Working with BMW's ad agency Fallon was a wonderful experience even when we had to tear the player apart and rebuild it with less than a week to launch. They gave us tremendous freedom to be creative, and made us feel like an important part of the BMW Films team. They are a world class group of people.
Our roots
Donat Group was founded in July of 2002, but it all started in 1999 when founder David Gratton and two classmates from the Vancouver Film School launched one of the World's first weekly interactive video broadcast, VFS Live!, now recognized as a precursor to today’s podcasts and vodcasts. Ahead of its time, VFS Live! typified the kind of work that the team would continue to produce.
The VFS Live! team went on to found ici Media Inc, which quickly gained an international reputation for video and multimedia deployment on the Web. The ici Media mission to bring immersive experiences to Web audiences lead to several extraordinary experiences, including work for Green Peace, Disney, Apple, PBS, and the world-famous BMW Films project, to date still the largest single video deployment on the web.
In 2000, ici Media In developed TODD, a product for distributing and playing of music and video over the Internet. This innovative project had functionality that would not reappear until the release of iTunes Music Store in 2002. In 2001, Vancouver software developer Totally Hip acquired ici Media Inc and the TODD technology. During their time at Totally Hip, the ici Media team focused on multimedia training and consulting for a number of educational institutions including Harvard, University of Chicago and the University of Calgary.
TODD relied heavily on unreleased XML features. These features were coming in the next version of QuickTime that Apple was about to pull together. However, bugs were found in the code with less than two weeks to release. Our team hopped on a plane to Cupertino and worked with Apple engineers through the weekend to fix the bugs and QA the component. We even wrote an XML parser from scratch. QuickTime 5.0 with the XML component was released ten days later. The commitment of the Apple engineers to work through the weekend with a small Canadian company is an attitude we have taken with us in our own careers.
Donat Group
The core members of ici Media left Totally Hip in 2002 to found Donat Group Enterprises, where they returned their focus to web application development. With deep insight into the needs of educators in both the academic and corporate worlds, Donat Group was chosen to develop a sophisticated learning management system for Socrates Learning Systems whose clients included Wal-mart, Costco and Zeller's Pharmacies. Next, the Alberta Government’s Learning Technologies Branch called on Donat Group to develop a learning object repository interface for the entire K-12 market. Since the team has developed repository sites and infrastructure for Open School BC, Alberta Online Consortium, SciQ.ca, BCcampus and SFU, among others.
Having shaped many best practices for such projects, Donat Group began an internal project in 2004 to develop community architectures around large repositories that would aid in discovery, sharing and reuse of content. This research resulted in the formation of two independent companies in 2005, as well as a major contract in 2006 to develop an education and research community for NANOMED Canada.
Today, Donat Group works with many of the world’s top companies on projects that combine the best of e-learning and online communities. Much has happened since that first broadcast of VFS Live! but our core focus remains the same: to develop new and broader communication channels that provide rich, immersive experiences for online audiences.