One thing we’ve learned from the recession is that movies are now considered “recession proof”.  People need the escape.  This can easily be seen from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which had a $160 million 5-day opening.  It was also the fastest movie to ever reach $350 million world-wide. I was somewhat surprised to find out that this movie would be offering an IMAX 3D experience as well.  Typically I think of the animated movies which can fairly easily crank out a 3D version of themselves.  However, digitally adding 3D scenes to a filmed movie requires a great amount of work from the production companies.  Why do it? Money of course.

Monsters vs. Aliens © Dreamworks Animation

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Filed under: Musings, Technology

One of the more complex software projects we have undertook at the IMA happens to be the one we talk least about publicly. Athena, is a Project Management System created by the IMA back in late 2007. At the time, there was a lack of a good open source solution and online commercial alternatives did not allow us to own the data. It also was our first chance to cut our Drupal teeth. I’m happy to look back at 18 months and see that it has been used quite successfully by most of the staff (and a lot of non-staff).

A view of a user dashboard

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Filed under: Technology

Social networks are going to be redefined.

Trying to keep up-to-date with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. is not a new problem.  There are entire desktop applications dedicated to aggregating this content for your consumption. Still I find myself drowned by the noise. It would be optimistic to say that a quarter of this social stream directly interests me. Additionally this content is decoupled from other forms of communication (i.e. SMS / e-mail).  These are some of the reasons why I am excited about the prospects of Google Wave.

Last week Google announced what can best be described as a communications platform.  It mixes traditional e-mail with a slew of modern features.  Real-time collaborative editing, event planning, and a game of chess are just a few of the tasks you can carry out from within the platform. — Anyone used SubEthaEdit? — The engineers developed Wave by asking themselves what e-mail would look like if it were invented today. The result is e-mail on steroids. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Technology

Last Friday night I thought I would check out the soft release of Wolfram Alpha.  I was greeted with the following:

So they were running into some load issues, but then again they’re not your traditional search engine.  Wolfram Research is the software company behind Mathematica.  Mathematica is to a mathematician as the utility belt is to batman.  Suffice it to say, it’s pretty amazing software.  It came as somewhat of a surprise that the company was launching a search engine.  They are quick to denounce themselves as a Google replacement.  Search results in Alpha present more thoughtful and curated responses — if it knows what you’re asking.

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Filed under: Technology

I thought I would follow up Ed’s MW2009 preview with an after the fact look at the online remnants of the conference.

Brooklyn Museum flat out swept the Best of the Web awards and their main website won the overall award.  A huge congratulations from all of us at the IMA for a well-deserved recognition. (Be sure to watch their virtual thank you.)  As if that weren’t enough, I totally missed the news that Brooklyn released an API for their collection.  Even better, someone has already created an iPhone app for them using it.  Open developer access to the IMA’s collection just got a huge bump in priority for me.

We had a great meetup with some of the tech staff of NYPL.  Their group is of a scale and quality that we are quite envious of.  We are greatly looking forward to future collaborations with them. (They’re an ArtBabble partner.)

In the presentation realm the IMA had a cloud computing talk, an evaluation of online video for museums, a solicitation for feedback for the Steve in Action IMLS grant, and an ArtBabble demo.  Other favorites from outside the IMA include alternate reality games, a galaxy of pop stars, and a massive update coming soon to ArtsConnectEd.

Our own Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO gave the opening keynote which you can watch in full on ArtBabble or at the bottom of this post.  It even inspired a great series on transparency for the Museums and the Web conference itself.

Filed under: Current Events, Technology