Every year at Softeq, we enjoy coming up with a unique Christmas gift for our clients. Given that innovation is one of our core cultural company values, it can’t be something standard or off the shelf. We can’t just send a flat 2D Christmas card...so for the past 27 years, the Softeq Christmas card has been a 3D pop-up card. This year’s 3D card is a rocking horse. 

Our 2024 3D Christmas Card

Our Christmas gift is an opportunity for me to get a little creative, dabble in some artwork (using AI nowadays, of course), write some poetry for the card in the box (original, no AI), and sometimes do some programming. This year I created the poem artwork using the AI tool Midjourney. Simply amazing what you can do now with AI.

I enjoy giving myself a new challenge when I write poems, and this year I decided to incorporate our mission of Creating a Better Future as the first letter of each line.

A fun fact...the card is 3.5" x 3.5", which is the exact size of a 3.5" floppy disk. 💾 If you've been in the industry as long as I have, you used your share of floppies. A whole 1.44Mb of information in your pocket! Not even enough to store a photo nowadays. If you weren't around back then, you know it as the "Save" icon in most programs. 😆

A collection of some of our past Softeq Christmas Gifts

I love gadgets and puzzles, and for inspiration, we start by looking at whatever new gadgets I’ve added to my desktop collection over the past year. We also think back to the ideas we had in previous years that were runners-up and perhaps make better sense this year, either due to cost, or timing, or theme.

Whatever the gift, it has to reflect Softeq's brand and value in some way. For example, our cribbage board couldn’t just have a standard set of cards. Ours had to have programming on them and with executable code in 13 languages, including an obfuscated programming language called Befunge. Learn more about the inspiration behind our cribbage board and card deck, including Befunge.

In 2022, we gave a Kalimba, also known as a Thumb Piano. Why? When IBM was hiring programmers in the early days of computers (the 1960’s) almost no one was trained in computer programming. There were no Computer Science majors in those days, so IBM hired musicians and trained them to code, because they already understood the abstract nature of encoding data into something that could be "played."I love to hire for aptitude more than experience, and more companies should still be doing that today. Learn more about the Kalimba and the inspiration behind it.

My desk is the inspiration for many of our gifts

And last year we gave out the Shashibo Cube, partly inspired by my love of geometry and fond memories of my 3rd grade teacher Mr. Brilliant (yes, his actual name). Learn more about the Shashibo Cube and the inspiration behind it.

Chris with his teacher Mr. Brilliant

Our long-term clients now look forward to this gift each year and even collect them. Some keep them on their desks as a desktop gadget, and others bring them home to their kids. Adults and kids alike should get at least one fun toy for Christmas! If it brings a smile to someone’s face, we’ve succeeded.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-- Arthur C. Clarke

I've always loved this quote, and I thought it would be fun to give a magic gift this year. The Magic Mind Reader Cards, while not advanced technology themselves, are still based on the very essence of technology. 

They work because the cards are actually Base 2, or Binary. Each card represents one "bit" in the number. You can see the numbers in the top left corners are powers of two: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32. Let's visualize why:

 0     1     0     0     0     1    (binary)

32    16     8     4     2     1    (decimal)

Cards only containing the number 17

Let's say our friend chooses 17. The number 17 has two bits set in binary, and appears only on the cards 16 and 1. Why? Because 010001 binary == 17 decimal. All the numbers on the 16 card have that "bit" set in binary, and the same with the 1 card. Binary is what all computers "think" in.

Just as Clarke said, the science here looks like magic! If you want the trick to look even more amazing, arrange the cards in numerical order, and give the answer from a distance. You can add up the numbers because you know the order of the cards.

The other side of the cards contains Softeq's Mission of Creating a Better Future and our five values of Trust, Empathy, Collaboration, Commitment, and Innovation. 

Softeq's Mission and Values

You can learn more about our mission, vision, and values on our website. Culture is important at Softeq, and our Teqies actively live our values

We hope you enjoy playing with the Mind Reader cards, and we wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas!