Author Archive for alon

Alon on Flash and Canvas at SXSW

Published by alon on March 1, 2010 in Speaking. 0 Comments

SXSW

I’m looking forward to participating in a panel Is Canvas the End of Flash? this month at SXSW on the role the new HTML Canvas element is playing in web development and how it compares to Flash. Much of the perspective I have for this panel comes from my long history working with Flash and from our recent work with Canvas for Isilon Systems on InsightIQ.

The panel has been organized by Greg Veen of SmallBatch, Inc., creators of TypeKit and includes Chet Haas from the Adobe Flex team, Nathan Germick from social gaming start up Wonderhill and Ben Galbraith from Palm and Mozilla, also lead of the ambitious Bespin project.

Come check us out if you’re going to be in Austin.

Also check out some of the presentations by friends of Carbon Five at SXSW:

From Dinosaurs to Digital: A Museum Convergence Success Story from Maria Giudice of Hot Studio on her work with Jonathon Denholtz of the California Academy of Sciences.

Social Search: A Little Help From My Friends a panel on social search organized by Brynn Evans that includes CEO Max Ventilla from our recently acquired client Aardvark.

Beyond the Desktop: Embracing New Interaction Paradigms a panel on interactions that go beyond keyboard+mouse includes Nathan Moody of Stimulant, masters of the multitouch Microsoft Surface and NUI design.

DNA Direct Acquired by Medco Health Solutions

Published by alon on February 19, 2010 in Clients. 0 Comments

Medco Health Solutions and Carbon Five client DNA Direct announced earlier this month that DNA Direct has been acquired by Medco. Congratulations to everyone on the DNA Direct team on this new opportunity to extend their genomic medicine and health care services to an exponentially greater audience.

Among other initiatives, Carbon Five worked with DNA Direct to roll out their first release of, as founder and CEO Ryan Phelan describes it, “the first genetic guidance program for a top five health plan with Humana, facilitating prior authorization and providing clinical services to ensure appropriate testing with lower out of pocket costs from the right lab.”

Google Acquires Aardvark

Published by alon on February 12, 2010 in Clients. 0 Comments

Google announced today that they have acquired our client Aardvark. Congratulations to the very talented team at Aardvark on this next big step toward bringing their social search service to a global audience.

Aarvark has more details on the acquisition. You can also read more about the work did helping the Aardvark bootstrap their team and product development.

Recipe for Simple Agile Retrospectives

Published by alon on December 17, 2009 in Agile. 0 Comments

After my talk at the Commonwealth Club last week our good friend Darren from Stimulant followed up with me to get a summary of the simple agile retrospective technique I described.

I thought I’d just send him to Google but a search for agile retrospective returned descriptions that seemed too heavy weight for the small, skilled, agile-literate teams we employ at Carbon Five.

There is certainly a lot of valuable information and insight out there I and definitely suggest doing some reading to understand the fundamentals and options for running retrospectives. However, since we want to do retrospectives often, we need a practice that doesn’t take much time or effort.

Here’s a recipe we are using these days. You can do this in 30 minutes. I actually did this with our architect for a home renovation project I am working on. Great things came out of it. I think it might have blown their minds.

Setup

Get alll team members in a room with a few stickies each.

You’re here to talk about an iteration, project, or other unit… with the goal of improving the next time around.

Thoughts: 5-10 min

Smiley face on stickies with good things from the last iteration.
Frowny face with concerns, risks, fears,…
You don’t have to be exhaustive, use the time you allocate.

Cluster: 5-10 min

Create two teams.
Give the smiles to one and the frowns to the other.
Group the stickies into related clusters.

Discuss: 20 min

Identify the primary smiley clusters.
Confirm that you will continue to see these benefits, can you increase them?

Identify the primary frowny clusters and list the themes on a whiteboard.
Vote to discuss – each team member has 4 votes – put dots next to
the issues you want to discuss.
Discuss the top 3 issues – identify SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria) steps to address them.

Rinse, wash, repeat. Don’t feel you have to talk about everything. You are trying to focus on top issues. Once you address those, the next most important issues will surface for discussion.

We do this every other week with our internal team and monthly including our clients.

