The Challenge

Effective collaboration during complex creative team projects is an unrivaled challenge. Countless emails or update notifications cross paths and often cause confusion as well as issues with version control.

To overcome these challenges, Bluescape set out to develop a platform that would help business service operators and advertisers develop creative concepts interactively, in real-time, across multiple devices and geographies. The company wanted to ensure that concepts could be shared internally and with clients for rapid ideation, iteration, and implementation on a number of different platforms.

A first iteration of the cloud-based software platform was written for a multi-touch graphic wall. According to Demian Entrekin, CTO of Bluescape, the team found that the first development environment they used did not provide enough flexibility or headroom, so the company started looking for alternatives.

Working with Qt

With the help of The Qt Company Professional Services, the Bluescape team quickly built tools and objects that users could interact with in real-time. The collaborative wall features an unprecedented amount of workspace that spans 160 acres – that's more than 145 football pitches. It also enables multidirectional voice and video and event tracking, making it ideal for customer presentations, strategic planning, rapid ideation, client approval, creative execution, media planning/buying, and risk analysis.

“There are three key advantages to using Qt: The first is the speed of development. The second advantage is the large amount of money that increased development speed saves you. And the third is Qt's reliability, which has helped us minimize the risk during the development of such a complex platform.”

Entrekin explained that one of the advantages of working with The Qt Company service engineers was the amount of insight and understanding about the platforms development pipeline, so the team could stay on top of new technologies and features as well as being able to provide feedback and requests in a real two-way conversation.

“One of the biggest surprises for me about using Qt is that there were no surprises – it really delivered what we wanted it to deliver, and then more,” said Entrekin.