6-min demo of VIAAS (from the DEMOFall09 conference)

Earlier this week, our client, Third Iris, publicly announced the launch of VIAAS, a cloud-based video monitoring service. Here is the 6-min demo:

Public launch of VIAAS.com at DEMOfall09

Today was a big day - our client, VIAAS ("Video Intelligence As A Service"), announced their public launch at DEMOfall09 today. The full press release announcing the launch can be found here.
VIAAS provides a better and less expensive way to record video. VIAAS offers a video camera which is mounted on a wall or ceiling, connects to the internet and displays viewable clips in a web application. All of the video is stored in the cloud for security and safety. A user can define motion sensitivity settings to capture only the important activity in the camera's field of view. The VIAAS solution overcomes many of the hassles home users and small businesses face when trying to install video surveillance systems. There are a slew of other advantages and features that you can read by going to the VIAAS site.

Enablus has worked with VIAAS since the summer of last year on:

• Overall product/brand/channel strategy
• Flex RIA development
• Marketing & ecommerce website
• Physical industrial design of camera form factor
• Package design
  

In short, it is an engagement that tested the full scope of Enablus' product development capabilities.

And it couldn't have happened with a nicer group of clients. Steve Roskowski (CEO) and Paul Forester (VP of Services) are as sharp as they come. Both are battle-tested veterans of Silicon Valley. Steve is an ex-Apple Engineer and serial entrepreneur (one of his companies was acquired by Cisco). Paul (also ex-Apple) has developed large-scale IT infrastructures for telecom providers.

And did I mention brave? Announcing your public launch at DEMO is a high anxiety affair - over 500 physical attendees and over 10,000 live streams to watch a 6-minute pitch. Steve and Paul's demo went off without a hitch. They articulated a very clear value prop for why homes and businesses are interested in the VIAAS offering. They also demonstrated how easy it was install a camera, and begin watching streaming video feeds within several minutes.

Congratulations VIAAS!!

What are the roles on a Flex/Flash RIA dev team?

There are many roles in building a Flex/Flash-based RIA. Some are common to building web apps in other languages. Some steps are specific to Flex and Flash, Let’s cover the range of these steps, as well as who typically performs them. I say “typically” because you may not have the budget for an 14-person team....you may have four people which have to cover many bases. Here we go:

1. Someone to organize the work effort, track progress, coordinate the backlog with business stakeholders, make stuff happen, and keep the big picture. This is typically a Project Manager.
2. Someone to lay out information architecture and interaction design in the form of wireframes. This is typically the job of an Information Architect or an Interaction Designer, however, I’ve seen Business Analysts perform this role.
3. Someone to create visual design comps which incorporate the font, color palette, iconography and image assets. This is typically a Visual Designer.
4. Someone to write user stories and acceptance criteria. This is typically a Business Analyst, but sometimes falls to the job of a Project Manager or IA.
5. Someone to slice up the visual comps and churn out image assets. This is a typically a Visual Designer.
6. Someone to create the CSS. This is typically a Visual Designer
7. Someone to incorporate the image assets into a .fla which can be imported into a Flex project. Typically this is a Flex developer, unless you have a Designer that is highly comfortable bridging creative and technical. Next year, when Flex 4 (aka “Gumbo”) and Flash Catalyst are released, the Designer-to-Developer hand-off will become more streamlined. In the meantime, this hand-off can be a clunky affair depending on the skills of the players involved.
8. Someone to lay out the base UI structure in MXML. This is a Developer well versed with the out-of-the-box components and their features/constraints.
9. Someone to architect the overall design of the presentation tier. Most teams will use one of the popular Flex frameworks like Cairngorm or PureMVC to streamline this process. For large projects, I’ve seen this responsibility fall to the Architect. For small teams with 2-3 really sharp Developers, they will share architectural responsibilities.
10. Someone to architect the messaging layer between the presentation tier and the back-end. At some point, a decision will be made as to whether the team will use HTTPRequest, JSON, XML, AMF, BlazeDS, LCDS, etc. The contents, format and periodicity of the API will need to be specified. This typically falls to whomever is architecting the back-end, in conjunction with the Flex architect.
11. Someone who loves to create custom components, manage state, and write business logic using Actionscript. This is usually done by a Senior Developer or Architect who has been around the Flex for awhile and has a deep understanding of OOP from a past life (e.g., converted Java or .NET studs).
12. Someone who knows how to use animations, transitions and maintain visual integrity during a browser window resize. This requires a Senior Developer with experience with Flash and Flex.
13. Someone to code back-end functionality, implement the physical data model, and other server-side “stuff”. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve lumped these together into a generic category because there will many nuances based on your back-end technology choice.
14. Someone to test implemented features. This could be a dedicated QA Analyst, a Business Analyst, or Project Manager.

