On Friday last week (that is the 4th of May 2012 just in case you are reading this in 2013) we spent an excellent day up in the BBC’s plush new MediaCity, Salford offices with a bunch of BBC folk, other start-ups and generally bright, vibrant people. The cause was the first instalment of the BBC’s Connected Studio. First, a little about what the Connected Studio is and then I’ll tell you some more about the day.
BBC R&D are looking at innovation all the time with the real possibility that some of the very cool new tech they are currently working on not surfacing for another 10 to 20 years.The Connected Studio is an initiative to look at how the BBC can innovate just a little beyond the existing roadmap for digital. The intention is to do this in a collaborative manner with BBC staff working with invited external digital agencies, technology start-ups, designers and developers to participate in generating new ideas, concepts, features and functions . Find out more here.
The main focus areas each having their own creative studio days are 1) Homepage, Search and Navigation 2) Weather and Travel 3) BBC Children’s and 4) The Olympics. There is a reasonably detailed engagement charter detailing the steps to achieve the goal of generating ideas and moving them rapidly through concept to proof-of-concept to pilot. Each focus area will start with a Creative Studio day. This is a one day event (the first being 4th May. More on that later…) to facilitate ideas and concepts. Out of the ideas pitched at the end of the day, a number of the companies or individuals will be invited back to the Build Studio. The build studio is a 2 day innovation workshop to develop ideas and proof-of concepts much like a Launch 48 (although you already have the concept by this point). The objective is to have a working PoC at the end of the 2 days. Of these PoCs, up to five will be invited to work on a 6-8 week Pilot Build for which there will be up to a £50K budget. The BBC then has an exclusive option for a 6-12 month period to take forward any successful pilot it chooses for full product development.
There is a total fund of £1m to develop concepts throughout the year, with an additional £1m of BBC staff time.
That was a quick overview of the overall concept of The Connected Studio I’ll take you through the experience of participating in the first Creative Studio.
The Creative Studio
We were limited to 2 attendees, as I believe was every other company. So I attended along with one of the UX Consultant’s in our network Alex Ng. The Creative Studio on 4th May was all about Homepage, Search and Navigation. Prior to the day we had been provided with a creative brief so knew that the focus was to explore the potential uses of customisation and personalisation.
You have the option of booking in advance, a 15 minute closed pitch with the BBC and a third party. This is for those that already have a developed idea and want to protect their IP. Everyone else presents in an open session, the time you have to present largely depending on the number of people presenting.
Arriving at MediaCity between 9-10 for registration (I left my house at just after 5am) you get a good breakfast before getting started at 10.
The new BBC Office has lots of space that has been built to foster collaboration and creativity. We were situated in an events space that had been segregated into a number of areas for the main presentations, break out areas for collaboration and another presentation area for some presentations by some key BBC experts that were open to all if they chose to attend.
Adrian Woolard (Project Lead R&D North Lab) got the day started, introducing us (probably about 60-70 people half of which were the BBC) to what the Connected Studio is, the vision unveiled by Raph Rivera and what was expected of us. James Thornett and Clare Hudson then introduced us to the current homepage and it’s journey to now, their strategic objectives and the challenges they face. At 10:40 we were ready to go and had a 4pm deadline to be ready for the presentations.
We had developed a few ideas into one concept on the train up to Manchester so requested a closed pitch on the day but they were full. So, it turned out soon after that we had a 2 minute slot to present in the open session in front of the audience and the camera. Not nerve racking at all! As we already had an idea we went off into our own little space to develop it further, prepare wireframes and a presentation to fit into the 2 minute time slot. Other people gathered around the “ideas wall” to collaborate with others who up to now, had only half an idea and wanted to create a team to work up some ideas on the day. Others went to speakers corner where various BBC experts were waiting to answer any questions.
Supporting the open spaces were a number of 15 minute “expert” presentations in the morning. The agenda was as follows:
I didn’t attend all of the morning sessions as I was deep into developing our idea but both the Homepage Tech session and the Personalisation session were very useful. Both gave an insight into the current state of their topics plus a view of the roadmap ahead. Especially interesting was Tom Broughton discussing their ambitions to implement a Triplestore to allow semantic search features – something that was prevalent in the idea we were presenting.
A very nice free lunch was available from Midday and then the afternoon session was focussed around developing the presentations whilst those that had closed pitch sessions were presenting in a private meeting room. Linda Cockburn, a creativity consultant that led the BBC’s Creative Network for 5 years, did a presentation on how to present and then there was an opportunity to present your pitch back to her and real members of the Homepage audience to get personalised feedback prior to the 4pm deadline.
At 4pm we were all ushered to the presentation area where a number of plasmas, a microphone and a cameraman awaited. There were twenty-three 2 minute presentations. The whole day (as expected from the BBC) was run to strict timelines, the excellent event production team running a tight ship for everyone involved including the 15 minute morning expert sessions. So, the pressure was on to fit our presentations into the 2 minutes, some of which were cut off because they ran out of time. All-in-all there was a high quality calibre of presentations with some excellent and varied ideas produced. Some were digital but to my surprise most were hand drawn presentations on flip-board paper and there was one presentation told in the form of a story.
