The whole team at Nitobi is honored to have been picked as one of 5 companies out of 80 to present at the Launch Pad event at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I get 5 minutes to convince a panel of judges and the crowd (voting in real-time with sms) that PhoneGap is the hottest technology product launching at the event. It’s described as “American Idol” for business…no pressure;-)
“For 2009, we continue the tradition of showcasing innovative and promising new companies at Web 2.0 Expo. While the definition of a launch has gotten cloudy in this age of public betas, we’re looking for new companies or products that make us take notice. And while venture capital has been the focus in past years, the reality of the market is that companies must gain the attention of customers. So our judging panel and criteria this year focus more on what is essential and transformational in today’s market than on ability to get funded. Along the way, we’re sure the VCs in the crowd will find several startups they’d like to talk to!”
Good luck to the other presenter and I hope we all manage to provide some value or at least entertainment to the crowd.
The event is at 1:15-2:15pm Thursday April 2nd in the Keynote Room (Ballroom - 3rd Level).
I have 2 free passes is anyone is interested. Just leave a comment or email me.
Duane stopped by the Nitobi Office earlier this year to chat with me about RIAs, what we do and where it’s all going. We also chat a bit about RobotReplay.
I wasn’t sure where it was all heading, but I guess I ended up on the first episode of Duane’s World for Adobe TV. Very cool. If you think you have a topic that would be good for Duane’s show leave me a comment and I’ll put you in touch.
I should call out that Adobe has done a great job with the content and UI of Adobe TV but has failed to provide clean URLs that are actually updated in the address bar. Thus it’s kind of a pain to find and share URLs and impossible to navigate with back button. Too bad it would be so easy to make it a great example of public facing Flex RIA. Someone _high_ and Adobe really needs to start hammering this sort of thing home if Adobe is going to successfully make the leap to Saas and web services. I guess it’s not enough to have Kevin Lynch talking about it. I also can’t resize this video, so it’s best to go to Adobe TV to watch it.
[Disclaimer Duane's a good friend and on Nitobi's Advisory Board]
Earlier this year I was interviewed for an article on RIAs in ComputerWorld (sorry you need an account to log in).
Here’s an excerpt:
Developer: Nitobi Software Inc., Vancouver Project: Nitobi Complete UI is a set of nine user interface components for rich Internet applications. They’re
designed to help RIA developers save time by plugging in whichever Nitobi modules they need rather than
recreating the functions themselves. They include, for example, a spreadsheet module called Grid, a Calendar
module, and ComboBox, for completing data-entry fields by searching a database as the user types. How it works: All the Nitobi Complete UI components are written in HTML and JavaScript. Nitobi has offered the
components since 2004, but more recently has used Adobe AIR to give them the ability to work offline as well as
online. That means users can transfer data between their desktops and the Web more seamlessly, says Andre
Charland, Nitobi’s chief executive, and they can take data such as contact lists with them even when not connected
to the Internet. Best practices: If you take the time to understand what AIR can do, says Charland, “it’s amazing to me how close
we can get to traditional desktop software.†The key is understanding and fully exploiting its capabilities.
For instance, he says, AIR can provide native access to Flash on the desktop, and it’s possible to call Adobe’s
ActionScript directly from JavaScript.
Because AIR is still in beta, he notes, it remains a “moving target†for developers. Nitobi tries to deal with that by
being very open with its customers about ways in which things could change.
Obviously things I said didn’t come through in the translations and AIR is 1.0 now it’s more stable. Other than that it’s a nice plug.
Dion and I were (again) the two Ajax-tag-alongs on the OnAIR Tour in Europe. So we had a quick chat about what Nitobi has been up to with our Ajax components.
The first leg of the European OnAIR Tour has just wrapped up in London. It’s been a great time. I’m just putting together all my thoughts on the tour but I’d post this video of my talk in Spain.
User experience you can take to the bank! VanUE » HSBC User Centered Design Group
HSBC is a global bank with over 100 million customers in 83 countries worldwide. As a global team dedicated to championing the needs of all of HSBC’s customers, HSBC User Centered Design (UCD) views the customer experience as one that has no borders. With user research and user interface design teams worldwide, UCD has the ability to meet the needs of an ever-changing world. UCD projects range from intranet designs and applications for internal staff to innovative engagements with ATMs and mobile banking. Join UCD as the team shares some of its memorable experiences setting the bar for the “World’s Local Bank.â€
Sounds interesting. Some of the best talks on usability I’ve been have been from experts working directly for business or product as opposed to outside consultants (not trash talking, ’cause I’m one of em). I’m also very interested in usability and ux in the banking world since so many Nitobi customers are large financial institutions. Banks also have to deal with other issues like large data sets, privacy, security and accessibility more diligently than many businesses so it’s neat to understand how they balance everything. Incidentally many big banks were *very* early adopters of Ajax…before we even had this clever little term:)
We talked a little bit about what AIR is and then checked out some demos including Pownce, a Google Analytics app (correction there is no API for Google Analytics) and our SalesForce demo.
We’re
running a survey this month to gather information from web
designers and developers about the tools and platforms they’re using. It’s quite focused on development of Ajax user interfaces.
If you can spare three minutes, I’d appreciate it if you
href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bpDcVkz3gpWM1sBwcNAAMg_3d_3d">completed
the survey. It’s pretty brief-14 multiple choice and short answer
questions. One person who does will win an iPod Nano. We’ll be
publishing the survey results in February. So everyone wins really:)
I’m going to be talking at Ajax World East in New York this March 18-20th. Here’s the deal:
AJAX for the Masses: Building Rich User Interfaces in Dreamweaver
Web application developers and designers often give up on building rich, interactive user interfaces because they lack the JavaScript skills to make it happen. AJAX development power tools-including Dreamweaver, Spry and off-the-shelf AJAX components-make it easy to build rich user interfaces in AJAX with no JavaScript coding.
Andre Charland will demonstrate how to install, set up and configure extensions to Dreamweaver, and will use them to build simple, rich interface AJAX apps. After this session, even beginner developers will be able to add AJAX interactions to web applications. This session is a must for ambitious, novice and intermediate designers anxious to use AJAX in their applications.
Drop me a line if you’ve going to be there and would like to meet up.
The whole team at Nitobi is honored to have been picked as one of 5 companies out of 80 to present at the Launch Pad event at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I get 5 minutes to convince a panel of judges and the crowd (voting in real-time with sms) that PhoneGap is the hottest technology product launching at the event. It’s described as “American Idol” for business…no pressure;-)