Jan 31 2007
Good idea from IAB and RMB who give a second life (!) to the Cyber Lions Awards Belgium. Our Art Director Nicolas Jandrain has been selected as a member of the Jury along with other Belgian professionals.
These relaunched Cyber Lions aim to raise significantly the number of Belgian entries at the Cannes International Advertising Festival by offering free case submissions to the Belgian winners. Check out the official website for more information.
Jan 26 2007
Every week, we develop new features for Proximus in B2C and B2B as well. The Business Rewards Programme offers temporary promotions on selected products (mobile phones, data cards…) for business customers. Among the latest updates in this segment, check out also the demo of the Internet Service for BlackBerry.
Jan 24 2007
Private Investment & Wealth Management is a Fortis subsidiary helping you manage your investment portfolio. Another nice reference made with emagiC CMS.Net and the very first Chinese-speaking web pages we build (yes! Check out the Hong Kong and Taipei sections).
Jan 23 2007
Emakina will be part of an IAB Breakfast on RSS & marketing. Along with Clo Willaerts (Skynet) and Jeremy Collin (AdLink), we will explain how marketeers can benefit from the multiple possibilities offered by this new channel.
When? 6th February from 8.30 to 10.00 am
Where? Roularta, Research Park, 1731 Zellik
Info, registration and access map on IAB Belgium website.
Jan 22 2007
New collection, new website. Made by Emakina, of course.
UPDATE: site of the day on E-motional Design.
Jan 18 2007
W@=D@ is project for and about culture.
W@=D@ is a mix between Tintin and Michael Palin.
W@=D@ is in the city. Keep your eyes open.
In other words,W@=D@ is a cross media cultural project that takes place from November 2006 till March of this year. A television series, theater productions, magazines, websites and an online forum will offer a privileged look behind the scenes of the cultural traditions of India, Mali, China and Mexico. Check out the brilliant W@=D@ website made by our friends of Design is Dead.
Jan 16 2007
We’re delighted to announce that Design is Dead is now part of the Emakina Group. For those unfamiliar with this company, Design is Dead (DiD) is an Antwerp-based agency with a strong focus on design and technical know-how.
Why Design is Dead?
- They form a very inspired, passionate crew whose corporate culture is very close to ours
- We already collaborated with them for several clients and we really enjoy their work
- They’re located in Antwerp, a city that is now a place-to-be for culture, advertising and education
For all these good reasons, we think that DiD will bring a lot of added value to even better serve our clients. More details in the official French and Dutch press releases.
Jan 15 2007
The 85th Brussels Motorshow opened its doors this Friday. For this special occasion, we designed a range of micro-sites for different brands distributed by D’Ieteren.
- Volkswagen
- CVI
- SEAT
- Audi
Jan 11 2007
A post from Johnny Degreef, Web Solution Architect.
A few weeks ago, our Java team attended JavaPolis 2006. It’s one of the biggest European conferences for Java developers (more than 2.800 attendees and 100+ speakers this year).
The thing that hit me most this year is how few Java code that we’ve seen. It’s a fact now that Java is merging more and more with other technologies and programming languages. To name but a few hot ones: Ajax, Flex, Ruby, JSON, Python, REST…
There were also sessions about the never ending story, called SOA. I guess by now, everybody understands that SOA is nothing more then a buzzword that sales guys like to use just because it’s fancy… In practice, however, SOA architectures based on web services can not be ignored.
Some things that really scared me are these upcoming technologies like REST and COMET. REST (Representational State Transfer) seems a good idea, but I’m sure that security departments will think differently on this since it can expose your complete business logic by means of simple HTTP GET requests. COMET is a technology that allows to push information from a server to a browser. The idea is nice, but I consider it as a violent rape of TCP/IP! Even with some upcoming ARP (Asynchronous Request Processing) web servers like Grizzly and Glassfish that are designed specifically for this purpose, I still have an awkward feeling about this. But probably, I’m the only one thinking this way since the upcoming Servlet 3.0 specification will also be based on this.