At the end of the presentations at 6pm, beer and wine were provided (until 11 if you wanted to stick around for that long) for all of the attendees to mingle. Some very interesting people and all in all an excellent day of fun and innovation. The next step is to wait to see if we get through to the build studio (we should hear by the end of this week). The concepts presented will be judged on, Distinctiveness, Relevance to brief, Innovation, Value, BBC public purposes and Connected Strategy (One Service, Ten Products, Four Screens – http://tinyurl.com/connected-storytelling)
Our Concept
Without doing too much of a reveal, our concept was based around turning the home page into a living thing that is more dynamic and more real-time rather than a navigation step that users spend very little time on. Less than 10% of people used the personalisation features in the previous version of the homepage and lots of people will continue to ignore it. With this is mind we introduced various levels of personalisation and testing the idea of machine learning to automate personalisation as much as possible. Once a semantic Triplestore is introduced, this could be taken a lot further.
Our key points were the following:
Here’s one our mock-ups that we presented to give you a taste of what we were thinking:
Summary
I doubt we will pitch for Weather and Travel or BB Children’s creative studios due to this being less relevant to the work we do but you never know. If they interest you though, I would highly recommend getting involved in The Connected Studio whether you are a digital agency, tech firm or and individual designer or developer. It really is an excellent day.
Here’s a few links of interest:
Location: Clerkenwell
Salary: Excellent plus Share Options
Red Badger is a creative software consultancy – we are working on some really innovative projects with some excellent calibre clients. Our integrated teams (PMs, BAs, UX, Designers, Devs, UI Devs, Testers) collaborate using agile project methodologies (Scrum and Kanban). We are a startup, having been in existence for 18 months and are growing rapidly. We are in need of a charismatic, talented Agile Project Manager to integrate into our talented team. You will be working on some very exciting projects ranging from Rapid Prototyping/Concept Lab type environments to longer term engagements.
You will need:
Desirable:
This is a great opportunity to work with in a really sociable, fun environment. Red Badger is still young but growing so you’ll be involved at an early stage in our history and to have influence in shaping our future.
For more information or to apply please contact us here: hello@red-badger.com
As we now roll full steam ahead into 2012 I thought I’d take the time to do a blog on Red Badger’s year in 2011.
The Beginnings
Red Badger was formed in May 2010 with Stuart Harris, David Wynne and I investing some of our savings into building a company based on specific ideals with a specific long term strategy in mind (this has evolved over the last 18 months). We wanted to be in full control of Red Badger’s destiny and as such decided not to seek investment of any kind. We also made an executive decision that we wanted to dedicate ourselves full-time to Red Badger so decided that we wouldn’t contract ourselves out to clients as individuals to fund the building of the company. This of course had it’s implications. We all quit our jobs and for the next year we would be working in each others homes, building up the company with no income whatsoever.
Into 2011
As we entered 2011, the company was nearly 7 months old and we were still just 3 guys working from each others homes. 2010 had largely been about creating a presence. We formed some key partnerships, pitched to potential clients and generally got ourselves out there. In October, we also started to design our twitter app, Birdsong for Windows Phone 7. By January 2011 we had two main channels of work - we had been working on a couple of large pitches (amongst others) for 2 very big clients and developing Birdsong. By 25th January v1.0 of Birdsong was available in Microsoft’s Marketplace.
Birdsong
At this time, Windows Phone 7 was in it’s infancy having only been released in November 2010 – having been involved in developing on the platform in its beta stages, we had every confidence in a bright WP7 future. However, we knew that Birdsong wasn’t going to contribute to building the foundations of Red Badger in monetary terms and in fact didn’t plan for Birdsong to be making large contributions to Red Badger revenue in the long term as only a small percentage of apps actually make companies a lot of money. Birdsong for us was all about building a Red Badger presence.
The first half of 2011 was an incredibly enjoyable time for Stuart and David being able to focus on developing Birdsong, shipping features in response to customer demand – part of this involved creating a good customer service platform through Zendesk. We also started to do the promotional work around it, engaging with Microsoft at an early stage. The Microsoft activity is on-going but you can read the Microsoft Case Study on-line.
We knew that Stu and Dave’s time on Birdsong was going to be short lived once client projects came through so we had to ensure it was architected really well (This is a given anyway) to allow for someone else to come in, learn the code-base and take over where Stu and Dave left off. By May and over 1,000 BDD specs later, Birdsong was doing pretty well – it was on v1.4, was the leading premium social app on the WP7 platform and had gained some notoriety among the WP7 consumer base and internally at Microsoft. It was achieving what we had set out for it.
We have ambitious plans for Birdsong, were aware that it still had a long way to go and was by no means perfect but were preparing ourselves to have to leave it for a while.
The Madness Begins
In parallel to developing Birdsong we had been working hard on a couple of pitches (amongst others) for 2 really big clients for quite some time (At time of writing neither project is live so we can’t talk about them yet which gives you an indication of their size). In April, we finally won both projects with both of them due to start just a few weeks apart in May and June.
