Browns Brewing Company is one of the first (and in our opinion, best) brew pubs in the New York Capital Region. Their dependable ales and lagers have been a vital fuel source and lubricant for the jackadam machine, and in 2007 we helped them build their new website — along with an innovative and intuitive content-management system.
When Jenny Holzer was invited by Mass MoCA to fill their massive football-field-sized Building 5 with an assortment of projected texts, jackadam was charged with the task of visually documenting the project on the web. We provided them with a high quality computer-controlled pan/tilt/zoom camera that takes live pictures of the installation and streams them to the Mass MoCA website. The end result is what we’ve dubbed a “live photostream” — a slideshow of what is currently happening in the space — which results in a much higher quality image than what streaming video can offer.
Dailysonic was one of the first podcasts to hit the scenes back in 2005. It combined intriguing and entertaining original content from numerous contributors with a smattering of high technology for automatically splicing together and delivering these segments as customized episodes to individual listeners. Adam was the lead developer for this custom-episode technology (as well as the weekly science correspondent).
Working with ace programmer George Ardeleanu, Jack built a new website for our favorite creative agency, id29, in record time. Their site is built using the finest in standards-based techniques, ensuring it looks good in every browser and ranks high in Google searches. And, of course, we built them a powerful system for updating their site with up-to-date agency news and client info.
id29 came to us with a hilarious script they had written several years earlier that they wanted to make into a short video. After giving them some feedback on the script we directed, shot and edited the movie and built them a website to host it that included a simple guestbook so that people could leave their raving reviews. Who but jackadam gives you all this? Nobody, that’s who.
Jack worked at Vidvox for five years, growing it from a two person company to a four man S.W.A.T. team while releasing nearly a half dozen programs in the process. Vidvox makes software for live video performances; used on everything from the last Beastie Boys tour to pre-visualizing editing and effects for motion pictures. While at Vidvox Jack designed, developed, and released the video remixing program GRID in just under two months.
Oftentimes we are asked to make websites that, while requiring editable content, just don't warrant a full-fledged relational database like MySQL. So we created Angstrom, an extremely lightweight PHP database system that uses human-readable text files to store data. You throw the Angstrom directory onto your server and it just works™. Using Angstrom, we have been able to significantly cut down the implementation time of simpler websites. Small is sexy.
Jack and Adam work for Open Box Technologies, Inc. (alongside four other awesome guys) developing this new tool to help people work with video on the web. It's got a convenient API for uploading, storing, and managing video as well as encoding into a wide variety of formats for different devices. Whether you work in PHP, Ruby, Javascript, or plain old HTML, SesameVault lets you throw video around like you actually know what you're doing.
Manglepod was inspired by the dynamic audio creation technology behind the Dailysonic podcast. It is an open-source suite of tools developed by Adam and another Adam for stitching MP3 audio files together on the fly, dynamic ad insertion, ID3 tag manipulation, and dynamic RSS feed load balancing. Plus it has a cool name.
a.k.a Dynamic Digital Signage, a.k.a. Some Fancy Plasma Screen With All Your Company's Info on It. Whether it's in a retail space or an office, a large screen displaying relevant content can be useful in a million ways. It could even include live data pulled off the internet. We could build someone an easy to use system for updating and scheduling information for display using the slickest motion graphics this side of the Mason-Dixon line... screw it, either side of the Mason-Dixon line.
A simple idea: You upload all your videos in any format to our website, they're converted [via SesameVault], and delivered to your iPhone or iPod. And using the Apple iPhone video cable, your movies and TV shows can be viewed on any TV at DVD quality. As long as you're in range of wifi, you can have your entire video collection with you at all times.
Glove that is also a phone. Nuff said.