This makes me come back to Flex that out-of-the box supports to push data to the browser. Let me assure you, I like the idea of Flex very much. I’m convinced that our front-ends are evolving to this technology. But what about the infrastructural aspects of Flex? Can a complete Flex application have the same simultaneous load then a traditional web application running on a simple Apache 1.3? What’s the impact on the web server stack?
What’s new under the sun for Java? Well, of course, there is the final Java SE6 released a few weeks ago. And since Java is open sourced with a GPLv2 license there is the OpenJDK equivalent. New in Java SE6 are a web service client stack, native XML data binding, scripting support (Mozilla rhino engine), SQLXML, Diagnosability, Desktop API enhancements, annotation tool support and finally, no more JVM tuning flags! The Java SE6 JVM is auto-tuning. For the upcoming Java SE7 there will be a new archiving structure more flexible then jar packages, support for dynamic languages, easier Swing development, Asynchronous IO and Javadoc improvements. Java SE7 will also come with new Java language modifications. Hot topic here are ‘closures’ that can control abstraction (less code).
Finally, I want to conclude on what we need to focus more and more in our daily work:
- Profiling: more important then ever before. All web application should be verified with a profiling tool. Most memory leaks still have their origin in written source code. Besides this, profiling of CPU, memory and IO are needed as well.
- Flow of changes: the final goal of software development is to have a stable outcome. We need to stabilize our releases as much as possible. The usage of a source code control system is not sufficient since it doesn’t cover any application life cycle. An interesting design pattern to tackle this is the “tofu scale”, invented by Perforce.com.
- Automatic testing: Besides Agile development, there is also Test Driven Development (TDD) where all development is concentrated by unit and acceptance tests. To automate testing of web applications, have a look at Selenium, a Firefox plugin.
Jan 10 2007
Since last Saturday, the 29th edition of the Dakar rally is on track. 7.000 kilometers of dust, sweat and sand through 6 different countries. For D’Ieteren, we made a VW Dakar micro-site that lets you follow the race day after day : latest news with RSS feed, video and audio podcasting with and by Brigitte Becue and Stéphane Henrard, two Belgian competitors in the VW team.
Jan 9 2007
The AperoNet team informs us that the 3d AperoNet party will be held this Thursday at the Jonas Gallery, a fine place for contemporary art run by Najad Jonas-Ménouar, a member of our account managers team at Emakina. Info and registration on www.aperonet.be. Hope to see you there.
Jan 9 2007
After Wrangler, Total or Jean-Paul Gaultier, we’re happy to welcome a new international client with Center Parcs. And “happy” is indeed the right keyword here to talk about this display ad campaign promoting the “first minute deals” (the earlier you book your holiday, the less you pay) in three European countries (Belgium, Holland and Germany). Check out the first IMUs below.
Jan 8 2007
I’m with Josiane for one year. She’s cute, smart, fun, cultured, patient, elegant. In one word, she’s perfect. I admire her so much that I created a website fully devoted to my worship: www.ilovejosiane.be. Every day during the last 12 months, I’ve taken a picture published on my mobile blog. With all this material, I even assembled this short film – Josiane in 365 pictures, day after day, month after month, season after season.
Just tell me in the comments what you think about my new girlfriend.
Jan 5 2007
Yesterday evening at the Euronext Brussels Awards, we got “First Alternext Performer” (see picture below). This distinction emphasizes the excellent evolution of Emakina Group’s listing between 7th July and 31st December 2006, from 8.55 euros to 9.50 euros (+ 11,1%). Not too bad for a newcomer on stock markets 
. We thank our stakeholders for their trust and hope to do even better this year.
Jan 4 2007
After a short break due to sad circumstances, VW EscapeTV is back for a fifth issue. On cover: Faudel, Emmas Daumas, Vegastar, Kirsten Flipkens, keMo BMX… Hot, fun and available now for download.
