BrightLounge

For this interview, BrightLounge travels to Prague, one of the most visited historic centers in Europe and the home town of TechSquare, a startup accelerator with bold projects. We meet with and interview the founders of TechSquare: Nikola Rafaj and Petra Hubačová, who also organized TEDxPrague this summer.

Founded in 2011, TechSquare partnered with Credo Ventures to help some of the most talented young entrepreneurs in Prague turn their ideas into global businesses.

Meeting the startups at TechSquare, many of whom were still in the pre-launch stage, was a great experience. In this episode we included footage from inside TechSquare, including short intro interviews with Brand Embassy and Lonely Sock Games, two startups that managed to grow beyond local and became successful shortly after launch.

During our visit in Prague we attended two events organized by TechSquare. The first was a Mini Seedcamp for budding entrepreneurs and young startups where we got to meet Eduard Kucera, founder and CEO of Avast, one of the most popular antivirus programs in the world. Next we joined a group of entrepreneurs at the Czech premiere of Something Ventured, an event organized by TechSquare and Credo Ventures.

We hope that you enjoy watching this episode, and if you have suggestions for our future episodes, we would love to hear them! You can reach us via e-mail or Twitter @brightlounge.

Dwell on Design is by far one of the most renown conferences on interior design and architecture in the US. This year, Dwell brought some of the most prominent names in the sustainable design to Los Angeles, including Bryan Cranston, Emmy Award winning actor and sustainability advocate.

We arrived in LA just in time for Dwell on Design, so this episode is all about sustainability, green architecture and innovation in design. We bring you an interview with John Turturro, the Project Manager of 3Palms Project. 3Palms is one of the greenest homes in the US, a LEED Platinum certified house that Bryan Cranston is building, with the help of an exceptional team, in Los Angeles, California.

In addition to our interview with John Turturro, we talked with the leaders in pre-fab green buildings, such as BluHomes and Altius Architecture. We also met Resource Furniture, a company carrying a wide selection of multifunctional, space-saving furniture, and Architecture for Humanity, a non-profit organization empowering architects to create sustainable solutions for communities in need.

The collection of interviews in this episode of our video podcast is a reminder of the collective effort to make the sustainable design the norm, not the trend. Each company or architect present at this event wanted to send a clear message, that making responsable choices is a professional duty.

What do you think the future home needs or should look like? Send us your thoughts or join the conversation on Twitter on sustainable design!

Bogdan Rîpă and his partner Alexandru Costin are some of the few Romanian entrepreneurs that built successful software companies in the last decade. In 2006 they were acquired by Adobe and now have been given the task of taking Business Catalyst to the next level and preparing it for the Creative Cloud.

Alexandru and Bogdan are managing a team of over 200 people at Adobe Romania and working on re-designing and improving the BC platform. BrightLounge visited the team in Bucharest, Romania, shared our thoughts and wishes for Business Catalyst, and talked with Bogdan about his story and the strategic choices he had to make after becoming part of Adobe. It was a great experience and unique opportunity to meet the team at Adobe Romania, and we are excited to share this interview with you, whether you are web designers that are Business Catalyst veterans like us, or you just started using it as part of the Creative Cloud.

Since we are talking about entrepreneurs creating successful businesses, the remainder of this episode of BrightLounge is about some of the tools, apps and processes in our workflows, that we use every day working at Velora Studios and on other projects.

It’s always useful to learn about other designer’s workflows and favorite applications, so we have included a bunch of examples for you, such as:

using Text Expander to save time writing e-mails and code

saving images of your designs and using Kaleidoscope to see the adjustments

using RescueTime and to-do lists to manage your time effectively

finding the right color schemes with ColorSchemer

using Cornerstone as part of the your development practice

We would love to hear your thoughts on how can designers spend less time on routine tasks and become more productive. Also, if you have suggestions for future topics or know of a great guest for the next BrightLounge, send an e-mail or connect with us on Twitter!

Enjoy and remember to share this episode with your friends!

Croatia is a top rated country in Europe, and a fantastic location for nature-lovers. Besides visiting the famous Plitvice Lakes Park, we met up with UX designer and developer Marko Dugojnic, one of the most respected web standards professionals in Europe. He is also the creator of TypeTester, a nifty app helping web designers test fonts in the browser, and a speaker. Marko shares his story and a couple of tips on typography and how to become a top UX designer.

Web application development becomes our favorite topic for this episode, as we continue to talk about the tools and resources a web entrepreneur needs to build a great web app: from planning, to project management, to development and testing to pricing and launching. We discuss how to:

Plan to release a minimum viable product and decide what features need the most attention before launch

Choose a framework or toolkit for getting started quickly with your web app

Find dead-simple solutions for implementing specific features, such as real-time notifications and functionality, or a simple and solid payment gateway.

Test and optimize your app before launching

Build a user-base and promote your product

It’s a laid back episode with a bunch of useful tips and information. So enjoy and let us know about your own experience with building a web app!

The creative industry of fashion design has always had an intriguing relationship with technology. This episode we travel to Cebu, Philippines, to meet and interview couturier Cary Santiago, and learn about his unique use of laser cutting in fashion design.