OfficeArrow keeps growing by focusing on users' needs

In my email inbox was a holiday greeting and newsletter from one of our clients, OfficeArrow. While reading the newsletter, I reflected on the incredible journey this company has taken in the past year.

This time last year, OfficeArrow was in the concept stage. There was no website. The company had four full-time employees and several whiteboards full of ideas.

Enablus had been brought in to lead the User Experience Design for their site. We completed one focus group to identify segments in their targeted audience and to unearth critical versus nice-to-have requirements. In mid-December of '07, there was a flurry of IA design and wireframing to construct a narrative for why OfficeArrow would become important in the hearts and minds of their user base. The next goal was to validate our wireframes with a second focus group in early January.

Fast forward to today. OfficeArrow is a thriving community for office professionals - defined as administrative assistants, office managers, and event planners. The site has over 92,000 registered users (plus the thousands of lurkers who never register). As mentioned in a prior post, this rate of growth is above average. How did OfficeArrow accomplish this?

1. They know their audience and have segmented it appropriately. During the first focus group, we identified three distinct groups of users. Two of these became primary personas, the third was placed on a backburner for later development.
2. They narrowed their feature set to focus ONLY on the needs of the primary personas. On the original whiteboards were many (seemingly good) ideas. However, after refining the critical requirements for the primary personas, we reduced the scope of Release One.
3. They have dedicated resources to seed the site with content and evangelize the community. Robert Ball, the CEO, made a early decision to hire content specialists to seed the site during the early months. All of the content contributors are former office professionals (e.g., they have walked in the shoes of their users). Eventually, the site reached a tipping point where a majority of the content is user generated, not staff generated.
   

Hooray for our clients - OfficeArrow and Spectrum K12

It has been an exciting month for two of our clients - OfficeArrow and Spectrum K12 School Solutions. Both achieved huge development milestones.

OfficeArrow passes 50K registered users in 5.5 months.
OfficeArrow is a social networking site aimed squarely at the needs of Office Professionals, such as administrative assistants and office managers. The site launched on May 1st of this year. We are proud to announce that last week, OfficeArrow surpassed the 50K registered user mark!

50K in less than 6 months is a significant acquisition accomplishment. To provide a comparative, here is a extract from a chart found in a March ‘07 issue of Fast Company of other Web 2.0 sites:

• DEL.ICIO.US took 16 months after launch to get to 50,000 users
• DIGG took took 5 months after launch to get to 25,000 users

What makes the OfficeArrow metric more compelling is that it serves a tightly-focused audience, whereas DEL.ICO.US and DIGG serve an extremely broad demographic mix.

Spectrum K12 secures $7.4 Million in funding.
In the midst of the credit market deep-freeze, Spectrum K12 lands a significant round of funding. I’ve mentioned Spectrum K12 in a prior posting, hinting at our design collaboration on an up-and-coming product release. The solution, called EXCEED/RTI, was announced to the public on June 30th. Since then, the market feedback has exceeded (no pun intended) our expectations - school districts are clamoring to participate in the initial rollout.

Response To Intervention (RTI) is a hot trend in public education. In a nutshell, RTI is a framework of practices and techniques to quickly identify “at-risk” students and implement a structured program to prevent their academic failure. RTI relies heavily on data capture, both from initial diagnostic tests and from constant “interventions” (e.g., twice-a-week coaching sessions to increase reading comprehension). The Spectrum K12 EXCEED/RTI solution is designed to help teachers, principals and administrators automate the workflow, student progress monitoring and district level reporting associated with RTI.

RTI is a potential game-changer for the US educational system. Luckily, the group of investors participating in this fundraising round agree. This $7.4 Million raise will help cement Spectrum K12’s leadership position in this market category.