2010 introduces a complete redesign and redevelopment of the festival site, including the backend content- and relationship management system. Makalu will be leveraging the event management and promotion software that we’ve been developed during the past four years, and presently used to operate Marek Lieberberg’s concert and event promotion site, MLK.com.

In addition, as with all our recently developed and deployed products, Rock-am-Ring 2010 will be leveraging the scalable performance of Amazon EC2 virtual operations environment, with its CloudFront content distribution network (CDN).

Be sure to check out Rock-am-Ring.com!

To help Javier in his quest to again become a Spanish champion and to support Makalu in its social initiative Consigue tu Ilusión (“Follow Your Passion”), Makalu has agreed to provide exclusive sponsorship of the Spanish athlete during the 2009/2010 season.

Consigue tu Ilusión will be a social initiative launched by Makalu, focused on the region of Andalucia, Spain, promoting the benefits of pursuing one’s passion, through persistence, hard work, dedication and individual responsibility.

As part of this initiative, Makalu intends to establish a fund to provide scholarships to young people in Andalucia to study abroad, and to provide venture capital to start-ups in the region.

As part of the program, Makalu will soon be launching a website dedicated to the initiative. Be sure to follow us here, and on Twitter for future related announcements.

Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA), Qponix worked with Makalu Interactive to design the user-interaction and user-experience of its online products. Through an iterative and highly collaborative process, Makalu worked with Qponix to design a user-experience which effectively communicates the usefulness, value and usage of the innovative (and fast-growing) concept of the web-based widget.

Says Corbin De Rubertis, CEO of Qponix:

“Working with Makalu is great. Apart from their product design capabilities, what we perhaps value most is their ability to efficiently and effectively integrate into our team and our workflow. With minimal input and guidance, they have an exceptional ability to always know exactly what is needed.”

Google chose MakaluMedia to design, develop and operate the online game which anchored the ambitious campaign. The game needed to be fun, engaging, accessible, responsive, supportive of the strategic objectives, and compatible with the context of in-flight play. Through an intense, iterative (and fun!) process involving the creation of game mechanics, visual and interaction design, and technical front-end and back-end development, the final product emerged.

In addition to the challenges of game mechanics and interaction design — which we’ll present in a future article — the project presented a variety of implementation and technical challenges as well. To provide a dynamic and engaging, yet lightweight and responsive user interface, the client-side component of the game was developed using JavaScript and the jQuery library. In order to rapidly scale in terms of performance under heavy load, the server-side application was developed in Python, and hosted in the Google AppEngine environment. The application supported a number of external interfaces, including a game data initializer from Google Docs, and an external real-time monitoring application.

At midnight on June 24, the switch was flipped, and the game was launched. Throughout the day, players throughout the United States — including passengers on all Virgin America flights — competed against each other in an online scavenger hunt, using Google Apps to help answer as many questions as possible during the one-hour game. At 6:00 am, two special press flights — with some of the world’s top puzzlers onboard — left Los Angeles and San Francisco, in direct competition against each other and documented in this video by BoingBoing:

All of the hard work and passion put into the project from the teams at Google, Virgin America and Makalu was rewarded in the experience of a perfectly executed campaign. Reviews were glowing, and the positive buzz surrounding the campaign reinforced the positions of Google and Virgin America as innovative leaders in their respective markets.

Announcements of the winners, video interviews and a permanently-playable version of the game are maintained at the Day in the Cloud site. Be sure to check it out.

http://www.dayinthecloud.com/

Although we’re still a long way off, recent events — in which MakaluMedia staff have played an important part — have brought us a few steps closer to such a world.

MakaluMedia hacker and researcher Arto Bendiken has long been interested in distributed systems, and “information about information”, and naturally developed an interest in the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF, in short, is a technology that allows the representation of data as “knowledge”. If two independent systems store their data in RDF, and share common semantic “vocabularies”, then the two systems can effectively share their “knowledge”. What does RDF look like? A simple example has been taken from this Quick Introduction to RDF.

