Like it? Please keep your money in your pocket and do us a real favor by spreading it around and drop us a line, explaining what you’ve used it for.

Major credits go out to Alex Cerilla for making this icon set possible.

As the Palomar5 blog reads, the setting of the event was quite simple:

In our humble office with a granny’s chair, loads of pillows and the dim light of a billion candles we familialy calmed down and curiously listened to the three invited speakers’ stories about failure.

The result was magical. The situation was intimate, honest, at some moments silent (but never awkward), inspiring and optimistic to its core. While this event was invite-only, we will definitly organize another Fail Conference in the near future. Be sure to get in touch with us if you want to be involved. Word has it that the next #failcon will be in Amsterdam.

The video was filmed, directed and produced by KS12, the photo’s were taken by Laurent Hoffmann & Georgiana Tugui.

After spending the last nine months at our office at Mehringdamm, we’ve moved to a new location. It’s quite a unique place, because Ku’damm (as the locals call it), is one of the most famous shopping avenues of Berlin. Famous for its big cars, fashion designers, German celebrities, blonde Russians and cookies, Ku’damm is a place we’re excited to work in. A special thanks goes to Schindler Parent, who are kindly offering us this place to us.

We’re looking for a new office space:

Ideally, the place should be at least 35 square meters for us. We would prefer a place in Kreuzberg, Neukölln or Mitte. It can also be a shared working space environment, because we have a lot of friends who are also looking to rent a place.

If you know anything, please get in touch with us.

We got the data from Just, who made a tool called Social Stitch to aggregate social media activity. Using the data of Twitter, Flickr, MobyPicture and LinkedIn, we were able to map the usage of social media throughout the three days of the event. Every day, the visitors would be given a Daily News with information about the day before with articles, the schedule and the graphics we did.

We had a lot of fun interpreting all that data that we found a during the event. Using the dense stream of information, we were able to visualize patterns, behaviours and other interesting facts. For the event organizers, the infographics were very helpful to understand the attendees. We also got a lot of nice feedback from the visitors, who were surprised to find out how accurate the graphics summarized the different parts of the event.

The visuals were used for the web, large screens, posters and the daily news magazines.

The first track concerned ‘political’ data and the way government data can be used. Richard Pope (UK) of the Rewired State, had an interesting talk about why governments should make data accessible for citizens. According to Pope, apps should always be ‘relevant, actionable and generative’.

The second track of day they was about the way government services can be improved and the role that data could have in this field. Ton Zijlstra, who has been working with governments for a very long time, was moderating this track. One of the topics that was discussed, was the founding of data.overheid.nl, a future platform for open government data of The Netherlands.

At the end of the day prizes have been awarded to the best projects of the day. Tikker, a future application where you can see what is being said about politicians on different social networks, won the third prize. Second prize went to They Promised, an app that you can use to keep track of the promises politicians have made. The winner of the HackdeOverheid was Toevallig of Niet, a platform that lets user see relations between persons using different databases and the API of LinkedIN. The last project will be supported by the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers and us to develop it further.

To see the full list of submitted projects, you can check out the website of HackdeOverheid. At the moment, we’re working on a new brand identity of the annual event, so stay tuned.

Every line equals one nuclear warhead. The size of the lines are the theoretical maximum range of the nuclear weapons. This is assuming that the missile is launched from a home country. For some countries, this is not relevant due to the availability submarines and bombers. The steam graph shows the total amount of warheads in the world. As you can see, both the US and Russia are starting to dismantling them at a slow rate.

If you live in The Netherlands, you can see the visualization as a spread in the latest Bright Magazine (#33). Also, this is the first one of a series of data visualizations for upcoming Bright Magazines. If you want a high resolution image or if you want to use the visualization for a different purpose, feel free to contact us.

We expect you to:

- Make beautiful data visualizations for magazines, websites and other
media;
- Find new ways to tell stories;
- Create excellent UI’s;
- Make mistakes. We have a rich company culture of making mistakes and we expect you to be a part of this.

What’s in it for you:

- You get to work at the chocolate factory;
- We serve home brew espresso from freshly ground Arabica beans;
- Flexible working hours;
- A paycheck. We only hire great interns and great interns deserve to get paid accordingly;
- An awesome working environment with a lot of creative freedom.

To apply

Send us an e-mail with your portfolio and a brief description of why you’re interested.

Update: The position has been filled and we’ll introduce him shortly.

Companies such as 7digital, Echonest, Twones, RjDj, Last.fm, 3voor12, Songkick, SoundCloud will all be opening up their full API’s to the developers. Several of these companies will in fact be launching new API’s or extending their existing offerings especially for the event. Meanwhile workshops will be held by Steim and the TU Eindhoven – who will explore the physical realm of music.

The goal of the event is to rapidly prototype and build new projects, working through the night to complete them in time and present them on Sunday afternoon. A selection of prizes are then awarded by the companies to the teams who produce the best ideas using their API’s.

And to make Music Hack Day Amsterdam even better, we need you! Registrations are open, so if you haven’t signed up, now is the time to do so. Signups are going fast and there are only a limited amount of places available. You can sign up here.

Update: Music Hack Day Amsterdam was a blast! You can see the list of more than 40 hacks and prototypes here.

Two weeks later Floris and Roel arrive in Berlin. The Your Neighbours team is complete and after a few days, we move into the offices of Palomar5, an innovation hub in Berlin. The first few days are strange, we split the roles, make endless to-do lists and start to work together for the first time of our lives. We’re now a web agency based in Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Our team consists of several disciplines that complement each other. Founded in 2009, Your Neighbours is owned and managed by:

Edial Dekker – concept & strategy.
Floris Dekker – design & art direction.
Roel van der Ven – development & technology.
Kamiel Blom – audio & video.

Unlike our short existence would suspect, we’ve already worked with clients who are a lot smarter than us. Among others, we’ve worked with Nokia, Deutsche Telekom and Universal Berlin. Our personal network is influential, supportive and helps us to be flexible at all times.

You can find more information here if you want to know what we’re doing exactly.

The concept.

Instead of having a fancy homepage and an even fancy-er blogpost page, we decided we wanted to create something that would work for all the different kind of posts we want to write here. There has a been a lot of writing about certain people who design a new template for every post they write, and we think that’s a great idea. However, having 3 people who want to be writing blogposts on a weekly basis, it just wouldn’t work out for us. Of course we still wanted to be the coolest kids on the block so we came up with a solution. We have several templates for different kind of posts. This way we can keep experimenting with new templates, which can then be re-used over and over again. Right now we’ve made three unique templates, one for ordinary blogposts (focussed on readability), one for projects (focussed on imagery) and one for video (focussed on showing the video in a unique way).

The grid.

It’s 5 columns.

The navigation.

Since most of our visitors will go straight to a blog post anyway, we didn’t really see any use for cluttering the interface with a horizontal menu bar on top or a column full of distractions next to the text. So instead we made a nice little menu that you can always find on the top of the page and should navigate you through the rest of the website.

The technical stuff.

This site runs on WordPress with a custom Lighttpd configuration to speed up things. We’ve made an extensive post on setting up and tuning this here.

If you want to know more about Your Neighbours and what we do, please read our introduction post. Also, we’d love to hear your opinions on the website so feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with us.