Does Office Space Really Matter?

I was thinking back to my fondest days in the software industry.  There are four times that came to mind:

1. Crushing the ping pong ball on a Saturday afternoon, shirts off, with my soon to be business partner Ahn Ahn at Microsoft.  And no, I don’t think we were there that day working on Microsoft tasks!
2. Freezing my ass off in our Ballard office with no heat at 2am trying to get client projects out the door.
3. Late night Denny’s with Ahn Ahn after working a full day at Microsoft, and a full night on the business
4. My 2nd office in Vietnam, right in the heart of the party district. We’d regularly work til 9 or 10pm, then often hang out drinking together.  One particular night comes to mind as it was my birthday.  So after a long day of work, the team and I drank ourselves into the ground and I missed my flight back to the USA the next day

All these memories, the space was never really that important to me. I had a nice office during my time at Microsoft and it just felt secluded.

What clicked in my mind as we designed our our new Vinasource office was these fond memories were all about my extreme experiences, good and bad.  It was these experiences that spawned emotions and drove me to work harder.

With that in mind, we set out to create an office that was fun, exciting, dynamic and community oriented.

Still about a month away from completion, here is what we are doing:

• Open floor plan, grouped by projects with project names hanging from the ceiling
• The “War Room” – beautiful conference room with mounted projector made for efficient project meetings
• The “One Room” – Techies like games, clients use skype, Xbox One is an awesome skype experience.  The One Room features a couch, small conference table, 60 inch screen, game character fat heads on the wall and an Xbox one. Skype calls with clients take priority, any other times, anything goes
• The “Arena” – We find there is no better way to let off steam than to battle it out on the ping pong table
• The “Library” – As techies we spend a lot of time on a screen. Sometimes it’s nice to just pick up an old fashion book and kick back on the bean bags.  Afternoon nap is cool too, after all, who didn’t fall asleep in a library back in school at one point in their life?

So if you ask me, do I think having an amazing class A office space matters, I’d have to say no.

But creating a space coupled with a working culture that breeds extreme experiences is critical.

Mobile App Links Starting to Roll Out

Several apps are starting to adopt a new standard for deep-linking into apps, called App Links. There’s a great overview video on their site. The open-source standard was introduced by Facebook, and can be implemented into any app.

Previously, especially on iOS, it wasn’t possible to click on a web link within a web site or an email and have it open to a specific view or piece of content within an app installed on your phone. Instead, it would simply take you to a web page. Android has some methods for this, but there was nothing cross-platform.

One app that is taking the lead here is called Mailbox, which is an email app released by Dropbox. To see this in action:

1. On your iOS device… (I didn’t have as much luck on Android during my testing)
2. Install the Mailbox app
3. Install the Flixster app
4. Send yourself an email with a link to a Flixster movie such as the latest X-Men movie
5. Open up Mailbox and click on the link in that email
6. You should be taken directly to that movie in the Flixster app
7. For comparison, try clicking on that link from your regular iOS mail app and note that you’re simply taken to the web site

I’ve also posted a short video of this on YouTube.

A handful of companies have implemented some level of App Links. Facebook supposedly has incorporated this into their apps as well, but I wasn’t able to observe this functionality during my limited testing.

This could be an extremely useful feature to incorporate into your apps, since the mobile user experience of using native apps is so much better typically than strictly browsing the web.

We will have to wait so see whether Google, Apple and Microsoft choose to adopt this into their respective mail apps. It could really be convenient if they did.

Anomo Case Study

Anomo is a particularly interesting client for Vinasource, in that it was founded by Vinasource client James Sun and Vinasource CTO Benjamin Liu, after successful collaboration on the Pirq project, which Vinasource helped develop.  The two co-founders, during Vinasource’s work with Pirq, realized that they shared a similar vision of enabling people to find, connect, and engage with the people around them in a safe and efficient manner.  They found that technology had enabled people to gain unprecedented knowledge of their surrounding, from restaurants to housing prices and gas stations, and yet people still knew nothing about the most important piece of their surroundings – the PEOPLE.  And thus social discovery app Anomo was born!

Anomo began in 2012, utilizing a Vinasource development team consisting of a program manager, 2 iOS devs, 2 Android devs, a PHP dev, a QA Engineer, and a Mobile Architect.  The team was rather large for a startup, but was necessitated by Anomo wanting to launch simultaneously on both iPhone and Android, as well as the need for backend web services development where most of the logic and processing was done.  Total timeline from idea conception to beta launch was approximately 8 months of development time, including a UI redesign halfway through the project.  The app was successfully launched in June 2013, and has attracted over 160,000 users and raised over $1.2M in funding to date, with local Seattle investors including John McCaw, Amit Mital, Scott Swerland, and Maveron.

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/anomo-meet-new-people/id529027583?mt=8

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vinasource.anomoinc.anomo

 

From a product/technical standpoint, the app was quite complex/full-featured.  Features included:

• Account Creation / Email based Login / Facebook Login
• User Profiles / Interests / Public Profile Page
• Check In module integrating with Google / Foursquare API to get Places Data
• User Content Creation (creating posts/uploading photos/etc)
• Two-way messaging / Group Chat
• Location Awareness
• Search / Sort by Location
• Invite Friends
• Content Sharing
• Push Notifications
• Gifting / In-app Purchases
• Flurry Analytics
• Hashtags
• User / Content Search
• Filtering
• Followers
• Admin System for managing app, content moderation, analytics, users, etc

The team also developed a responsive modern consumer targeted website located at http://www.anomo.com.

The Vinasource team particularly enjoyed this app in that they got to use and customize so many different features within iOS and Android.  It was certainly a feature-rich app (almost too much so, and we looked to start simplifying the app in later iterations).  The team also worked closely with Anomo stakeholders to analyze data – building, adding, and improving features in highly targeted iterations.  In all, up to present day, the app has had over 20+ iterations and updates already, with each one built upon the learnings of the previous iteration.  MVPs of new features were tested out in each iterations, with successful features rewarded with additional customization and unsuccessful features removed.

Probably the biggest learnings from the Anomo project was from being put in the shoes of a client.  We learned first hand the challenges of being a startup, raising money, of evolving business requirements and pivots that lead to development changes, massive scaling, as well as the numerous non-development related challenges.  In particular, we learned the value of iterative agile-based development to combat changing requirements and environments, as well as the importance of analytics, data-driven decisions, and “failing fast” so as to minimize cost and risk when releasing new features.

 

Does your app contain, display or access third-party content?

Does your app contain, display or access third-party content?

This article gives a good description of the new question that Apple added to the app submission process, and explains why Apple is asking for this info.

Marvel’s iPhone App Turns Sketches Into Tappable Mobile App “Prototypes”

Marvel’s iPhone app for creating prototypes from sketches is a great option for anyone wanting to design and communicate an app concept without having to do a lot of Photoshop work. Clickable mock-ups can be very effective to communicate interactive design. If you do have more polished mock-ups than just pen-on-paper and you want to make them interactive, you can use either the main Marvel solution or Flinto.

Read the original article on TechCrunch.