Articles by Alon Salant
Story Mapper is Release Planning for Pivotal Tracker
We’re proud to announce the release of Story Mapper, a project we have been working on at Carbon Five to support an Agile project planning technique called story mapping. We use Pivotal Tracker to manage our feature backlog and the day-to-day activities of tracking a feature from estimation through delivery and acceptance. However, we find …
Ada Freezes Monsters with Snowballs (and Canvas)
Alex sent me an email Saturday morning with this really cute Canvas game he wrote with his daughter Ada. His timing was really great since I am on a panel at SXSW Tuesday called Is Canvas the End of Flash? He explains it all below… I was telling Ada how video games are made one …
Alon on Flash and Canvas at 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 …
DNA Direct Acquired by Medco Health Solutions
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 …
Google Acquires Aardvark
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 …
Recipe for Simple Agile Retrospectives
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, …
Fail Early and Often at the Commonwealth Club Wed Dec 9
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. …
Aardvark for iPhone on the App Store
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 …
Carbon Five at SXSW 2010
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 …
Once Upon a School, Hot and C5 in Fast Company
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!