  @prefix : <http://www.example.org/> .
  :john    a            erson .
  :john    :hasMother  :susan .
  :john    :hasFather  :richard .
  :richard :hasBrother :luke .

As it happens, our Drupal team, led by Arto, has been working for a few years on a project with our colleagues at M.C. Dean and Raincity Studios in the development of a sophisticated collaboration and communication platforms for the US government, based on the Drupal platform. (Certainly it represents one of the largest and most complex Drupal instances in the world.) This platform presently supports more than 60 international clients servicing use cases ranging from policy definition collaboration, to natural crisis management, to school operations in the African continent.

This project represents a natural fit for RDF technology, given the value realized in sharing “knowledge”, not just “data”, between the various instances of the platform, as well as the growing number of other RDF-enabled systems around the world. Towards this end, the project team has been working intensively during the past months to design, develop and begin to integrate an RDF storage, management and access framework into Drupal. And since a primary objective of this project is to release the developed products as freely available open-source software, much of this RDF work can be tracked and accessed from the Drupal RDF project page.

Given that Drupal forms the core technology of the platform , the project team naturally maintains a close relationship with the its founder and leader, Dries Buytaert. In guiding the evolution of the Drupal platform, Dries has always demonstrated a willingness to take bold steps in the direction of progress, and this has been evidenced once again this week. In his keynote speech at the Drupalcon Boston 2008 conference, Dries made the big announcement that the future versions of Drupal (beginning with version seven), will be based on RDF.

Drupal presently dominates the market of open-source content management systems, and so this announcement represents a huge step forward to the building of a truly “Semantic Web”. If interested, you can read various reactions from the blogosphere at Network World and SitePoint.

We are tremendously proud to have been a part of this progress, and look forward to continuing work towards a world of networked knowledge.

LogBook is a modern browser-based application which will replace paper-based operational log books in use through Eutelsat, and which will feature an open API to all components of the satellite control center, allowing centralized logging of all operational events.

ESA has already developed several generations of multi-mission TT&C processors — the DSTS and MPTS in the 1980s, and the IFMS in the mid-1990s. The IFMS is currently used in the majority of ESA missions.

After more than a decade of successful TT&C service from the IFMS, it is time that a new-generation TT&C processor is considered, to address future mission requirements.

Makalu is proud to have been awarded a sub-contract with BAE Systems (UK) to participate in a study of the architecture of the next-generation system, leading to the production of a demonstration breadboard. In this activity, Makalu will provide input, support and review for the overall system functional analysis, design, and architecture, as well as demonstration breadboard development and validation.

The future system will encompass all the existing features of the IFMS and TMTCS, as well as address requirements for future missions, such as:

• Far tones for Delta-DOR, as per CCSDS recommendation.

• PN (pseudo-noise) ranging with larger input bandwidths (for Bepi-Colombo and future Deep Space missions).

• Acquisition of very low Es/No signals, allowed by the use of Turbo codes.

• Autonomous operation of the receiver, able to recognize the signal received prior to its demodulation, independently from configuration.

• Higher data rates up to 1 Gb/s (for Earth-observation and new astrophysics missions).

• Advanced modulation schemes, like MOHMS.

• Incorporation of the Telemetry and Telecomand processing and SLE services in a single TT&C machine.

• Open loop storage of wide-band and low SNR signal samples, as needed for Delta-DOR ranging or tones in EDL phases.

This project follows the ESA study for the use of 25.5-27 GHz band in ESA ground stations, performed in 2006-2007, to which Makalu also contributed.

TeleViews is a modern and innovative system used to archive telemetry, commands and events for all Eutelsat satellites, and to provide a browser-based interface to data visualization and related services.

To achieve this, a modification to the IFMS application software was required, in order to implement this frequency pre-steering function, based on the spacecraft expected trajectory files.