Archive for December, 2008

This year, Pancentric decided to share it’s Christmas Tree with the world. Rather than have a traditional tree in our office, we made a virtual one.

First we commissioned a metalworker Adam Laurence from the wonderfully named “One Little Girl & A Can Of Gasoline” to produce a tree shaped structure. Then we grabbed a bunch of LCD screens from around the office to hang on it. Alex here opened up an old PC and put as many graphics cards as we could in it (who would have thought that it would be so hard to find working PCI graphics cards?) After some swearing and a lot of grief he managed to get x-windows running across all of the screens, (this involved re-compiling the windowing system without xinerama, thank goodness for Open Source and the Freedom to modify). So now we had the basic hardware up and running.

Next, Laco and his gang started work on designing and programming the tree. Working with the geometry of the screens they created a pixel perfect flash animation to run across the 6 screens on the tree!

Of course we weren’t content with just that, so a camera was sourced to put this onto the web. The 1st effort used a standard webcam effort, not good enough I’m afraid, the limitations of custom plugins, and the low refresh rates made it look rubbish.

So, we started again this time with a domestic camcorder, this is connected to a PC and the raw video feed is transcoded into h264 and pumped up to a server on the internet. The server then puts the h264 video into a Flash wrapper and streams it out to the end viewer. If nothing else this was a great proof of principle/concept for us as it means we now have the capability of doing mass video streaming – which is nice.

So all that remained was to record some “fun” clips for out 3pm broadcasts, put the flash in a good looking page, design an email etc. and away we went.

We’ve taken it down now and hope you all liked it.

A Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2009 from us all at Pancentric.

Whilst browsing the Brand Republic website today I was very pleased to find an article detailing Pancentric’s latest digital campaign for Petplan.

The 12 days of Xmas campaign featuring of all things, 12 daily emails provides Petplan customers with exclusive Xmas content, including a selection of funny/cute and altogether sickly videos of animals. Xmas gift ideas, and the chance to win one of three daily prizes.

Brand Republic were even kind enough to detail the success of the campaign to date. More than 500,000 comms, with a 30% open rate and 50% click thru rate.

To read said article, follow the link below:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/Discipline/Marketing/News/869973/Petplan-launches-12-Days-Christmas-campaign/

Famous at last! Made my Xmas that!

A lot of the IT bits and pieces that we buy end up coming to me as they are often ordered in my name. As a result I am constantly being teased by intriguing looking packages, that turn out to be replacement hard drives, or cunning little cables or other such ephemera.

Just the other day I received a package in a big padded envelope from someone I didn’t recognise so started opening it up to see what it was, imagine my surprise when this is what I found inside it.

Well that doesn’t look like any kind of IT related package I’ve ever seen, so I said to my colleagues, no it must be for me. So I opened it up and looked at what was inside.

Hmmm, what was that carefully wrapped in bubble wrap? A brooch, a medal, a badge of honour? Only one way to find out…

Aha! It’s a processor, I should have guessed. It transpires that it was ordered from e-bay to upgrade an old box and somehow it was wrapped in this lovely little box.

The message being that a bit of care and attention to presentation makes a huge difference in perception. I was intrigued and surprised and it made a big enough impact for me to remember the seller (and we still have the box!)