Benefits of Agile: Increased Customer Collaboration

Over the course of the last year, CURTIS Digital made the switch from being a primarily Waterfall software agency to an Agile one. If you are at all familiar with the software world, you likely know that each methodology has an almost cult-like following.

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Improving User Experience, One Field at a Time – Again

Most of the systems we develop here are CURTIS Digital now have a input pattern around Twitter handle inputs, e.g., @quotientaustin or @social_quotient .

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Improving User Experience, One Field at a Time

Sometimes, users need a little help with inputting full, proper URLs. While working with Dibster, a local start-up MVP client, we ran in to a small usability problem while going through user testing. A lot of the users of the system are non-technical, and we kept finding that they were not inputting URLs the way that our system wanted.

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Inspired CSS3 Animation Code

I read and study the designs on Dribbble.com on a daily basis. I came accross a cool animation a few days ago that begged to be coded. Based on the simple design it seemed like it should be doable so I thought I would also take the time to teach myself some animation properties of CSS3.

Here is what I ended up based on this awesome inspiration from Robin Andersen
http://dribbble.com/shots/829412-iPhone-iPad-Macbook 

Post by John Curtis, CEO

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SaaS developer CURTIS Digital launches SpeakerStack.com

The Austin Business Journal wrote a feature about SpeakerStack yesterday.

Software development firm CURTIS Digital, Inc.. is releasing its first software package this week, part of a suite of tools targeting the trade show industry.

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CURTIS Digital Labs is Proud to Release First Product – SpeakerStack!

We know. We’ve been a little radio silent on the blog-front, but not without good reason. We’ve been locked in the lab working on our first CURTIS Digital product, and it’s finally ready for the world to see. We are proud to present SpeakerStack to you today.

SpeakerStack is a revolutionary new platform that is aiming to create a seamless experience for conference presenters and show organizers. Both speakers and show organizers know that managing content for a presentation can be difficult. Presentations have a tendency to be media-rich, which while exciting for the audience, makes content delivery a hassle for speakers.  Large file sizes eliminate email as an option, and FTP and Dropbox can be inefficient. The simple task of sending a presentation to a show organizer has a tendency to turn into a monumental undertaking.

Managing content isn’t any easier for the show organizers, who are already responsible for planning every minute detail surrounding an event. They’re also required to review and approve presentations and confirm that their formats function with the available conference equipment (which they often don’t-technical difficulties are cited as one of the most common complaints among professional speakers). Presentations aside, organizers also have to pull together speaker bios, profile pictures, and session handouts. This might not sound like a big deal for a single speaker, but think of an event like SXSW-hundreds of different speakers held presentations of the course of the festival, and it was someone’s job to make sure that all they had all the necessary content for each and every session. There didn’t used to be a system delegated to housing and organizing this kind of information-until now.

SpeakerStack is a new kind of virtual space where speakers can upload their own content or connect to common repositories like Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Skydrive, etc. and add their materials to their SpeakerStack profile. This puts their collateral in an online location where it’s ready to go, all the time. They can also add a bio, their headshots, and pull in additional information from social networking sites. Show organizers using the SpeakerStack portal, mobile app, or website can connect via API to obtain this information dynamically. This prevents Speakers from having to resend their information for each conference that they attend.

 Speakerstack

Here is a picture of what a speaker profile looks like. Notice that their upcoming events and session handouts can be easily found via the timeline.

Show organizers can upload a spreadsheet of speakers at their event into the system, and SpeakerStack will search to see if any of the speakers already exist inside of Speakerstack. If they do, it will pull together all of the information available on the speaker’s page. Show organizers can monitor their progress, view documents, approve presentations, and export everything they need. SpeakerStack can also be integrated with existing show management software via APIs, allowing organizers to gain access to all data in real time.

Interested in signing up? Head on over to http://speakerstack.com/, and be sure to keep an eye out for upcoming products from CURTIS Digital Labs.

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OpenStack: Havana is Released!

OpenStack Overview
If you’ve been online at all in the past several years, you have undoubtedly heard about “The Cloud”. Cloud computing is essentially the method by which we can harness the power of many individual computers by combining that power into one amorphous blob (or “cloud”) of computational ability.

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What CURTIS Digital is Reading: August 2013

The Internet and I grew up together, and perhaps because of this, I never thought that it was something I would need explicit behavioral guidelines for using. ARPANET passed into the great beyond in the year that I was born, and ISPs crept across America one home at a time.

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Android Studio Released!

Last month at Google I/O, the Android community announced the release of their new integrated development environment: Android Studio. Android’s new IDE is based on the popular Java-oriented IDE, IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition (also free!).

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