It's a Deal

We can finally take the wraps off something we have been cooking up for a while. Raincity Studios has acquired Bryght (press release)! The expanded company will operate under the Raincity Studios banner and the Bryght name will live on through the hosting products (i.e. Bryght Light Sites and Bryght Virtual Private Servers will continue). Raincity Studios will also continue Bryght's work in leading edge technology like Jabber / XMPP and OpenID. And of course, all Bryght guys are now Raincity guys!

Looking forward by looking a wee back

The Bryght Guys first met Robert Scales, Mark Yuasa and the Raincity Studios folks at a New Media BC "Building 21st Century websites" event way back in November 18, 2004 (here's photographic evidence). Amazing to think that was almost exactly three years ago.

Raincity Studios become our new officemates at the beginning of October. We said goodbye to NowPublic as they moved into larger offices to accomodate their growing team.

This past Thursday, the Raincity crew took charge of their first 1 Alexander Thursday BBQ (we have an open offer for anyone to come by the offices on Thursdays at 12:30pm to join the BBQ...no need to RSVP, just come on down to the office). Burgers, smoked turkey, smokies, some veggie platters, and lots of Dr. Pepper were consumed.

Raincity Studios are long time partners of Bryght. Their very first year of operation, they built over 30 separate websites using our Bryght Light mass hosting platform. They're now a full services design and development shop, and doing great work all over the world (Robert is off visiting China with Kris Krug as of today).

Welcome, RCS crew, and thanks for being such great officemates (heck, you're even podcasting for us). You can see some of the pictures of their new space in our office with photos tagged with Raincity Studios on Flickr.

There's no need to wait for the mythical City of Vancouver WiFi. Build your own WiFi mesh today with a Meraki box imported by Mike West with some help from NetEquality. Bryght in combination with the folks at Outcome3, Nitobi, Donat Group Enterprises, Communicopia, Elastic Entertainment and more daily are "unwiring" our very large extended Gastown block (Alexander to Abbott-ish initially with the goal being everywhere in Gastown eventually) of tech friendly companies. This means that anywhere you are in the mesh you will be able to use WiFi.

Raincity Studios social media maven Dave Olson explains what this means:

QUOTE

When considering the usage patterns (home users at night, business user by day) there is certainly abundant redundant bandwidth available and yet no reliable way to just get online without trying a bunch of SSIDs, risking cleartext password, hacking through a backdoor or other scheme.

DrupalCamp LA was wonderful thanks to the incredible organization of Crystal (and others who I am too lazy to name here) and to the participants. Here are some thoughts on DrupalCamp LA and this part of California in general:

• People - loved meeting up with our close partners at WorkHabit (great to finally meet Earnest and Dominic) as well as meeting some new folks like Markus, Jen, Mike, Steve, the army from Achieve Internet (thanks for the drink and food on Saturday!) and many others
• Drupal Install Profiles - not only do you want one, but if you are a consulting shop, you need one, watch for Boris's follow-on presentation at DrupalCon Barcelona
• Deployment - as ably presented by Jonathan of WorkHabit and Mike - What happens if you have hundreds of sites and need to upgrade them? What do you do if you have a popular social media Drupal site with content being added continuously and users being added continuously and you want to upgrade it? Bryght and WorkHabit have been dealing with these issues since 2004, it's now hitting other big time firms in the Drupal ecosystem like Lullabot, Warner Brothers and Achieve Internet. DAST, AutoPilot, and Hostmaster 2 are the keywords to watch.
• Theming - I enjoyed the beginning of Milind's Drupal theming presentation. I wish I had time to synthesize all the Drupal theming presentations I have seen into one Godzilla kick a*s one :-)
• Venue - AOL Beverly Hills was spectacular. Great conference rooms, kitchen and lots of places to sleep, recharge and hold informal meetings and the bandwidth rocked. I uploaded many many photos at consistently at 100KB/second!
• Cars - shiny, big and expensive (many many Mercedes and BMWs) seems to be the order of the day. I drove brother in law Andy's 2001 BMW 330 for 20 minutes; I am not into cars but if I was it would be BMWs - I'll stick to cheap, cheerful and economical Japanese cars like Hondas. The taxi driver of Armenian heritage who took me to meet my Mom was thankful to his Filipino doctor and when he heard I was of Filipino heritage and meeting my Mom, he drove very fast and very safe in his big American taxi.
• Mirror World (à la Gibson's Pattern Recognition) - LA seems to be a subtly different mirror of those days in Vancouver when it's sunny: every street is big and wide unlike Vancouver, the sun shines perpetually unlike Vancouver which bizarrely had the same weather as LA but a few degrees cooler, there are freeways everywhere unlike Vancouver (which could have gone down that path but through hard work and accidents of history did not)
• Food: My brother in law took good care of me: delicious Japanese organic food at Fukada in Irvine, great coffee at Abbot's Habit, great Mexican food, yummy retro Italian American at Andre's with my Mom who happened to be in town and my aunt, can't wait to go back to Glendale and eat some seriously delicious and inexpensive Filipino food
• Capitalism: 15 million people with lots of entertainment money and geeks meant great shopping: Samy's rocks for photo stuff (bought a FireWire 800 Compact Flash Reader to replace my broken USB one) and I went to two Apple Stores and Fry's

Got a favourite Web 2.0 application, mobile game, digital short, game, digital effects, music score, something that qualifies as the 'best of BC' new media or some other cool new media? Then nominate it today for the PopVox Awards (fine print: must have been released between September 2006 and August 2007; check out the full rules). Nominations are free and the winners are determined by online voting, i.e. vote for your favs from September 8th-17th after nominations close on September 7th.

The winners will be announced at the opening of the Vancouver International Digital Festival aka Vidfest on September 22nd. The PopVox Awards are organized by New Media BC, the organization behind Vidfest, and the website was a collaboration between Bryght and our friends at Raincity Studios (check out RCS's PopVox announcement) with Bryght providing some custom Drupal coding and some Drupal design as well as hosting on a Bryght Virtual Private Server.