All of a sudden, we needed to build two project teams of ample size and find an office to run them out of. We started plugging into our network of people we have worked with before. We knew they were very high quality but availability was an issue. Everything we do is Agile and built on a UCD approach so we needed integrated teams consisting of a PM, UX Consultants, Designers, Developers, UI Developers and Testers.
With a lot of hard work we somehow managed to assemble two teams with the right people to work on our projects - 90% of which we had worked with before (Which eases the worry of whether you’re getting quality or not).
At the same time, another startup - Fluxx was formed in April. They are a digital strategy company setup up by a number of our friends and former colleagues at Conchango. They had just found a lovely new office in St. Paul’s that would cater for their growth expectations over the next 2 years but at the time they had ample space spare. We were in discussions to partner with Fluxx as a development partner so it made sense for both companies that we would sublet a floor in their building for 6 months.
So, with project wins in place, a new office and a staff rota of the highest quality we secured a bank loan to get us off the ground with rent, buying furniture and equipment. We moved into our new office in May, raring to go.
The Projects
Both projects were very different but both incredibly challenging and innovative. One is an interactive 3D HTML5 website for a large automobile company with no dependency on Flash for modern browsers. The other is a large Government project that I can’t say anything more about. Both are mutli-platform with Web, Mobile and Cloud elements.
The first thing to do was to get the processes and systems in place through which we would run our projects – we now had clients in Germany so a cloud based infrastructure fitted perfectly (See: How The Cloud Underpins Red Badger’s Business) to allow for a remote but collaborative working environment. We also had to educate our clients in the way we approach and deliver projects.
In May, we kicked off our first project, meeting in Hamburg for 2 weeks for project planning and requirements development (Sprint 0). Once that project was underway we started the kick-off for the 2nd project.
It was a very interesting time, integrating two new teams from scratch, getting used to the new office and spending a lot of time flying between Munich, Cologne, Hamburg and London. Over the next few months we iteratively improved the processes of the projects and solidified our working relationships with both the clients and the Red Badger team internally.
Both of the projects have gone incredibly well and are both still on-going 7 months later.
The Intern Programme
With all of the above going on, it is easy to understand how difficult it had now become for us to focus any time on Birdsong development. This presented us with an issue as we have long term ambitions for Birdsong but it is very difficult to dedicate a resource to it that can be earning us up to £1,000 per day when Birdsong has only made us about £3,000 in a whole year. We decided to align Birdsong development with our plans for developing talented youth by using Birdsong as a training platform for our interns.
So, in June (Earlier than initially planned) we launched our intern programme. We advertised for a few months through our blog and a number of University job board sites. In all, we had 65 applicants for 1 position (admittedly some of these were students that seemed to be applying for everything regardless of position and relevancy of their skillset) so there was quite a lot of work to narrow these down to a final 8. We then set the final 8 a coding challenge, reviewed the code that they sent us and ended up interviewing 3. We finally offered Joe (an incredibly talented and self motivated student at Kings College) a part-time position due to start in November. (Joe’s Blog).
We have given Joe the responsibility of owning Birdsong development and support. We are investing in his long term future at Red Badger (we are investing our hopes on him joining us after graduation) so take a senior developer off of projects to pair programme with him when he is with us. This is costing us over £1,000 a week in developing both Joe and Birdsong but we think both are worth it. If we didn’t have Joe we simply couldn’t justify doing this just for Birdsong development.
Joe has now been with us for a month, has two weeks off to sit exams in the first two weeks of 2012 but is making fantastic progress. There is an incredible amount of code to familiarise himself with but he has almost completed the Trends functionality (a good feature to ease him into the dev) and will soon be able to start moving on to more pressing bits of functionality such as updating the Push Service (which we know is in need of some desperate attention). So hopefully, Birdsong users won’t have to wait too long for an update. Watch this space...
Growth, a new office and new project wins
As well as running our two main projects (delivering quality is our primary focus), the second half of 2011 has been about solidifying partnerships, trying to secure new business, and growth (which is dependent on an improving cash flow).
At the beginning of December we moved into a new office as we were growing out of the Fluxx space (at the same time Fluxx were getting big enough to grow into the space we vacated). With so much going on it is taking us some time to get the office in ship-shape but the interior designers have been in, we’ve got water supply/drainage fitted and now need to get the kitchen fitted and let the interior designer do his work. Hopefully it will be done within the next 6 weeks and working in a messy office will be no more.
An important part of our growth is to hire permanent staff so we have started converting some of our contractors to permanents and bringing in other new permanents into the team. Rachel has also joined as Client Services Director (blog) who is responsible for business development and marketing so this should give us the extra focus on new business that we need. We need more people across a varied skillset but finding the right quality (which is absolutely paramount to us) is difficult so that is one of the challenges we face. A nice problem to have.
As well as growing and moving into the new office we have also won new projects, most significantly with a major media corporation doing some innovative rapid prototyping using Node.js (See Steve’s Blog here). We are well shaped for 2012, with 3 large parallel projects and some smaller ones to fit in also. There’s lots of hard but fun work ahead of us.
