Light barriers, PCBs and a connection to the cloud turned our agency foosball table into world’s first digital foosball table. Our custom-developed software displays live-scores on- and offline, counts all games towards the agency league and tweets the results.We released the do-it-yourself instructions for the hard- and software as open-source on the Internet. Technicians all over the world inspected the code – and discovered our message between the lines:'So you love innovative technology? You’ve come to the right place!Send your application to jobs@sinnerschrader.de. We look forward to hear from you'.

Technology whizzes are rare and keenly sought after in the industry sector. So how do we win the high-calibre technology experts over to our digital agency?We started an open-source project to prove our leading position within the digital industry. Made by our very own geeks using only the latest technology.

The hardware costs for our foosball table hack was about €150, consisting of the following factors:1 x Arduino Uno€301 x Arduino Wifi-Shield€802 x Infrared photo sensors€20bits and pieces€20--total€150The foosball table itself was already at our agency, as were the iPads or smartphones which are being used as displays.As all the programming and designing was done in-house, the labour costs were fairly reasonable as well:2 x Frontend Engineer for 2 weeks€250 p.d.€5,0001 x Designer for 1 week€200 p.d.€1,0001 x Project Manager for 3 weeks€250 p.d.€1,250--total €7,250After we finished the project many of our perfectly connected colleagues used their social media channels to promote the work, which was the only promotion.Since we obviously hit the mark the project received wide media attention, including many major German newspapers and all special interest magazines. Furthermore the word spread internationally, including Wired and Techcrunch – the leading online magazines for our target group. Then the bloggers picked up the story…So we generated a total media volume of over €200,000 by investing €150 plus some fun (which cost the company €7,250).

Digital Geekness is deeply anchored in our DNA. Hence the use of only the latest web-technology in combination with sleek interfaces and the fun we have at work exactly expresses our mindset. The digital foosball project showcases our skills and values perfectly. And as a world-first we generated loads of buzz, mostly right on spot to successfully attract talent playing in our league.