TakeMySpot

TakeMySpot is an iPhone application aiming to be the last parking related app you’ll need. It combines parking regulations, crowd-sourced spot availability, and meter timeout notifications.

We worked with the TakeMySpot founders to take their project from concept to reality. In addition to our development role, we created the user experience and design of the application. One of the biggest challenges on this project was taking New York City’s sloppy parking regulation spreadsheet and parsing it into a clean geographical database.

Redbeacon Widget Program

Redbeacon, Best in Show at TechCrunch50 in 2009, gives people an easy way to compare and hire local service providers online. We worked with them to build their widget program, which allows website owners to generate affiliate revenue by referring visitors to Redbeacon.

The widget is a customizable interactive form wizard that can be embedded on any website with a single line of JavaScript. We used advanced HTML5 features (providing graceful degradation for legacy browsers) to make the widget resize on the fly as a user interacts with it. Due to the space constraints, the layout had to be near pixel-perfect across all the popular browsers. We utilized Selenium tests to save time and verify that at any given phase, the layout stayed intact.

Nasuni

Nasuni’s product is a cloud-based virtual NAS allowing companies to save drastically on their file storage and backup infrastructure versus more traditional solutions.

While Nasuni was focusing on the development of their core production, they approached us to build their public marketing site and online buy wizard. The marketing site was built with flexibility in mind, allowing content producers to work within the site’s style guide (we created that too) with no knowledge of HTML or CSS. For the buy wizard, our goal was to make the purchasing process as painless and user-friendly as possible.

PBS Digital Learning Library

Digital Learning Library is a way for local PBS stations to share digital content amongst each other. After starting life as a customized version of Alfresco (an open source Java CMS), it’s complex and confusing interface needed an overhaul to be functional for the end-user.

We were tasked with creating a more user-friendly layout and then implementing it as a front-end to the existing CMS using it’s web service APIs. jQuery was used extensively for AJAX calls to make the application more “desktop-like” as well as allow for quick page loading by having slower elements load after the page has been rendered.

National Geographic Events

Events showcases the wide range of public programs, including exhibits, speaker series, films, concerts and special events put on by National Geographic.

For many of the content producers on the site, this was their first experience with Django, or even working with a live database-backed web administration tool. We worked with them to reshape their ideas about how they would manage content on the site and create database models to suit their needs. The end result is a very flexible content management system that seamlessly displays local content in a number of different formats as well as linking out to external pre-existing content when needed.

News21 Newsroom

News21 is a Knight Foundation funded initiative to innovate and experiment with new ways to deliver in-depth and investigative reporting online.

They had done considerable development by the time they approached us, but were looking for some more firepower and a fresh perspective on the problem. We worked with them through several iterations, converting their ideas into functional code and consulting with them on the best way to handle complex site interactions. During our time on the project, it evolved into a social site built on top of Django and the Pinax platform utilizing the geospatial features of GeoDjango. The code is open-source and available on Google Code as django-newsroom.

Navy & Lavender

Navy & Lavender is an online store focusing on fine gifts and favors for weddings and other special occasions. Sprout Creative approached us to build a full-featured e-commerce site using their design, delivered as static HTML/CSS mockups. The site is built on the shoulders of a number of open source Django applications, including Satchmo.

Green Effect

Green Effect was a contest sponsored by Sun Chips® and National Geographic to find the most compelling ideas for green environmental change. Five winners were selected and each given $20,000 to implement their idea.

We were in charge of building the site based on their wireframes and design mockups. From authentication to video encoding, several existing platforms and APIs were leveraged for core site functionality. Due to the high traffic received during the voting process, we tuned the code so that most pages could be rendered either directly from the cache or with only one query to the database.