Moving on to 2012
2011 was a year of transition. 2012 will very much be focussed on securing the future of Red Badger. We have had a great 2011 but it would be naive of us to think we are out of the woods entirely. We are still very young so our focus must be to grow steadily and sensibly and to win new innovative projects with both new clients and existing ones. The first 6 months of 2012 will be very interesting. In the 2nd half of 2012, if all goes to plan, we have some interesting product development plans to kick-off.
We of course will continue to develop Birdsong, hope to take Joe on for a year long full-time placement in June and may potentially bring in new interns/grads in the summer to bolster the Birdsong development team.
We also will be doing a re-branding exercise and overhauling our desperately out of date website. We just haven’t had the time to do it up to now so hoping to get something moving on that this month.
Exciting but challenging times.
Ravensbourne
I realise in this (now rather long) blog that I haven’t mentioned Ravensbourne College. Ravensbourne is an innovative, creative University on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East London. They offer great support services to their post-grads and an incubation programme (with the help of a European Development Fund grant) for startups in London. This acts as a stimulus for new entrepreneurship in London. In Jan 2011 we were accepted into the incubation programme which provided us with free facilities and meeting rooms as well as an opportunity to work with other incubatees that were based there. This very much provided us with a platform from which we could launch ourselves. Our first meetings with our clients were held there and our first projects were won there. So, our gratitude goes out to all at Ravensbourne, especially Chris Thompson (Who heads up the Ravensbourne Programme) and Carrie Wootten (Head of Enterprise and Innovation).
Finally
Happy New Year to you all. I hope 2012 is as good for you as I’m hoping it is for us. I have a good feeling about it.
We’re looking for an experienced developer to come and join the ranks of our lean, fast growing, tech loving, passionate and dynamic team. The projects we are working on are all innovative and cutting edge, with totally immersive, amazing front end design and UX - we just don’t do the boring stuff.
Producing software across web, mobile and cloud you’ll be working in close, multi-disciplined teams surrounded by some of the industry’s best developers, designers, UX architects and testers. Our clients (who love us) are large and well known, and this is an organisation that you will be proud to be a part of.
You will be passionate about technology. You will always strive to understand the latest and greatest, keeping a keen eye on developments in the world of software development, platforms, architecture and patterns. You will be tenacious and passionate about doing things the right way and building beautiful software. You will be interacting with clients on a weekly basis and be a great communicator.
You need to have C#.Net, HTML5 and JavaScript. Familiarities’ with leading patterns, practices, methodologies and frameworks surrounding those technologies are a must. If you’ve worked with Azure,NoSQL databases, node.js or XAML – all the better. You'll need to be adaptable as we are always looking for better/new ways of doing things, which includes trying out new technologies.
Ideally you’ll be used to working in an Agile manner and will be familiar with Scrum and/or Kanban. You’ll enjoy pair programming, working spec first and use the IntelliJ ReSharper keyboard layout (just kidding…kinda). If you’ve previously worked in multi-disciplined teams that would be a bonus, if not – you have much to look forward to.
Creativity and passion are the key.
If you think that sounds like you and Red Badger sounds like the sort of place you want to work then get in touch. Please send your CV, Stackoverflow profile, GitHub profile, code and anything else you think we might be interested in to hello@red-badger.com – we can’t wait to hear from you!
As anyone that has read this blog before knows, Red Badger has been developing on Windows Phone 7 since the very beginning. Now Mango is out, it’s features have got a lot more interesting. I have been waiting with bated breath to see what cool apps will be coming out on the platform now that Mango is readily available.
So, I was incredibly surprised and intrigued when I got an invite to the Alphalabs.cc launch event in collaboration with onedotzero Adventures in Motion Festival. If like me, you are into electronic music, motion graphics, animation, immersion and generally anything innovative, then you should find out who onedotzero are if you don’t know already. I have been coming to various events put on by onedotzero at the Southbank in London for years. This weekend they are celebrating their 15th birthday by running the adventures in motion festival at the BFI Southbank showcasing a mixture of interesting screenings (screenings include subjects such as; Bjork’s unprecedented contribution to the medium and art form of music video), interactive installations (you’ll probably hear me talk a lot about immersion in the coming months), talks and workshops, some live audio/visual performances and some educational conferences. I’d recommend it to anyone.
Anyway, back to the Alphalabs.cc launch event. I had no idea what to expect at all and I didn’t know who the guest speakers were either. After picking up my complimentary breakfast from Benugo and getting my pass we were ushered into the studio. There were the usual Microsoft suspects, Will Coleman and Paul Foster, both Microsoft Developer Platform Evangelists for Windows Phone 7. There was also a large contingent from the Windows Phone User Group including Matt Lacey on the presenter’s roster. There was however, a very mixed crowd. A clear mix of art/creative and tech.
