Olympic Passion

It's no secret, Raincity staffers have demonstrated their passion for anything Olympics, Open Source and Social Media over the past 5 years...

During that time, as individuals and as a company we have had the honour to attend, cover and enjoy two Olympic games.

Raincity Studios is listed along side 9 other companies in the current issue of WE. The West Ender Cover Feature:Made In Vancouver.

Our city is a hotbed of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. From the fashionable to the ecological, here are 10 businesses — new and established — we think are at the top of their game.

We are honored and exited to be featured with some of Vancouver's greatest and most innovative companies.

Tags:

• Drupal
• pioneer
• raincitystudios
• robertscales
• technologist
• Vancouver

We've seen a lot of changes at Raincity Studios over the past six months.  This transition has not necessarily been an easy road, but we're finally beginning to see the fruits of our labour.  After closing down Bryght, restructuring our management team, moving out of the Gastown offices and repaying a majority of our liabilities, we're happy to announce that the first phase of our transition action plan is nearly complete.  And now, as we head into Autumn and the

SXSW is still almost 6 months away but you may have noticed a flurry of self-promotion on Twitter as the Panel Picker was launched last week.  The panel picker allows the people to weigh in and tell the organizers what they're interested in seeing at conference, but with over 2200 panel proposals, the prospect of browsing them all can be an overwhelming prospect.  Here's a few recommendations to get you started...

First up, I would be remiss to not mention our own Robert Scales and his panel, Social Media and the Olympics: A Case Study.  This panel is sure to be a very timely and relevant topic with SXSW falling just on the heels of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.  Scales has been an Olympic fanatic, providing social media coverage of the Games in Turnin, Beijing and now Vancouver this winter.  The IOC has been criticized for their posture towards social media and yet this years games is poised to have more social media coverage than ever before.  This panel is sure to be full of stories from the trenches and examine the challenges and opportunities facing social media and sport. 

Another recommendation would be for Dave Olson and his panel, Hitchhiking to the Boardroom.  Olson is a poet, artist, storyteller, traveller, producer, and and all around bon vivant, yet still makes time for his day job helping various tech companies and start-ups.  Dave's unorthodox perspective has brought life many stale meetings and his panel is sure to the same.  Dave's also set to be moderating the Rock and Roll Photography panel with our friend Kris Krug and legendary photographer Bev Davis.  After seeing an early version of this panel at Northern Voice, I can say without hesitation that this one's not to be missed - it's a beautiful and candid exploration of how musicians and bands can work together. 

KK also has a couple other irons in the fire that you should check out.  Listening on the Internet: Online Media Monitoring examines some useful strategies for making the most of all the data that's being produced online and finding out what people are thinking/feeling/saying about your brand.  And beyond just listening, Kris will examine how all of our activities online are actively shaping our online identity in Your Content is You, Your Website is Dead. 

Another Vancouverite with a proposal worth checking out is John Biehler and Do the Cool Kids Leave when the Suits Arrive?  John will examine the tension that can arise between business models and users just wanting to be social and have fun.  This discussion will examine the importance of "co-creating fun and valuable experiences" with your users.  

We're excited about the re-design of drupal.com. Most of us who work with Drupal on a regular basis are very familiar with drupal.org - the home of the Drupal project, the contributed modules and all the amazing developer activity that makes Drupal such a great platform. But as Dries pointed out in his DrupalCon keynote this past year in DC, the Drupal.com page, until now just a simple placeholder page forwarding visitors to the project, is apparently getting a significant amount of traffic. Lets face it - lots of people just assume your website ends with a .com extension. And since people who are familiar with drupal are likely browsing directly to drupal.org, we can assume that most of the folks that end up on drupal.com are trying to learn about the project.

Now these noobies have a great place to learn about our favorite CMS and Drupal gets the slick showcase it deserves. The good folks over at Development Seed did a excellent job of designing the site and the images they've used make for a very compelling presentation. We can't help but notice the smiling face of Raincity's own Robert Scales (who is responsible for many of Drupal's tattoos) and our good friend and community hero Boris Mann (apparently responsible for Drupal's great haircut).  It's great to see the Vancouver drupal community so well represented!

Drupal.com looks great with this new makeover and it's another victory in battling Drupal's reputation for being "less pretty" than other platforms like Wordpress and Joomla. Efforts like the Design4Drupal camp held this past spring in Boston are trying to build the design community and proving that with a good designer and a solid themer, anything is possible. We already know that Drupal is powerful, but, like the at end of many hollywood teen flicks, the nerdy girl just took off her glasses on prom night and it turns out she's beautiful!