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Jul13iShares Cup Race Village at Cowes Week
- By Carl Crawley in News,
- Tags: iShares
The iShares Cup Race Village at Cowes Week looks set to become Cowes’ new hottest spot this August, with a public bar and tented village open all week on Egypt Point, just minutes along from The Green, the prime viewing area for shoreside spectators!
Open to the public with free entry, the iShares Cup Extreme bar will provide a panoramic view of the Solent sailing all week from Saturday 1 to Saturday 8 August. Open every day from 11am-8pm, with special late opening (until 11pm) on Monday 3 August for the iShares Cup at Cowes Week finale, and Friday 7 August for Cowes Week’s famous fireworks night, the iShares Cup Race Village features the Extreme bar, a food court, entertainment, and some of the best seats in Cowes. Visitors can grab a coffee and cake or cooling ice-cream, and relax as they watch the crews do all the hard work!
The spectacular iShares Cup Extreme 40 Sailing Series returns to Cowes for three days of ultra-competitive sailing in the UK round of the 2009 European Series over the first weekend of Cowes Week from August 1 to 3. With short, sharp courses set just off the Esplanade, spectators can get an up-close view of the thrills-and-spills of Extreme 40 racing. The iShares Cup action begins at 2pm from Saturday to Monday August 1st-3rd, with up to eight action-packed races each afternoon, with live commentary. Every day after the iShares Cup racing there will be prize givings, hear first hand from Extreme 40 skippers, so the public can meet some of sailing’s greatest stars, including Olympic medalists, world champions, record-breaking offshore sailors and America’s Cup teams.
Cowes Week racing takes place every day from 1st-8th August, and throughout the week there will also be special promotions running at the iShares Cup Race Village Extreme bar.
For more information on the iShares Cup, take a look at www.isharescup.com
Mar12Charity Site Goes Live for 2009
- By Carl Crawley in News,
- Tags: charity, website
OC Vision has today launched the new website for charity Ellen MacArthur Trust.
The Ellen MacArthur Trust takes young people aged between 8-18 sailing to help them regain their confidence, on their way to recovery from cancer, leukaemia and other serious illness.
The new website heralds a new phase in the website production for OC Vision and encompasses some of the latest technologies available at the moment.
The site also integrates a number of existing social platforms such as YouTube to gain maximum awareness of this worth while charity.
We wish the Ellen MacArthur all the best and hope that you all feel ‘inspired’ to donate.
Visit the website at www.ellenmacarthurtrust.org
Oct13Web App ‘n’ Widget Frenzy
- By Carl Crawley in News, Technology, Web,
It has most definately been a busy ole month in the development department here at OC Vision.
We’re currently working on an Equine Insurance Web-App which is due to launch in November, just finished an OS X widget for Mike Golding Yacht Racing, another 2 widgets in the pipeline and a Web App for Puma Ocean Racing just launched!
We’re very pleased with http://media.pumaoceanracing.com – our latest web-app to hit the interweb! It is simply bursting with exciting technologies such as ‘Distributed Storage’ (from the great guys at Amazon S3), Video Streaming and Live Conversion technologies from the guys over at SesameVault (http://www.sesamevault.com) and all built on a Ruby on Rails Platform.
The site is a media portal for the Puma Sponsored ‘Il Mostro’ Volvo 70 currently taking part in the Volvo Ocean Race which started last weekend. It allows registered users to log in and retrieve hi-res images as well as video in multiple formats during the race.
All processing is done behind the scenes, with the media team simply uploading single image and the system takes the image, extracts IPTC/EXIF data, creates mid-res and thumbnail images and uploads it to S3 for distributed storage.
As for video, Quicktime files are uploaded using FTP and then using the secure admin panel, videos are processed and converted into MP4, Flash, 3GP and Ogg Vorbis.
May06The Sun is shining in Plymouth
- By Carl Crawley in News,
Some of the OC Team are currently in Plymouth for The Artemis Transat 2008.
The OC Vision team have all one way or another worked on the build up of the event over the last few months, being responsible for the design and production of the flags, banners, official race magazine, development of the website, in-house media accreditation software and Media Server plus providing key infrastructure support for all voice and data comms with communications sponsor BT.
Stay tuned for more information/pictures of the venue over the next few days!!
For more information about The Artemis Transat, visit http://www.theartemistransat.com
Oct02Approaching projects with an analytical process
- By Carl Crawley in News,
Each project that we work on at OC Vision is approached in the same analytical way to ensure you receive the best solution or product. The principles of which are based upon the de Bono Hats system as identified by Edward de Bono.
Edward de Bono is Maltese Psychologist and physician born in 1933 and is a prolific writer about lateral thinking. From his writings, he devised the de Bono hat system which, he theorized as a method of approaching problems and situations in a more analytical way to produce more substantially productive meetings and collaboration within teams.
As a result of this, he described a process of deliberately adopting different approaches to a situation or problem as an implementation of parallel thinking. Each approach is defined by symbolising putting on a hat. This system works within group situations or when working alone.
Six Hats
White Hat : (Blank Paper) An objective look at the problem. Informational with facts and figures only.
Red Hat : (Fire) A subjective hat about your feelings, emotion, feelings and intuition.
Yellow Hat : (Sun) An objective look at the situation. Praise, positivity and reasons why the problem will work.
Black Hat : (Judgement) An objective look at the problem. Why things won’t work, criticisms and negative aspects.
Green Hat : (Plant) A speculative/creative look at the problem. Alternatives to the problem, ideas and general feedback.
Blue Hat : (Sky) An overview of the problem. Looking at the big picture and the overall problem/process.
From a personal view in my role as Senior Information Architect, the de Bono system allows me to maintain focus on given problems and improves thinking processes while speeding up decision making and improving communication both with the internal team and clients.
If you would like to learn more about the de Bono system and how we would use this system on your requirements, contact us.