Shane Walter – OneDotZero Creative Director, made a number of inspirational talks that if you have been to onedotzero before, you’d be used to by now. Particular things he said rang close to my heart, particularly when discussing how artists/creatives should be integrated with developers (integrated teams of creatives and developers is something we believe in and practice at Red Badger). Such quotes as “Everybody is creative” & “We are social beings” (asking everyone to turn first to their left and then to the right to introduce the audience to each other and watching our behaviour to prove his point) gives you a glimpse at the sort of stuff he was talking about. This talk painted a picture of what was to be demoed.
After an intro to Windows Phone 7 by Will Coleman and a brief talk from Nokia’s Keith Varty – Head of ecosystem & services – Nokia UK & Eire, we got onto some demos…
First up was Team Holotronica & Stuart Warren-Hill with Vequencer. Stuart Warren-Hill is one half of the Hexstatic duo, a ground-breaking audio/visual electronic music act who’ve been experimenting with 3D A/V shows for years. Vequencer is a dynamic 3D visual sequencer. It basically allows you to use 8 instruments (such as bass drum, closed hi-hats etc. for you budding music producers out there) to sequence a live track loop in a 32 beat bar. As your track plays, there is a dynamic 3D visualisation in the centre of the application that reacts to your sequencing. I had a play and could have played with it all day. The 3D visualisation was written in XNA in collaboration with Martin Caine (of Retroburn Games) & Simon Jackson (both admins of the XNA UK Usergroup). What was also really cool was that there is a group collaboration option which allows multiple users (up to 8 simultaneously) of the Nokia Lumia 800 to connect their phones together and have a jam (presumably each person being in control of an instrument each). Matt Lacey (founder of the Windows Phone User Group) had developed the interface to allow the software to sync across multiple phones, a feature Stuart demoed to us across 4 Nokias. It was a truly engaging musical/visual app that (I’m sure to Microsoft’s pleasure) fully utilised the new WP7 Mango feature that allows apps to combine both XNA and Silverlight in the same application. All of this was developed in 2 weeks and it’s already looking very slick. There is a whole host of other features that could follow. Speaking to Stuart, he has every intention of his next album being produced entirely in Vequencer. I can’t wait for it to come out so that I can start making music with it myself. A great start to an entirely new type of use of Windows Phone 7.
Next up was Max Hattler and IndieSkiesGames to show Kaleidobooth. Max Hattler is a London based experimental moving image artist from Germany. He showed us some of his previous works all of which were very focused on symmetry. Kaleidobooth is an experimental art project using the Mango camera API to create a dynamic kaleidoscope application that adapts to both what the camera is looking at as well as sound inputs. What I found interesting is that Max had never worked with developers before so they discussed a little about their working environment, how they collaborated and the challenges they faced (Very much in the spirit of what Shane Walter had discussed earlier). Max was based in London, IndiesSkiesGames in Derby. They ran a tightly managed project using 37 Signals’ basecamp to collaborate. Again this was a 2 week project and the output was impressive. I didn’t get the chance to play with Kaleidobooth but it looks like a lot of fun and is due for release in early 2012.
The last demo was of Redshift. This is a 3D racing game through music videos created by digital art studio F’eld, Treehouse Dev, Edward Powell and music provided by artists from a favourite record label of mine - Numbers. Presented by Vera Glahn of F’eld, Redshift was again a prototype that was only 2 weeks in the making but was already looking pretty impressive. It takes advantage of the Mango’s accelerometer and gyroscope features to allow the the user to race through a 3D world by changing the tilt of the phone in a steering wheel kind of manner. Visually it’s still in it's early stages but is looking like it’s going to be a really engaging, immersive game with a killer soundtrack blending electronica with hip-hop beats.
All of the above apps demonstrated a wide use of Mango’s new features and showed just how easy it is to develop on the platform in comparison to other platforms, showcasing some really polished (and complex) apps that were developed in just 2 weeks.
The collaboration with onedotzero to create Alphalabs.cc is a fantastic move by Nokia and Microsoft. It’s basically an experiment to merge technology and art to inspire experimental projects on the platform. If you sign up to alphalabs.cc you can start to submit your experiments to be showcased on the website straight away and there are cash prizes ranging from £500 to £5000 for the overall winner.
At the end of the session, everyone in attendance got a free Nokia Lumia 800 so I’ll be retiring my HTC Trophy 7 now and testing the Nokia. I’ll blog about the experience in the next couple of weeks hopefully. After the session I enjoyed a beer before heading off to see some experimental music videos from the likes of Michel Gondry at Wavelength 11.
Unfortunately there is only 1 day left of the onedotzero festival but if you get time, I would get yourself down to the BFI to see some screenings and art installations. Tatsumi at 15:50 today, a screening paying tribute to Yoshihiro Tatsumi would be a highlight for me.
At Red Badger, we’re huge fans of the cloud and we try to persuade our clients to be too. Where possible, we base the products/services that we are developing on cloud infrastructure for its many obvious advantages.
Birdsong, our popular Windows Phone 7 Twitter client is a Microsoft Reference Architecture for Azure and Official Case Study. Using Azure for Birdsong has brought us very obvious advantages in scalability and low maintenance and combining that with Microsoft’s great BizSpark programme for startups, what would have been a cost effective service is now super cost effective. Birdsong is currently processing over 3 million transactions a month through Azure, is growing fast and all for very little cost.
