scales, robert scales

Citizens On the Ground

Raincity Studios Sino-Away-Squad of Scales and KK, are on the ground in Beijing to cover and participate in the Olympic experience as citizen journalism, technology experts, social pundits and cultural ambassadors.

The Glimmer Twins' tasks are diverse and their methods varied so here's a preview:

• participating in the 9th International Symposium on Olympic Studies, in Beijing, August 5-7 with Olympic scholar Dr. Andy Miah's
• documenting the scene for crowd-sourced new site: Now Public, Vancouver radio station: Crave 95, and BBC Interactive - among other media outlets



• shooting Creative Commons licensed photos delivered via Flickr
• extolling about the new, improved Bryght web community hosting product - available in free, cheap or fancy varieties
• meeting up with prospective clients to extol Raincity Studios' status as an approved weblog vendor for Vancouver/Whistler 2010
• cheering for Team Canada at the Archery, Fencing, Women's Softball, BMX and more summer games sports
• spreading international goodwill in the fun-loving/hard-working style they honed whilst at the Torino 2008 Winter Games.

September China Program Finalized

The September China trip is only a few weeks away. All of the details have been finalized and hotels and plane tickets have been booked. The crew will be making stops in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou, meeting with members of the business community and political figures. There is still time to jump on board if you have not already done so and join the team of business leaders who are making the trek. This is an opportunity of a lifetime to be a part of such a well orchestrated and strategic event. To find out more about upcoming Business Visit Programs in Beijing please, click here

Click here to Register for the September Program.

China Access 2008 is a strategic international business marketing and partnering initiative that has been consciously structured to help China better realize the unique economic development potential arising from Beijing’s hosting and staging of the 2008 Olympic Games.

The venture was publicly launched in Beijing by Vice Mayor Lu Hao in December 2004.

China Access 2008 will utilise the years leading up to the staging of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games to:

NewsForge: More On BarCamp

Bruce Byflield of NewsForge joined our group at BarCampVancouver last week-end. As it turns out, he had a pretty swell time: met some good people, was thoroughly impressed with the organization, learned a lot, was intellectually stimulated, and seemed to have had some fun along the way.

You can read his article in its' entirety online here. In it, Bruce highlights some of his positive experiences, while suggesting on how the Camp might improve as well.

Below is an small excerpt from his article after speaking with me after my session on Open Source Business.

"Open Source Business" by Robert Scales, the president and CEO of Raincity Studios. Scales explained his conviction that an open source business model was about more than working with technologies like Drupal and Ruby. Instead, Scales has tried to build his business as a cooperative, offering generous benefits and bonuses and encouraging employees to attend conferences. In addition, he has tried to build reciprocal relations with companies in the same line of business so that they can recommend each other when one is unavailable to work with a potential customer. Last year, he even went to the extent of making the company's financial position public , even though Raincity is not publicly traded. While he could not detail individual employees' salaries or the size of contracts due to Canada's privacy laws, he did give overall figures for both. "I'm really open," he says, sporting a Mohawk and all black clothes... However, it seemed obvious that, for all the humour, for Scales, his business model was not so much a buzz word as a way of life.

My first SXSW, I spent 10 days in Austin, Texas armed with a video camera, a digital SLR and my mac! In my hand a platinum and photographer pass giving me access to almost all events and venues in town for the film, interactive and music festival.

Raincity Studios and Bryght hosted a party with our friends at Blue Flavor and Newsvines.

Bryght had a booth in the Convention Centre, where I spent the best part of my afternoon chatting with geeks and rockstars alike. Helping Colin and kk to promote Backstage and our services.

Ponzi stopped by one afternoon and did a podcasts with me and one with KK, you can listen to mine on the Chris Pirillo Show.

It’s that time of year again, where hundreds of web geeks make the
long trek down south to city of Austin for South by Southwest
Interactive. Now, anyone who has gone to SXSW knows fairly well
that the best part of the conference is all of the parties that go on
after hours. With that said I am happy to invite you to South by
Northwest sponsored by Blue Flavor, Bryght, Newsvine and Raincity
Studios. There will be lots of beer, wine and margaritas to suck
down. Be sure to bring your digital cameras because there is nothing
more bloggable than drunken web geek celebrities.

I've been in contacts with the guys at AskANinja.com over the past 2 days and it they just hired Raincity to develop their new website.

Stay tuned over the next few days, we will talk more about their new upcoming community site.

Here's some of the podcasts I recorded at Massive 2006.

Chatting with Graham about the launch of his podcast

Having a chat with Mark, TechVibes Marketing lead, about the event

Chatting with Philip Djaw

On Location at Massive 2006 with Bryght at booth 253 in the Peer 1 Pipeline

Raincity Studios is at Massive Techvibes 2006, at the Telusphere (formerly know as Science World) for the second year, come visit us at the Bryght booth in the Peer One Pipeline.

It’s a great time to get to know us, our work and get first hand answ

Raincity checking in from Torino, Italy where we participated in a symposium on Web 2.0 and the Olympics in collaboration with New Media BC.

We’ve been very busy over the past week working on various events, meeting local new media companies and building our network.

Back in Canada, the Raincity team is busy; we have many cool projects going live this coming month and the production team is working hard to create and develop various projects for our clients. We’re also helping Bryght develop their next product, Backstage, due to beta launch at SXSW next month.

Press Release posted on New Media BC Website

February 2, 2006

Vancouver, BC - New Media BC announced today that there will be a BC led new media symposium in Torino, Italy, during next week's Winter Olympics.

The event, billed as "Olympics and Web 2.0", and slated for February 17th, will showcase a pioneering cluster of British Columbia companies leading a shift towards Web 2.0 - what is being called the evolution of the Internet.

Another fine segment of the Krug and Scales Show.

Checking in from Robson Square in Vancouver. Kris Krug and I are talking about Skateboarding, SXSW and the party we are hosting with Blue Flavor, News Vine, Bryght and Raincity Studios.

Roland Tanglao of Bryght host a weekly podcast called Roland Rabble. He co-host the show with Will Pate of Raincity Studios and Michael Tippet of Now Public (not in attendance this week). They Have special guest and cover a wide range of topics such as social networking tools, conferences, technology, marketing and other cool things happening in Vancouver.