation over beers at the Albion Hotel in Guelph while I was a student there. We were talking about how one could pick two words at random and assess how well they fit together. It’s like when you must pick a name for a baby. The first name has to sound right when combined with the last name. What is it that makes words sound ‘right’ together? Well, we never did answer that question. But during the conversation I came up with zinc roe as an example of a pair of words that sound like they ought to be something. The next year, when I needed a name to slap on a project out came zinc Roe and it just stuck.

We also knew that we wanted to create both the book assembly and viewing tool in Flash as opposed to Director. The tool is written in AS1 and uses Screentime Media’s MProjector software to create a standalone tool for creating the bundles of assets and text that are loaded into the viewer which works equally well locally or online.

What we see now as a version 1.0 tool has been used successfully by the Toronto Public Library in a public touch-screen kiosk format at the Metro Reference Library and had it’s widest release just recently as the core of a jointly produced project called Ontario Time Machine.

At this year’s SXSWi and the Museums and the Web conferences, the “VirtualBook” or “Page Turner” (it needs a real name) was greeted with interest by quite a few people from libraries and museums and it got us thinking about the possibility of a version 2.0 which would build upon the functionality and strengths of the existing version.

We know some of our basic goals in working towards a new version:

• Author in AS3 (bitmap handling and more structured code just a couple of the reasons)
• Streamline the book assembly process and application (cross-platform desktop application and/or hosted process)
• Make the viewing interface relatively “skinnable”
• Expand the display/export options (Flash viewer, HTML view, text only, PDF, etc.)
• Open the process and the product up to benefit from outside knowledge, criticism, and development

The first step in this is this post. We know there are a number of projects with similar goals out there in varying stages of production and we certainly have our personal opinions of where those tools succeed and fail but we would love some direct public feedback on what we have done with version 1.0 and on an on-going basis as we work towards a new version.

As an aside, here are a few companies and organizations with related goals or technology: Open Library, Google Book Search, Zoomify, and Issuu, Any others?

P.S. Please excuse the extremely punny title of this post. I shall endeavour to keep humour reigned-in during all future internet ramblings. Some may say it has been suitable reigned in that they noticed no humour present herein. To them, point taken.