We are also promoting the cloud to our clients. Some of our larger clients that have a well established IT infrastructure (with large maintenance overheads!) can see the benefit of the cloud but some just aren’t quite ready for it yet. Some of the smaller clients we are speaking to seem to be more open to it as by the nature of their size, they are more flexible and can reap the benefits from the cloud much more quickly. With lower up-front costs, greater productivity, global reach and fast access (via CDNs), incremental scalability, agility, reliability, low maintenance costs and “pay as you go” cost models it seems like an obvious choice to allow smaller companies to punch above their weight with their IT infrastructure or cloud based products.
With it have come some fantastic Software as a Service (SaaS) products too. Really fantastic! Which slowly but surely brings me to the topic of this blog. Now I’m going to give you a few examples of SaaS products and other cloud based solutions that we use at Red Badger to perform key functions in our day to day running of the business. All bring flexible cost models, are innovative in nature and enable Red Badger to maintain our agile, mobile way of working without the need for our own IT infrastructure:
SaaS Products
Accounting: FreeAgent is the cloud based accounting software of choice for Red Badger. It’s a superb product.
Our Accountant and all of our employees use FreeAgent for varying reasons. Our employees use it to quickly and easily add timesheets and expenses. It gives us Directors a slick dashboard overview of the health of our business, it manages our contacts, our projects (estimates, invoicing, bills etc..), integrates to our bank account, handles our overseas clients seamlessly (Fx can be tricky!), manages our taxes and provides all of the boring accounting functions that we let our accountant handle (P&L, Balance Sheets, Journals, Dividend Vouchers, Accruals etc..)!
It also integrates to Basecamp (amongst other 3rd party products/services), another excellent SaaS product from 37 Signals that we don’t currently use at this time.
FreeAgent has a very flexible pricing model providing different prices and functionality depending on whether your company is a Sole Trader, Partnership or Limited Company. They have a monthly (cancel anytime), pay as you go contract or an annual payment up-front for cheaper. They also have a referral scheme where you get a 10% discount for everyone you recommend.
FreeAgent makes the boring so easy! It’s not yet perfect but the product is being updated all the time, users can feedback and influence the product roadmap and the customer support is second to none.
Project Management: We use two main agile project methodologies at Red Badger, Kanban and Scrum. Sometimes we use them in isolation and sometimes we combine them to form what we believe is a best practice project methodology.
AgileZen is what we use for Kanban. It’s a very simple, intuitive and effective project management tool. It doesn’t manage all aspects of your project. It simply does what it sets out to do and does it very well and that is to provide a simple swim-lane based process interface for Kanban. Kanban replaces velocity with cycle time and AgileZen shows this through a nice and easy performance measurement interface, has great messaging capabilities and just works in a visually pleasing way. We use AgileZen for development of internal products and for UX/Design for our client projects.
Collaboration is a vital advantage of SaaS products especially project management tools such as AgileZen. We have a number of clients abroad and by providing them with access to AgileZen we can easily collaborate on projects with the distance between us not being a problem. It also encourages us to run our projects with full transparency which is how Red Badger run every project.
AgileZen has a flexible pricing model which is dependent on the number of projects, collaborators, amount of storage and functionality required.
AgileZen is another product that is constantly being updated and last years acquisition by Rally Software doesn’t seem to have slowed it down.
Project Management: After doing lots of research for a good cloud based scrum tool, we decided on TinyPM and haven’t looked back. It’s a truly awesome collaborative agile project management tool.
So many of the best SaaS products are built by people who are trying to resolve their own problems. TinyPM is one of these – it is built by agile developers to manage their own agile projects.
TinyPM provides an easy to use interface to create releases, iterations, user stories, estimates, view product/sprint burndowns, dashboard overviews and all of the other bits of functionality you would expect from a tool like this. It also has an integrated wiki that we find particularly useful to store any project related documentation.
TinyPM is incredibly helpful in providing transparent access and collaboration to our clients. All of our clients can see what we are doing from day-to-day at any point and can easily manage the backlog for our projects from a remote location.
The customer support is excellent, the updates are frequent and the pricing is scalable to your needs. You don’t have to use TinyPM in a hosted solution as there is also an installed-on-site version but we have found the hosted version to be both reliable and perfect for our needs.
Project Hosting: All of the Red Badger developers cannot sing the praises of Github enough. Having used TFS for years, I am pretty sure they will never turn back now they are using Github. Github is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that allows collaboration, branching and version control of your code in a hosted project environment. The speed at which the developers can commit code and make changes is fast and the ease at which we can provide our client’s developers access to our repository is incredible. We have many remotely located developers, from the project team and from the client working on separate branches of the same code base at the same time. It has allowed us to easily integrate 3rd party widgets being developed by our client in Germany and it removes the dependency on being connected to a network.
Github Teams is also a really good feature providing a simple way to manage teams and their privileges. It’s a very effective way of administering teams and developers especially when you are managing lots of projects/teams.
