Stimulant Listed as one of 2012′s Fastest Growing Companies

Stimulant was awarded a place on Inc. 5000′s “Fastest Growing Companies in America” and San Francisco Business Times’ “Fastest Growing Bay Area Companies.”  A big thank you to all of our collaborators and clients for helping make the past five years a success for our team at Stimulant!

2012 Event Design Awards

Stimulant won Gold for “Best Use of Interactive Technology” in the 2012 Event Design Awards for our “Connect to Life” exhibit for Intel at CES 2012. The Event Design Awards represent “the best of the best among this industry’s change agents,” and we’re honored to share the award with lead agency Foghorn Creative, and collaborators WorldStage, 2LK and the Taylor Group.

The full article, including a list of all winners, is online here.

Stimulant Takes Top Honors at IxDA Interaction Awards 2012

Stimulant, alongside collaborator Sifteo, was honored with a pair of awards at the Interaction Design Association’s (IxDA) inaugural Interaction Design Awards at the Interaction 12 conference in Dublin on February 3rd. Our creation, LoopLoop, a groundbreaking music sequencer for tiny devices called Sifteo cubes, took top prize in ‘Best in Category, Expressing’ as well as ‘Best in Show’ among all category winners.

Sifteo cubes, the brainchild of MIT-educated President and co-founder David Merrill and CEO and co-founder Jeevan Kalanithi, are 1.5-inch-by-1.5-inch devices that can operate in tandem with up to five counterpart cubes. LoopLoop allows users to improvise their own musical tracks layered with various samples and beats by “bumping” loops onto a sequencer cube from an instrument cube. Users can manipulate the cubes – which are aware of their own orientation, tilt, direction and proximity to one another – by physically moving them or touching them to one another.

Stimulant designed LoopLoop after Sifteo invited the company to become the first third-party agency to build an application for the platform, and contribute to the launch of a portfolio of games that focus on kinesthetic learning, spatial reasoning, and collaboration.

“We wanted to give anybody the ability to make great music, whether they were talented or not,” explained Stimulant Founder and CEO Darren David. “As the first outside agency to build something for the Sifteo cubes, we wanted to change the perception that these were just child’s toys and show this could in fact serve as a development platform.”

“This was just a tremendous collaboration from start to finish,” continued David. “We’re proud to share this award with Sifteo, as our application and the interaction model of the cubes were essentially inseparable.”

“The team at Stimulant was totally in their element creating LoopLoop,” added Sifteo’s David Merrill. “We worked together to identify the type of application that would push the capabilities of our brand-new game platform to the limit, and the result is simply awesome. LoopLoop is a perfect example of the kind of virtuosic design and development success that Stimulant excels at, and we’re excited to collaborate with them again in the future.”

The dual Interaction Awards victories are especially notable when considered alongside the studio’s big-name competition, which included Microsoft, CP+B, HUGE, and R/GA among many others. “IxDA clearly featured a competitive field of companies,” noted Darren David. “We’re extremely fortunate and humbled to have been grouped with such a talented field. LoopLoop gave us the opportunity to do what we do best, which is make engaging content for brands we admire.”

Stimulant’s Sifteo cubes project follows a stream of high-profile work, including an innovative application for the Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface platform and a 168-foot-wide interactive 3D virtual life simulation for Intel’s booth at CES 2012.

Stimulant makes iMedia Connection’s “2011 West Coast Agencies to Watch” List

iMedia Connection released their 2011 West Coast Agencies to Watch list today, featuring 25 forward-looking firms on this side of the Mississippi. We’re honored to be in such excellent company!