Bitchroom – Put that %#$! on Blast!

We are happy to announce the launch of Bitchroom, the foremost destination on the internet for venting your problems and finding solutions. Even if their is not a solution to what you’re venting about it’s always good to “Let it Out” or “Put it On Blast”. We had a lot of fun with the Bitchroom site because it’s something we all can relate to. Starting from square one, we worked closely with Travus and Mike from BR to design a user experience that was intriguing, intuitive, and innovative. With some initial background research as ammunition and the breadth of social network tools available at our fingertips, Travus and Mike gave us a good balance of freedom of creativity coupled with precise feedback. Development involved a collaborative effort with the good folks at Carbon Five and allowed us to see our hard work come to life. Give it a try for yourself, head over to Bitchroom put some stuff on blast.

CityMint – Mobile App for Food Delivery / Pickup

CityMintWe just finished the latest development for our friends over at CityMint, a new mobile application for food delivery or pickup. It’s all location based, allowing users to browse nearby restaurants, their menus, order items for delivery or pick-up. Extra nice features are that it stores your credit card info, can store multiple addresses for you, shows yelp reviews of each restaurant, and now supports delivery to your blanket at concert events in the park. As expressed here in this recent article about it in New York Daily News.

Download it from the iTunes App Store here

Have no fear…Sencha is here

Sencha Touch

We were so happy to hear that our friends at Ext JS have partnered up with JQtouch and Raphael to form Sencha Touch, our great new hope for a truly cross-mobile JavaScript/HTML5 frameworks. We have been partners with both Ext JS and have worked with JQuery for a long time, so when we got to play around with the Beta version of Sencha we had high hopes. So far it has lived up to everything we dreamed about and we have already begun a few projects built on the Sencha frameworks.

Voyavo.com – Trip Planner – Go Travel

We wanted to show off all of the features of Voyavo for those of you that don’t know….now ya know!

Voyavo.com – We’ve launched…now commence travel…

We really think that we have re-invented online travel planning. Go to voyavo.com to check it out.

About two and a half years ago we had the opportunity to do some consulting in Athens, Greece. We had a set budget from our customer and a time frame for work, but really didn’t want to travel across the Atlantic from the west coast of the US to just see just Athens. We decided to try some meta-search engines to see what we could come up with for other options for cities to visit before or after our visit to Athens. We instantly grew frustrated.

What we found was that there was no real way to create actionable work sheets of itineraries using any of the existing meta-engines, online travel agencies and/or travel planners. Mocking trips up was a combination of scribbling down prices, creating spreadsheets, and re-running searches for availability and pricing back on the originating site. Alternately we could store this information in a travel planner, but do nothing with it until it was time to travel. In many cases it was an after the fact travel planning process that we didn’t enjoy. In both cases, our intent was to simply mock-up some destination pricing scenarios, but we found that it wasn’t really possible.

We decided that this process was broken and that it was time to give it a shot on our own. This was a larger challenge than originally thought, as we needed it to cover both business and consumer travel planning as our original use case required. After a year of the project sitting on the shelf we finally started it back in October of 2008 and yesterday we soft launched it to the industry.

Voyavo.com is 1/4 meta-search, 1/4 travel planner, 1/4 geo-located logistics, and 1/4 collaboration.

While we know there a few usability issues that we need to over-come, we’d still love to hear your feedback.

Search, Add some items to a trip, and explore your destination.

Enjoy!

Is Flash Dead?

Check out this GWT project, where they ported over the game Quake to HTML5.  This is an example of what they are able to pull off with HTML5, and proof that it is quickly gaining ground on what was traditionally done in Flash.

http://code.google.com/p/quake2-gwt-port/

We’ve moved!

Just like the Jeffersons, we’re moving on up. Not to the east side, but rather downtown San Francisco. 118 2nd Street, 4th Floor to be exact. For all you city folks, we’re next to 111 Minna in the Van Heusen building. Stop by and say hi!
Under Construction

Doritos Tablet

This is going to be the next big thing in snacks

The New Blogher Rolls out

We spent a good portion on the Fall working with the good people over at Blogher and ThinkSF to redesign the blogher.com website. Our goal was to make the site more usable and community driven. The site upgrade was released over the weekend with much fanfare.  Thanks to the Blogher and ThinkSF teams for being such great people to work with.

G-Speak Gesture UI

I’ve seen a lot of gesture UI lately that just seems to be less efficient than traditional touch or mouse- based mediums.  This, however, changes the game.  Straight outta Minority Report (literally from the guy who worked on the movie).  We live in the future.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.