Github provides a great social element to its UI (collaboration, issue tracking and code review), is intuitive and packed full of functionality.
Again, the pricing model is incredibly flexible with seven tiers depending on number of repositories and collaborators required. Open source projects are of course completely free and distributed through GitHub’s interface.
Diagramming: LucidChart is an incredibly useful collaborative diagramming tool that has replaced Visio for all of the PC users at Red Badger. It has all the standard
LucidChart is written in HTML5 and your charts are of course stored in the cloud, so you can pick up your work from any browser and any location. The little bits of attention to detail in the user interface makes it such a smooth experience to use. The best bit about it however is the real-time collaboration. You can share your charts and collaborate with others. As you update your chart, it automatically updates in real-time in any collaborators browser. The technical architects of Birdsong were simultaneously able to both work on the architectural design (Microsoft case study here) in the same chart from a remote location.
You can use LucidChart for free with limitations and then there are three pay as you go plans based on the users, collaborators, storage and premium features.
Once you use it you won’t look back.
Customer Support: We use ZenDesk as our cloud based help desk support system as well as using it to host release notes, allow customers to vote on feature requests for our products (much in the same way as UserVoice works), publish announcements and other user community activities such as forums and FAQs.
ZenDesk is easy to use but also has more advanced functionality such as macros to allow for automated replies to similar support tickets. This is particularly useful when responding to a large customer base. We use ZenDesk to support the 10’s of thousands of Birdsong for Windows Phone 7 users to great success.
We integrate links to the pages of ZenDesk into our Birdsong application so users can access the pages directly from the app. The pages are well formatted to support mobile so it creates a seamless experience.
There’s over 10,000 companies using ZenDesk. It’s definitely a best of breed SaaS product again with a flexible and affordable pricing model.
Honourable Mention
Hosted Exchange. All of our email is served as SaaS through Rackspace Cloud’s (more below) Hosted Exchange Service. You can get it for $10 per month per mailbox, it’s super quick to setup and seamless in it’s operation. A no brainer.
Rackspace Cloud
Not all products that we want to use are SaaS so a simple answer to this is to purchase hosted servers in the cloud and to install those products on the hosted servers. We currently use Rackspace Cloud to host a number of products that provide essential services to our business. The obvious one is our website (Our website will be getting a long overdue overhaul soon and migrated to Azure in the process).
Apart from our website, below are some of the other essential products we host in the Rackspace Cloud...
Continuous Integration and build management: You cannot go wrong with JetBrains products, we use them extensively. TeamCity is no exception. It is a continuous integration server which we use to build from Github several times a day.
Summed up from the JetBrains website: “Automate code analyzing, compiling, and testing processes, providing instant feedback on build progress, problems and test failures, all in simple, intuitive web-interface “ – TeamCity will verify that your changes work before committing, giving you immediate feedback if the build is broken, allowing you to fix it immediately. This results in you never committing broken code.
Each time a feature is developed, we build through TeamCity and if successful it will automatically commit, resulting in a continuous integration of many integrations per day. We then automate tests on the code using Selenium all contributing to a continuous delivery process.
Testing – Bug Tracking: Another brilliant JetBrains product, YouTrack is an incredibly fast, intuitive keyboard-centric bug tracking system. It is very flexible in its use with a configurable workflow, tagging system, prioritisation and notification.
We integrate YouTrack into our agile process in conjunction with AgileZen and TinyPM. It is so flexible that we also use it for project delivery when we go into an even more highly responsive, agile process than Scrum, such as stabilisation, bug fixing or usability testing phases of projects.
It’s free to use for the first 10 users. The next 4 pricing plans allow you to scale up your use of YouTrack as required.
The more we use YouTrack the more we find new features that provide real value, the more we love it.
Testing – Case Management: TestRail is an excellent test case management product that integrates directly into YouTrack.
TestRail is where our testers write their manual test cases (automated testing being written in Selenium), manage test runs and enter the results. A dashboard based progress and activity tracker is easy to use and export/share. Its integration to YouTrack allows you to easily push the defects into YouTrack to be picked up by the rest of the project team.
Another product that has a flexible pricing model based on the number of users required. Another great product that we host in the cloud.
To summarise, Red Badger would operate very differently if it were not for cloud based infrastructure. We’d have to buy and maintain our own IT Infrastructure (Servers etc..), hire the IT staff to perform the maintenance and most importantly the way in which we collaborate and interact with our clients and employees would be much less effective.
The Cloud may not be for everyone just yet but it’s certainly pivotal in how we run Red Badger.
One last note: From the screen dumps I have attached in this blog post, have you noticed how nicely all of the product’s interfaces seem to be designed? Providing a beautiful user experience and design is what makes cloud products, great cloud products. A great experience on the front-end combined with a scalable, robust architecture hosted in the cloud is a very powerful and valuable combination.
A little about us...
Things are moving on pretty quickly at Red Badger. We’ve just moved into a new swanky office in St. Paul’s, are working on some cool projects for some great clients and still developing Birdsong for Windows Phone 7. We are starting to expand but want to ensure that quality is always our main goal whilst maintaining a vibrant, fun atmosphere.
