Mobile
Google Outside: A Story Telling Platform
We recently launched the second iteration of the Google Outside DOOH Campaign in London, showcasing the best of Google’s Search App (GSA) mobile application. Our challenge was to bring contextually-aware stories to hundreds of digital screens around the city, and provide a unique and relevant experience to each and every location. This had never been […]
Building Heineken’s “Open Your City” Platform
R/GA London recently launched @wherenext (http://openyourcity.heineken.com), aimed at providing venue recommendations based on social media activity, via a tweet response and web app. The app shows the five hottest venues and a heat-map of activity in the user’s vicinity. During the discovery phase, we were surprised to find that nobody was successfully cross-referencing genuinely real-time […]
7 things you probably didn’t know about iBeacons
Last year Apple announced iBeacons at the WWDC conference in June, and while most people know what it is, most have the wrong idea of what iBeacons can really do. You can also read the two earlier posts about iBeacons: part 1 and part 2 to learn more. My team and I decided to build […]
5 Tips for Getting the Most out of Your BaaS
I recently launched an iOS app called 2by2. The app allows users to combine digital artwork to create new “double exposure” art, which users can share or combine again. I decided to use Parse for the backend since it provides time-savers like social login, push notifications and data storage out of the box. The infrastructure handles security and scaling […]
Quality Can’t Be Emulated, Imitated, or Simulated
Testers find bugs. Finding bugs is one of the main goals for someone in QA. We strive to achieve a high quality product by finding bugs and issues before launch. It’s not exactly how W. Edwards Deming described it, but it is the way that software development works for the most part in fast paced […]
Phonebloks and Project Ara – Motorola’s Hail Mary?
The announcement by Motorola last week of the previously undercover Project Ara and their partnership with the Phonebloks community is potentially huge news from a one-time giant, and arguably the creator of the entire cellphone industry. On 10 September 2013 Dave Hakkens posted a YouTube video and the Phonebloks website, calling for people to back his plan to create a revolutionary […]
Making Prescription Google Glass
After months of waiting, I got the coveted email inviting me to pick up my pair of Google Glasses. After my appointment at Google HQ, my celebration was brief because I struggled with how to deal with Google Glass and my own prescription glasses. I tried wearing both frames at once (disaster) and I tried […]
8 Things to Consider when Selecting a BaaS Provider
Parse visited the R/GA office in March and was bought by Facebook in April. Since then, interest in Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) has continued to increase. BaaS or MBaas (Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service) saves time and money by simplifying the task of selecting, installing, and configuring your stack and making it easier to write, test and securely deploy backend code […]
Mobile World Congress 2013 – Back from Barcelona, Unchanged
A strange thing didn’t happen in Barcelona this week. I arrived home, unchanged and I suspect 70,000 other folks had the same experience, or lack of it. The event was gigantic. The new exhibition space at Fira Gran Via was 94,000 square meters – that’s in the neighborhood of 10 American football fields. There were […]
Parse @ R/GA
Last week Parse‘s CEO & Founder Ilya Sukhar visited the R/GA offices in New York to introduce our development teams to the Parse platform. Parse.com’s mission is to abstract backend functionality into one scalable and fully featured platform. While it’s particularly powerful for mobile apps, there’s no limit to how developers can integrate it into their […]
