Iron Man Demo

Over the last month we have been on the road to the 2.0 version of our software.  Our goal is to create an easy to manage, powerful dynamic image platform.  We have had a vision of how we wanted to achieve this and we are now nearing completion.  To showcase our progress we have created this demo which incorporates several of our new features. 

This iron man demo displays our ability to create an application/widget out of the traditionally static image format.  The image is geo-location aware, it fetches remote real time data based on render criteria as well as dynamically routes you based on where and when you click on it. So, try clicking on the different movie times and see where it takes you. 

P.S. - if you view refresh the page a few times, you will see a surprise offer!

Spring Cleaning at Sympact

It has been a very crazy week here at Sympact.  Several large projects are finally wrapping up.

First, we would like to announce that we have launched a new interface for the BokayMe Facebook application.  Check it out at http://apps.facebook.com/bokayme.

Second, starting Monday Stand For Us will being its pilot testing for the Gift of Life.  This is very exciting as the original intention of Sympact is becoming a reality.  If you are interested in joining the pilot test please send Robbie Donno and email at golman@msn.com

Finally, we have finished the first version of our Younety SDK.  This SDK includes the younety api gem, and younety_adi_client plugin as well as a sample application showing how easy it is to implement and build badges on our platform.  You can request a copy of the sdk by emailing elliott@sympact.net.

As these projects wrap up we are ready to move forward with our Younety/ADI platform, expect a lot more from us over the next few months.

Steve

Utility, Design and the Web

This morning I read this entry from Seth Godin and keyed on this quote:

The funny thing is that design on the web is almost the opposite. Winning sites on the web almost always have terrible design and terrible logos...In fact, it works so well it now seems to be clear that clunky, engineering-built design might just be the secret to success online.

This statement synchronizes with the emerging reality that the web is developing its own rules for effective marketing.  When attention is derived from recommendation and not interruption, the advertising focus must shift towards gaining and then leveraging recommendation. Print and TV analogues like banner ads or pre/post/mid-roll advertising do not translate into effective marketing.

What translates is utility, agile development, rich customer feedback loops and scalability. BokayMe is a representation of this strategy. The site was developed quickly ,based on the simple utility, build your own unique digital bouquet. It was developed utilizing an agile methodology on the Ruby on Rails framework. Since we launched we have engaged in continual improvements based on user feedback and we are only a week in. 

BokayMe is just one project, but it points to how Sympact is approaching brands and agencies to discuss their interactive marketing agenda.

BokayMe Featured by Mashable

BokayMe has been featured by Mashable as one of their 25 Great Resources For Valentine's Day.  We are very excited to have our first reference on the site as many of us have been long time readers.  We hope this will be the first of many as we use our ADI technology and Younety platform to rapidly build more top notch social applications.

Bokayme is awesome

This was an exciting day for the whole team here at Sympact because the beta version of BokayMe went live this morning. BokayMe is an online bouquet maker and system for sharing these digital objects with all of your best friends across social nets and mobile. We built this system for 1-800-Flowers and we all feel that it lives up to the traditions of ingenuity that has been a keystone of 1-800-Flowers success.

With a press release hitting the wires this morning, we  got our first blog mention from none other than Allen Stern the impresario behind Center Networks.

I'll quote my favorite part:

The bokay looks very beautiful online... Testing out the system, it worked as intended.

Allen also mentions that  there is a cost associated with sending your digital bokay. He did not seem to be keen on paying for these beautiful digital goods.  In the age of free goods and services delivered  via the Internet, I do think that this approach is an interesting experiment. It also places the onus on the Sympact and 1-800-Flowers teams to deliver a rock solid and compelling product to justify the cost.

We feel we met that challenge and look forward to improving on the features of BokayMe over time. We will no doubt continue to innovate to bring these great looking bokay's to anywhere on the Internet where someone wants to showcase them. Thanks to 1-800-Flowers.com for having the vision to bring BokayMe to life. To any other brands out there, if you're looking to deploy an application that picks up audience wherever that audience wants to be, give us a call. We have plenty of ideas.

Engine Yard - Merb, Rubinius, $3.5 Million, Oh My!

We have now been with Engine Yard for over two months, and the experience has been nothing short of amazing.  At Rackspace for the same money we were spending we had a single point of failure for all our apps,  a pen + mongrel_cluster config that was no where near production ready, and no direct rails support in case anything happened.

We have truly made strides with the help of the Engine Yard team.  We now have a Merb app to help handle one specific task, we now have redundancy.  We now have... HELP!!

