Industry
Twitter Tea Time: What’s Happening at Twitter
Over the last couple of months Twitter has been hosting a series of events for developers in their San Francisco HQ. However, because they felt they were excluding a lot of developers that work with their platform they started to sponsor Developer Teatime to share insight with the community and help spread more knowledge of […]
Six Tips For Forging A Strong CMO-CIO Partnership
This article was originally published in Forbes. Much has been made of analyst predictions that chief marketing officers will soon outspend chief information officers on technology. Technically minded CMOs are already major buyers of marketing-related technology, and there’s lots of evidence that forward-thinking brands recognize the overlap in accountability and the need to sync the […]
LinkedIn and eHarmony Lesson: Salt or Die
Adding random bits to create a unique input to a one way function would have most certainly prevented the LinkedIn and eHarmony password fiasco last week. If this sounds complicated and expensive, it isn’t; I explained it right here on Techblog last year. It’s called “salting,” it’s been around for decades and it’s practically free […]
Women in Technology
Meet Computer Engineer Barbie. Originally a gag gift, she sits on my desk and reminds me that I am a female in technology. I laugh and roll my eyes at her for her sparkly leggings, bluetooth headset, and pink laptop. I embrace her for her attempt to encourage girls to pursue technology-related fields. And I […]
Using Pusher to Enable the Real Time Web
At the R/GA London Make Day , the London office split into small teams to try and create, well, anything. Whilst some people were more existential, my team aimed to gamify the “Tea Round”, an important part of the London office routine. A key concept of the game was that all users would be kept in sync ‘real-time’. As with any hack day event, development […]
The Future of the Mobile Web: A View from BDConf
I just got back from the Breaking Development Conference that was held in Orlando, Florida. It was a gathering of some of the best minds working in the mobile web right now, and every session was brimming with insight into how to think and create for the web in this increasingly diverse landscape. Some themes emerged over the course of the conference. The first is […]
Facebook Developer Network Redux
R/GA attended last week’s summit where Facebook announced the re-launch of their developer network, now called the Preferred Marketing Developer Program (PMD). Building social applications and managing pages on Facebook is a rather complex process. There is a good deal of knowledge overhead involved in the simplest of platform integrations that it makes sense for Facebook to provide a guide to those who are known […]
The Web is a Village at Scale
Some time ago, I spent a month in the Himilayas. There were no roads or cars, only footpaths connecting small villages where people lived without most modern conveniences. Inside these tight-knit mountain communities, everyone appeared to have a natural sense of each others’ well-being. In contrast, it is well documented that technical societies tend to […]
Four Developer Tips for Winning Hackathons
Recently, we participated in a 24-hour hackathon and created 2012 Matters, a Facebook app that encourages you to share what matters most in the 2012 election. People are quick to talk about the advantages of building a product quickly, but there’s much less talk about what it takes for a team to build a successful demo in a very short time. Here are four things that successful teams do to create working software in 24 hours.
Copying Code is Like a Copying a Logo
Like logos and taglines, code is a powerful way to reinforce brand identity and attract customers; in many respects, code is similar to a branded typeface. Just as appropriating choice copy and visual assets is a sly way to bootstrap a company’s brand, swiping code can give a lift too. For example, shortly after we launched a […]