If you have other recipes for simple reflection, I’d love to hear them.

Fail Early and Often at the Commonwealth Club Wed Dec 9

Published by alon on December 7, 2009 in Agile. 0 Comments

Please join us for an Evening Program at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco for my presentation on techniques for creating a culture of learning, quality and collaboration in your organization. I will be sharing insights including failures and lessons learned from Carbon Five’s almost 10 years of creating web-based products.

Light reception to follow. We hope you can hang out after for a glass of wine and to catch up before the holidays.

http://tickets.commonwealthclub.org/auto_choose_ga.asp?area=2&shcode=1501

Fail Early and Often: Innovative Practices for Online Development
Alon Salant, Principal, Carbon Five

Organizations today increasingly struggle to create compelling software products, web sites and social media while working with the daunting details of limited time and resources. Learn new ways of working and delivering early value with simple and easy-to-apply processes from a pioneering software development firm. Discover how agile techniques and tools have helped to sculpt new strategies and sustainable practices, leading to more success, faster turn-around and reduced expenses.

Location:
Commonwealth Club Office
585 Market Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105

Telephone Reservations: (415) 597-6700

Time: 5:30 p.m. networking, 6 p.m. program, reception to follow
Cost: $8 members, $15 non-members, $7 students (with valid ID)

This is an open invitation. Please share with others.

Aardvark for iPhone on the App Store

Published by alon on September 17, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

We’re excited to see that the Aardvark iPhone app is now available on the app store. Since handing off an earlier version of the app to their internal team we’ve been waiting with baited breath for its release.

It has been very well received with TechCrunch claiming it the best way to use Aardvark and 4 1/2 stars from over 100 ratings in just a couple days.

Working on this project with the Aardvark team was great. We love their intensely user-driven approach for designing and validating features through iterative development. We also pioneered our own best practices for test driven development to the iPhone platform, something that seems to be rare in the iPhone development community.

Carbon Five at SXSW 2010

Published by alon on August 20, 2009 in Agile. 0 Comments

We’re planning our return to Austin for the South by Southwest interactive conference with a session we have put together with the folks at Aardvark. Titled The Experiment is the Product: Innovation through Iteration, Rob Spiro and I are going to break down how we merged our Agile software development practices with their user-focused and research-driven product design process.

There’s great stuff about cheap and fast prototyping and testing techniques, building feedback loops in to product design, and how to come up with emerging product definition that can drive an iterative software development process.

SXSW weights community input heavily in its panel selection process. Take a moment to give our proposal a thumbs up.

Once Upon a School, Hot and C5 in Fast Company

Published by alon on August 4, 2009 in Clients. 0 Comments

I was just forwarded a great writeup in Fast Company of the work Hot Studio and Carbon Five did for Dave Eggers and 826 Valencia on Once Upon a School. Truth be told, the article is primarily on Hot’s fantastic contribution to the project. Check it out!

Vinfolio Launches Collector Marketplace

Published by alon on July 8, 2009 in Clients. 0 Comments

Vinfolio announced today the launch of Vinfolio Marketplace where wine collectors can buy and sell wine from their private cellars.

According to Steve Bachmann, Vinfolio CEO, the marketplace includes 27,000+ unique items already marked for sale – more than 170,000 bottles with over $20 million estimated retail value. That’s far more than any retailer/auction house on the day the marketplace opens.

Carbon Five worked with Vinfolio years ago to create and launch their groundbreaking procurement and storage service for wine collectors. It’s great to see that they continue to push their industry by creating new ways for wine lovers to sell, acquire and enjoy wine.

2008 Charitable Giving

Published by alon on June 23, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Every year we donate a portion of profits to organizations and causes selected by the employees of Carbon Five. We neglected to update our site with the list for 2008 until today.

Personally, I am particularly psyched to be supporting the San Francisco Bike Kitchen in their move to a beautiful new space at 19th & Florida in the Mission. I have been volunteering as a mechanic with the Bike Kitchen for almost four years and have been continually impressed by the dedication and innovation of the all-volunteer staff and board. The bike racks at Carbon Five are full every day and the Bike Kitchen keeps many of us rolling smoothly to work.