These guys really know what they are doing, and the work going into Merb, and Rubinius along with the $3.5 Million from Benchmark capital really give us faith that Ruby hosting has nowhere to go but up.  We are happy to be up on the edge with the Engine Yard team, and have developed a great dynamic with the support staff.  If you want to get serious about your rails app and want the advice of the experts Engine Yard is the place to be.

Sympact makes its first contribution to Merb

Well after embarking on the Merb path we are still yet to get our application live, we jumped in the day Merb went from 0.4.2 to 0.5.0 and came across some bugs which has lead to 0.5.2 scheduled for release today.  We thought we were on the edge when using edge rails but this pre 1.0 framework experience has redefined the edge for us and for the first time we took the matter into our own hands.  Today we submitted ticket #453 along with a patch for an issue we discovered.  The patch was approved and committed into the Merb repository within an hour of being opened.

This marks our first contribution to the Merb project and will no doubt not be our last.  This continues to show what the Engine Yard experience is like from a customer point of view.  You can safely stay on the edge (edge rails) or push to the bleeding edge with an entire team of supporters.  We started out working with an Engine Yard support and quickly ended up in the #merb irc room, and solved our own problem and are ready to deploy with the fixes.  EY's expertise allows us to be comfortable even when we are out on the very edge craving new features. The dynamic between the staff, our developers and the community blend into an experience I have yet to see anywhere else.

This is fun...and productive.

Merb!

I discovered Merb (Mongrel + eRB) while searching for a solution for accelerating a section of our application via a custom mongrel handler.  At first the idea of learning a new framework was ludicrous especially for a production app.  After doing some reading and a call with Engine Yard I realized it wasn't going to be unfamiliar territory as ActiveRecord was fully supported via their gem plugin system.

Merb happened to be started by Ezra Zygmuntowicz the co-founder of our new hosting provider Engine Yard.  EY also has two full time merb experts on staff.  EY has been quick to recommend using merb for issues like the ones we encountered and even though the framework is young and volatile .  If I was at any other hosting provider I would never even consider using something like this in production.  This has been one of the best things about EY, the trust for their Rails/Merb experts.  They know what they are doing.  And while at some points the effects of being on the edge can be felt (They removed the MERB_ROOT constant this release!), the benefits of running a lower footprint agile merb app should prove to be worth the minor tweaking.

Sympact Guided By Lighthouse is Good

After some recent success, our three-person team recognized that we had to take issue management more seriously. The occasion of our changing hosting from Rackpace to Engine Yard presented us with the task of relocating our svn repository as well as our Trac system that rides on top of it. As it became apparent that establishing a new Trac system would not be trivial.  We queried the Rails Gurus at Engine Yard and were pointed towards Lighthouse, by ActiveReload. After some consideration, we began using Lighthouse for our issue tracking and we are happy that we've done so.

Why did we pay to use Lighthouse, when we could have continued using Trac for free? Although a Lighthouse license is very affordable, it is, nevertheless, not free. What features does Lighthouse have that Trac lacks? The most interesting feature Lighthouse has that Trac doesn't is the ability to not only send email, but also receive it. This allows us to update tickets from our email clients. The ability to do this,is, it seems, something new under the sun. Lighthouse also provides SCM integration and API we could integrated with, but we've not explored these featured yet.  And while Trac may have these features somewhere, we never got deep enough to use any of them.  Lighthouse has moved issue tracking from an annoyance to a pleasure. 

The strongest feature of Lighthouse is its interface. Compared to other issue management tools we've used (Elementool, Rally), Lighthouse might seem spartan. And it is!. And that's great! It has a very simple, tidy interface and has kept the number of conceptual units that a user is required to digest to the bare minimum. These units are 'projects', 'people' , 'tickets', 'messages', 'milestones', 'pages', and 'tags'. Lighthouse doesn't enforce a particular methodology, but rather, the decisions about how to use these elements are left to the users -- us. This fact has allowed use to cobble together a process that works nicely for us now, and can be easily changed if we need it to. At first we thought its lack of "Features" might be a problem and even went so far as to question the whole mentality of some of these new lightweight web apps, but in all honesty simplicity as led us to actually use the thing.

Our first impressions are that Lighthouse is both useful and adaptable to the way we actually work.  We are very excited to continue our development with Lighthouse there to help guide the way.

Sympact.net redesign

Stopping development to build a corporate site has always been a headache for us.  After the Bokay Me launch we decided to take a day to clean things up over on sympact.net.  While we all love the Brooklyn Bridge, it was time to put some relevant content on the site.  We know there is still a long way to go but we think this is a dramatic improvement for a days work. 

Take a look at the new www.sympact.net and let us know what you think.