To help us grow in the way we want to, we are looking for some bright young talent to come and join us on our quest. We work in a very fast moving, agile manner but are highly creative and are very focused on making sure things are done the right way. We do cool things using a User Centric approach with heavy dependency on User Experience and Design. We specialise in bespoke software projects and platforms on the Microsoft technology stack; from HTML5 to using 3D gaming technology in consumer and business applications (3D developers take note) – we cover a wide range of exciting technologies.
A little about you and the opportunity...
You will need to be really motivated and ready to learn lots of great skills that will be invaluable to your future. This time around we are looking for one person with a passion for software development. Future internships won’t necessarily be limited to one person and will cover other disciplines.
The internship will run for about 3 months. During the initial 3 months, all your expenses will be paid and you will get a small salary (but don’t get too excited about that bit). You need to be eager to learn – you’ll be working on real projects and surrounded by some of the best in the industry who will be investing their time in helping you develop.
You’ll be confident and personable – we want to take you along to meet clients so you need to be comfortable in front of big cheese (but we won’t make you wear a shirt and tie).
We’re looking for someone with a pretty good foundation in software engineering predominantly with the .Net framework and C# – if you have experience with ASP.Net, WPF, XNA and/or Silverlight then all for the better. You should also have a good grounding in web technologies; HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Don’t worry if your current skillset looks a bit skinny next to this list, we will help you to develop those that you don’t have and enhance those that you do.
This opportunity is open to all who think they have what it takes – whether that means you’re still at university (but can work part-time), have recently graduated or skipped university altogether but have got the skills anyway. As long as you’re awesome at what you do and show lots of promise (we’re not demanding much are we?!).
At the end of the 3 months, if you cut the mustard, there will be an opportunity for a full-time apprenticeship at Red Badger with the prospect of managing your own teams, running projects and helping our clients develop their ideas.
If you’re interested in this opportunity, email hello@red-badger.com with a bit about yourself and why you want to work with us. If you have a CV then send that too, but don’t write one just for us. If we like what we see, we will arrange to meet up (which may involve a beer) and if you’re the chosen one, you will be working with us on real, challenging projects with some of the best people in the industry.
Good luck!
Birdsong v1.2 is now available in the marketplace!
v1.2 is all about filling the functionality gap and preparing for copy/paste. So what’s new?
What got fixed?
If you experience any problems or have any feedback we want to know about it – let us know via http://support.red-badger.com or you can email: support@red-badger.com
We hope you enjoy Birdsong v1.2. If you haven't already got it you can get it in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
We're already working on push notifications (live tile / toast) to be shipped with v1.3 so watch out for that!
We are happy to announce v1.1 of Birdsong is now available.
This release is primarily about stability and performance. We've tried to address all known issues and done a ton of performance work which should mean the whole app is a bit faster and updates are far quicker.
Along with greater speed and stability v1.1 also brings:
The following major issues should now be resolved:
We have implemented a migration strategy so that v1.1 will make some changes in the background without effecting your current data or settings. The data store will now work very differently to provide you with enhanced performance.
With v1.1 we’re also changing how we deal with support issues and feedback. All support issues will now be serviced via our new support portal; which offers ticket management, user forums and feature requests all in one place. The support portal can be found at: http://support.red-badger.com
If you experience any problems or have any feedback we want to know about it – let us know via the support forums or you can email: support@red-badger.com
If you do not already have Birdsong for Windows Phone 7 it is available in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
The status bar in Birdsong provides you with an ‘at a glance’ view of the status of your timelines. To make the ‘at a glance’ status more intuitive it relies on iconography so following on from David’s Tweet Property Icons blog earlier today – this is a very brief blog explaining the icons used in the status bar.
Each timeline will have an icon associated to it to identify the timeline type. A brief description of each is below:
Home – This timeline will include tweets for everyone you follow
Mentions – Every tweet in which your tweet screen name is mentioned will appear in this timeline
Messages – Contains Direct Message conversations between yourself and other people who follow you
List – Any saved list that you have specifically added in the timeline configuration will have this icon associated to it. If you have multiple lists configured they icon will be the same for them all.
Search – This is again a specifically configured timeline. This may be a saved search or a new search but both will be identified with this icon.
When Birdsong is attempting to download your latest tweets, status indicators appear next to the timeline icons.
Updating – When a timeline is being updated, this indicator will appear next to the icon for that timeline. This will only appear on one timeline at a time. In the image to the right the list timeline is currently being updated.
Update failed – If Birdsong experiences a problem whilst updating one of your timelines a sad face icon will appear next to the relevant timeline icon. This is most commonly caused when Birdsong can’t access the internet.
These icons will remain there until the next successful download.
So, as I said, a very brief blog but hopefully this will be of some help to some of you.
Follow us at @redbadgerteam and don’t forget to feedback with any new enhancement requests and vote on existing ones. We will be prioritising our development according to user demand.
Get Birdsong Now!
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