webqem blog

webqem is running a seminar on Adobe Connect focusing on driving down travel costs in your organization.

This event will include topics that will allow you to dramatically reduce training and travel costs while securely staying connected to people from all over the globe. We will show you how to create secure online meeting rooms within seconds, allowing you to communicate with greater frequency and quality and boost your audience attendance and participation. E-Learning, tracking and rapid content creation will also be covered.

The event will be running on the 18th May from 8am to 9:30am. It is to be  held at the Duxton Hotel, 1 St Georges Terrace, Perth, WA 6000 Au. If you would like to attend please email Thomast@webqem.com or register online.

webqem have long been supporters of the Sydney Breast Cancer Foundation, and several staff attended the 2009 Pink Ribbon Ball on Saturday 26th September in the ballroom of the Westin Hotel, Sydney.

The theme was black tie with a touch of crystal, and the event was MC’d by Charlotte Dawson, with entertainment from comedian Julia Morris, Diesel, dancers from The Australian Ballet and the dance band Suite Az.

Aragon was the raffle winner of $1000 worth of Jimmy Choo shoes, and was swamped by female admirers soon after. Chris and Les had the winning auction bid for the Marrakesh Date Night.

Luckily there is no footage available of the moves on the dance floor, but the following photos show a great time was had by all.

As developers at webqem we are encouraged to stay abreast of new and upcoming technologies. In May 2009 at Google I/O, their annual developer conference, Google announced Google Wave.

Google Wave is in its early days and it will be some months before it is available to the general public, however Google knows that in order to drive adoption of Wave once it is released it will need the support of third-party developers. With this in mind, Google have built a set of APIs in order allow Wave to be extended.

To help introduce Australian developers to the APIs, Google held a Wave API Developer Day at the Sydney Google office on 19 June 2009, which I attended. The day involved learning about the available APIs and then working with them to build something cool to show off at the end of the day. There was last minute “audience favourite” voting added, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my demo, the Napkin Gadget was voted the favourite!

The Napkin Gadget is an implementation of the idea of a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. With the Napkin Gadget you can do quick freeform sketches in a Wave. The Napkin Gadget is an Adobe Flash based Gadget, implemented using Flex – the only example of a Flash Gadget on the night!

The Gadget has been open sourced at Google Code, and as part of the informal “prize” it is currently the Featured Sample on the Google Wave API Samples Gallery.

An example of the Napkin Gadget embedded in a wave