Past Preservers teams up with Crimson Bamboo

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Past Preservers teams up with Crimson Bamboo to develop historical tours for iPhone app

NEW YORK CITY and CAIRO—March 21, 2011—Past Preservers and Crimson Bamboo LLC announced today that they would be teaming up to develop tours for Rama, Crimson Bamboo’s flagship augmented reality app for iPhone.

Named by BBC Travel in 2010 as one of the ten best new travel apps, Rama is a mobile phone platform that takes users on historical walking tours which not only tell the story behind the stops on the tour, but also show archival images of how those locations once appeared. Past Preservers, a historical and archaeological consultancy that has previously provided support for programming for such major television networks as the History Channel and Al-Jazeera International, will tap into its considerable media connections and expertise to produce innovative new tours on locations around the world, which will be sold directly to users on Rama.

“We are very excited to work with Past Preservers on offering new tours for Rama,” Michael Carroll, co-founder of Crimson Bamboo, stated. “We founded our company with the mission of delivering top-quality content to users while also providing authors with new tools for telling—and showing—history’s greatest stories. Past Preservers has one of the largest networks of historical and new media experts in the world and we are sure that the tours we produce with them will continue to expand Rama’s reputation for providing users with the opportunity to understand and experience history like never before.”

Both companies also stressed that, in addition to providing a new form of immersive content for users, the collaboration would also focus on serving the authors of the tours.

“Past Preservers has always been dedicated, first and foremost, to helping academics and professionals to earn money doing the things that they are most passionate about,” said Past Preservers’ president, Nigel Hetherington. “Rama not only offers the perfect opportunity to reach new audiences using one of the most cutting-edge platforms available, but also offers our clients a new opportunity to write first-class historical content that they can sell directly to customers. This is a truly innovative publishing model that we are convinced will really serve our clients’ interests.”

Historical walking tours jointly produced by the two companies will be available for purchase within the Rama app, and are generally priced between $0.99 and $2.99. Rama can be downloaded on iTunes at http://bit.ly/hM2ZGe

Crimson Bamboo is a New York City-based Limited Liability Company founded in March 2010, with the mission of creating new convergences between people, data, and the world.

Past Preservers, founded by Nigel J. Hetherington in 2005, taps into its extensive network of archaeologists, historians, Egyptologists, engineers, geologists, and other specialists to provide historical and archaeological consultancy and professional support to the media industry. With offices in Cairo and London and representatives throughout the Middle East, North America, and Europe, Past Preservers has a strong hold in the international media scene, having completed assignments for the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, Al-Jazeera International, TLC, and Living Channel.

CONTACT:

Lydia Wittgenstein
Crimson Bamboo LLC
lwittgenstein@crimsonbamboo.com
http://www.crimsonbamboo.com


Nigel Hetherington
Past Preservers
nigel@pastpreservers,com
http://www.pastpreservers.com

Teaser: AWDL

Would you like a preview of the the book viewer of ISAW's Ancient World Digital Library?  Come on in!

Comments are welcome below or to me directly.

TLG the victim of "coordinated pirate attackers"?

Apparently so:

Update (March 7, 2011):

The Online LSJ was released on February 24, 2011. Within hours of its release, our site became the target of individuals attempting to download our data. By March 1 our server was bombarded by hundreds of coordinated pirate attackers seeking to break into our server security. As a consequence, we were forced to suspend access to LSJ while we are taking steps to address the security of our servers.


We are working to reestablish access gradually and hope that LSJ will be back up within the next few days.

We regret the inconvenience this action has caused to our legitimate users.

Rumors, and a sound from long ago.

One of the very many rumors out of Egypt this week is that one of the the trumpets from Tutankhamun's tomb is a victim of the looting within the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.  I hope it isn't true.

The silver trumpet was played by a military bandsman, James Tappern, on BBC radio (and recorded) in 1939, using a modern mouthpiece, causing it to split. The bronze trumpet survived being played in 1939 and in 1941, the last time without a mouthpiece.  The recording was bundled into a version for delivery over the web in the 1990s, and was made accessible online by Hans van den Berg and Nigel Strudwick at the Website of the Center for Computer-Aides Egyptological Research (CCER) which, as you can see, has been closed down.  The Wayback Machine at the IA preserves the CCER text, but not the .exe file,  Fortunately, several other sited have preserved those files and you'll find them here:Trumpet.exe
Trumpet.zip

Even more fortunately, there is a much more elegant version at the Africa page of the Philharmonia Orchestra Sound Exchange.  Click on Tutankhamun's Trumpet, and press play.

I don't suppose it sounded like that in antiquity.