For anyone who didn't spot the post over on the playhouse blog, the winner of the Daft.ie €1,000 playhouse prize was TA3. He is a hugely talented street artist based in Dublin and I would encourage you to check out his website and browse through some of his previous work.
Here is the animation he submitted.
http://playhouse.daft.ie/gallery.php?view=218&clip_id=1064
We were very excited last night to hear that we ranked Number 1 in the 2009 Deloitte Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in Ireland!
The Fast 50 programme, now in its tenth year in Ireland, ranks the fastest-growing technology companies in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland based on average percentage revenue growth over five years.
The awards took place in Clontarf Castle and industry figures speaking at the event included Paul Rellis, Managing Director, Microsoft Ireland; Michael Dwyer, Founder and CEO, Empathy Marketing Limited (Pigsback.com); and Jim Sloane, Lead Technology Partner and Vice Chairman, Deloitte UK.
In 2007 Daft.ie was awarded the Fast 50 Rising Star Award which recognises young companies with the fastest growth in turnover, so we were pretty made up to have ranked first in the fast 50 this year. All the credit for this award has to go to our team at Daft.ie who work very, very hard to make us the very, very best site we can be.
Needless to say there was a few fizzy pops had by all to celebrate last night - so there are lots of tired heads in Daft towers today. But we were pretty well behaved … we even brought our award (and our CTO) home in one piece!
We would also like to congratulate all the other winners on the night.
Details of the final Technology Fast 50 ranking list are available to download at www.fast50.ie.
As of yesterday evening, the augmented reality browser Layar is now available for the iPhone 3GS.
This application includes Ireland's first property search layer, powered by the listings on Daft.ie. This means that Irish iPhone users can now search through the widest selection of properties for sale, to rent or to share anywhere in Ireland direct from their phone.
What is Augmented Reality?
Daft Property Search Layer
Augmented reality is the term given to the overlaying of data on top of your phone's camera view. So, for example, you could point your phone at a house which is for sale on Daft and immediately see the price, photographs of the interior, and the contact details of the owner.
Aside from property search, there are a number of other interesting uses for this technology - there are layers available in various countries showing everything from nearby restaurants, ATMs, post boxes and even nearby twitter users!
Layar have been at the forefront of this new technology since releasing the Layar app to the Android marketplace in August this year. We at Daft were selected as one of the pre-launch development partners for this system, and have been actively developing on it over recent months.
Using the playhouse app platform, Tim Redfern has built what is probably the world's largest twitter client. To get your tweets broadcast on liberty hall just put in the #playtweet hashtag into your twitter message. Your message will stream across the top marquee and your profile picture will bounce up onto the main display. Messages will be moderated and will be streamed to the building from tonight until Sunday. Check out the test display broadcast last night:
As always, in between the twitter messages the user generated animations will still be displayed. Here's a nice youtube video showcasing some great animations, if you haven't seen the building yet:
If you have been in Dublin city centre after 8pm over the last two weeks, you probably noticed that there's something going on with Liberty Hall. This is of course the Playhouse project, of which Daft.ie is the main sponsor. With Playhouse, we started out just wanting to do a clever above-the-line branding campaign for Daft, but the project has been a much bigger success than we ever anticipated.
People Watching Playhouse From Pearse Street (source: danburke/pix.ie)
Over the course of the last 14 days there have been 552 animations submitted by people from all over the world. There have been over 15,000 online viewers of the live show and literally tens of thousands of people who stopped and looked every evening on O'Connell bridge, Millenium bridge and many other great vantage points in the Dublin city centre. Two days ago someone even created a facebook fan page to ask us to keep the show running indefinitely and it now has over 2,000 fans. Unfortunately, the show has to end as it is part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival and this Sunday will be the last night of playhouse. However given the public response to this project, you never know, we may look to run this again at a future date.
Competition
There are still 5 days left, so there's still time to get over to the playhouse website and submit your own animation. We are offering a €1,000 prize for the best animation submitted before midnight on Friday the 9th of October. The winner will be decided by public vote.
Vote Now
Browse the gallery and place your votes now to decide the winner and leave comments on this blog on who you voted for. The winner will be announced live on the building on Saturday night.
Finally all of us at Daft would like to thank the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival and SIPTU without whom this project couldn't have happened.
UPDATE: Deadline for submissions has been extended to midnight on Saturday and the winner will be announced on the building on Sunday night.