Apart from discovering Cary’s fascinating story, we continued exploring the exciting islands of the Philippines. It may sound like a paradox, but spending some time on an isolated island in the Philippines, where so many things we’ve grown accustom to in modern life are brought back to basics, it got us thinking about the future. What is the future of e-commerce? What is the future of customer service? How is augmented reality going to play a part? These are a few questions we discussed in this episode. After learning our way around the area, we found a beautiful spot on the coast in Moalboal to relax and continue talking about current trends, augmented reality, mobile apps and e-commerce.

Entrepreneurs and designers, what are your thoughts on the future of e-commerce? What do you want to see happening? Let us know on twitter, @BrightLounge. Learn more about laser-cutting in fashion design and the future of e-commerce in our interview with Cary Santiago.

We hope that we will inspire you to travel some place new in the world. For anyone, especially creative people, traveling somewhere new can really help you learn about the world and bring inspiration to your work. Travel has inspired many of Cary’s designs, and of course it is an inspiration for us as well.

As always, if there is somewhere you’d like us to travel to, or someone you want to see interviewed, get in touch! If you enjoy BrightLounge, remember you can support us by supporting our sponsors. Take a look at our offers page.

BrightLounge goes to Thailand! Besides the amazing experiences and places we discovered during our trip to Bangkok (check out our facebook page for behind the scenes photos), we meet and interview Pitupong, the founder and lead architect of Supermachine Studio. Pitupong’s vision on the role of architecture and design in our lives is inspiring and unique. His work incorporates elements of the Thai culture and a creative mix of simple and original patterns.

Supermachine Studio is also known for their work on the Big Mountain Music Festival, where they handle master planning, lighting and stage design. In Bangkok Supermachine Studio worked on the interior design of BU Lounge and Saatchi&Saatchi offices. For Pitupong, architecture and design are about communication, making a statement and making things fun. Ideas like the Pangolin House and the Lo-Fi Pixel Wall speak about his interest in current matters in the Thai society.

This episode we are giving away four bottle openers designed by Supermachine Studio for the No Red No Yellow Campaign they started a couple of years ago. To enter to win and for more details on how to participate, check out the giveaway page!

In the second half of the show we talk about the future of content subscription, RSS readers and content focused apps like Feedly and Zite. What are your favorite RSS apps, and what do you think technology will change in the way we consume information in 2012? Send us your answers and suggestions via email or @BrightLounge and make sure you enter our giveaway by the 15th of January 2012.

Every episode of BrightLounge we travel to a different country, interview a new creative person and tell a new story. This time, we are in Romania, sharing our experience about freelancing while traveling and when multitasking can be good or bad. Our guest is identity designer Jacob Cass (through Skype, from New York), who is an experienced traveler as well, having traveled to 34 countries.

First we talk about freelancing while traveling. We share our thoughts on what items and applications are essential for traveling. Here’s a short summary of a few of the items we covered:

Dropbox: keep files in sync and avoid having to manually move them back to your desktop when returning home.

Skype: use and online number so you can call clients and they can call you at no extra charge. Also great for when you need to make a call locally in the country you are traveling in.

Apple Airport Express: a great travel item because it will allow you to quickly setup your own secure wifi network either by connecting it to a router or ethernet.

Remote Desktop Access: Make sure you are able to access files back home if needed. We recommend LogMeIn and Apple remote desktop.

Bootable Backup of Hard Drive: A backup is necessary If your laptop hard drive fails while traveling.

Strong VPN: Access websites that require a US IP address. Can be used for online banking or for familiar entertainment like Netflix and Pandora.

Travel Adapters: Bring a few to get everything plugged in. Also a solar charger for your phone can be useful to keep your battery charged while on the move.

If you have any additional tips or questions for freelancing while traveling, tell us on Twitter @BrightLounge.

As for the second topic, we explain the challenge of multitasking when working on a computer. We talk about some of our favorite apps for keeping productive and aware of time. Check out Awareness for a non-invasive way to keep track of time spent on the computer and Fluid to turn any website into an app in your dock.

Also, be sure to check out our new offers page for offers from our sponsors. We are happy to have Audible as a sponsor for this episode,  who is offering BrightLounge viewers a free audio book!

Welcome to BrightLounge, a laid back podcast about design, startups and technology, featuring interviews with inspiring creative people around the world. In BrightLounge 01 you learn who we are and how we started this podcast.

Also, we interview Ilija Studen (@istdn), founder of activeCollab – a powerful project management and collaboration tool that can be hosted on your server or local network. We’ve been using activeCollab ourselves since 2008, so we traveled to Novi Sad, Serbia, where the team is located. We hung out with Ilija, talked about what’s in store for version 3.0 and learned the story behind the product from the founder himself.

Additionally, three new apps made the second topic of our first episode: WalkIn, TripMedi (winners at Startup Bus, during SXSW in March 2011) and Qwiki. What are these apps designed to do? What new concepts are they built on and who can mostly benefit from using them? We found a couple of answers, weighted the pros and cons for each of them and wrapped it up with a big thanks to Vzaar, for providing video hosting for our show.

Check back in a couple weeks for our next episode where we interview identity designer Jacob Cass. Subscribe on iTunes so you receive future episodes automatically when they are released.