Well, we upped the ante and have decided to give away a total of FOUR free tickets. We received a total of 40 submissions and were really encouraged by all of the enthusiastic responses. Without further ado:

1. Brian Sierakowski – @bsierakowski – Managing Editor of Baltimore’s [StartupDigest]2, founder of CahootsApp and eCommunications & Office Manager at Greater Baltimore Tech Council.
2. Paul Kauders – @pkauders – founder of SplitGear, a Baltimore-based company hoping “to make community based sharing of equipment the norm.”
3. Leela S. – a student at Towson University. Leela has “never won anything before, so this would be a real treat.” Well, there you go.
4. Eric Oestrich – @EricOestrich and oestrich on github – a student at Towson University that participated in the debut of the Baltimore Hackathon.

We’ll contact the winners shortly.

If you didn’t win: buy a ticket – or – stay tuned! More announcements to follow.

Thanks to everyone that helped us spread the word. If you’re interested in hearing what else we’re up to then please follow us on twitter.

The course will be held in our incubator at ETC Canton and will cost $375 for early bird tickets (purchased before November 20) or $450 for normal-priced tickets.

But wait! There’s more. We’re giving away two free tickets to the course: one for a co/founder of a business located in the Greater Baltimore area (you can be a “technical” or “non-technical” cofounder) and another for a student at a local college or university.

We’re giving away the tickets to further spread the RoR love and to help more people find the road to happiness. If nothing else, we figure it’s a heroic deed.

One of my personal dirty little secrets is that I don’t really know Ruby or Rails. I think it’s high time I capitalize on the fact that I’m lucky enough to work with the most talented Ruby on Rails web application developers in Baltimore – so I’ll be taking the class too.

Read what one local Baltimoreans had to say: “I really enjoyed Jeff’s Intro to Ruby course. I got a good overview of Ruby all in one weekend.” – Heather Sarkissian (CEO, MP3car.com)

Learn more about the course.

I hope to see you there!

Yair

Ignite NYC

Web 2.0 Expo kicked off with Ignite NYC on Monday (11/16) night. We’re a big fan of Ignite talks (having created the websites for Ignites in Baltimore, DC, Annapolis and RailsConf) so it was exciting to check out Ignite in the Big Apple. The Ignite NYC website lists the speakers but doesn’t mention what they spoke about (we’d be happy to host your website). Unfortunately I didn’t take notes at this event and I’m not going to go through all the youtube videos right now, so I don’t have much to share.

Web 2.0 Sessions

NoSQL: The Shift to a Non-relational World

This talk, given by Dwight Merriman, was about non-relational databases, which is a different paradigm from traditional databases like MySQL, Oracle, MS Access, MS SQL Server, etc. Non-relational databases are interesting to me as I think they might be applicable to some of our client projects. My notes:

• No joins
• Uses map reduce instead
• When considering scaling out – think about “CAP” – you can pick any two of the following but you can never achieve 100% of all three:
  • Consistency: ensuring that data on multiple database servers are consistent
  • Available: you want the database to be available when you need it
  • Partition-tolerant: partitioning the database to run across multiple servers
• CAP constraints are most relevant when writing to the database. If you’re only reading from the database, it’s easy to have all three.

The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products

This talk was given by Eric Ries (@ericries), who blogs at Lessons Learned. He is someone with whom many tech entrepreneurs are smitten, and I must say I myself was impressed. My notes:

• Continuous Deployment
• Devs can check code in, gets deployed everywhere within 20 minutes
• Cluster will detect bad changes to the code, revert them, email everyone
• The example Eric gave was that if someone messes up the UI of the checkout
  screen, e.g. changes the "pay now" button such that users can’t see it
  and this causes the company not to receive payments, the system will automatically
  revert itself after 20 minutes or so.
• Lean Startups
• Commodity Technology Stack
• Customer Development
• Agile Product Development
• Agile Product Development
• Principles from Lean Manufacturing, Agile, and TPS
• Unit of Progress: A line of Working Code (as opposed to advancing the plan in waterfall).  Problem: known, Solution: unknown.
• Product Development at Lean Startup
• Unit or Progress: Validated Learning About Customers ($$$)
• Problem, Solution: unknown.
• Hypotheses, Experiments, Insights feed into XP, which feeds Data, Feedback, Insights back into Problem Definition / Customer Development cycle
• Problem team: (formerly sales, marketing, product development) – cross functional team
• Solution team: (formerly engineering, ops) – but should also include marketing – cross functional team
• Pivot: one turn through this feedback loop
• Ideas – build – code – measure – data – learn – back to ideas
• Minimize total time through the loop
• AAA’s of metrics:
• Actionable
• Accessible – must make sense to anyone, and must be accessible by anybody in the company (everyone should be able to pull the report)
• Most useful thing is to kill pet projects and help people see that pet projects are bad ideas.
• Auditable – "metrics are people too" – reports come from tangibles
  – when someone sees a report, they must be believable and must stand up
  to any questions.  People must be able to audit them because initial
  human reaction is to doubt and deny, etc.
• Measure the Macro
• Always look at cohort-based metrics over time
• Split-test the small, measure the large
• Five Why’s
• A technique for continuous improvement of company process.
• Theory: behind every technical problem is a human problem
• Example: imagine a server crashes.  Why?  Code got deployed
  that used some obscure API that caused it to crash.  Why?  Person
  that wrote the code was a noob engineer and didn’t know better and wasn’t
  trained.  Why?  Manager
  doesn’t believe in training.  Started with a server problem ended
  up with a management problem.
• Ask "why" five times when something unexpected happens.
• Make proportional investments in prevention at all
  five levels of the hierarchy.
• Behind every supposed technical problem is usually a human problem.  Fix
  the cause, not just the symptom.
• Helps us identify that we’re too busy to find out why we’re too busy
  or something
• Acts as a natural speed regulator.  If we’re spending too much time
  fire-fighting – we’ll have to slow down to address problem, etc.  Regulates
  our speed.
• Minimum Viable Product
• What’s the absolute least amount of product we can build to engage the
  visionaries?
• Instead of asking customers what they want (which they don’t usually
  know), we’re going to take our theory, put it out there, and TEST.
• Visionary customers can fill in the gaps on missing features – if the
  product solves a real problem.
• Fears:
• False negative: customers would have liked the full product, but the
  MVP sucks, so we abandoned the vision
• Too busy to learn: it would be faster to just build it right, all this
  measuring distracts from delighting customers
• Must have an agreement with the team to iterate – just because clients
  don’t like the first version doesn’t mean they’re not going to continue
  to iterate.

Eric mentioned a book he’s publishing: Startup Lessons Leaned (book) – still in “beta.” He also recommended The Four Steps to Epiphany.

Sketchboards & Prototyping – Method for Rapid Design

This talk, given by Todd Zaki Warfel (@zakiwarfel), described a process his company uses for prototyping ideas for applications. It was my favorite talk from the conference. Todd’s website is at http://zakiwarfel.com/. My notes:

1. Prototyping is a process
2. People often say "I think I get it but I’m gonna have to see it" -
   need to see prototypes
3. Todd’s company doesn’t do wireframes.  Their wireframes are their
   prototypes.  Wireframes
   might be sketched out on paper.  Click-through wireframes are their
   prototypes (XHTML/CSS).  They do production-level prototypes, not recommended
   for anybody else.
4. Two main reasons for sketching / prototyping in the process
1. Sketches are a great communication tool – don’t write notes – sketch
   them out
2. Pics have less room for interpretation than text
3. Lo-fi is cheaper, generally speaking, than doing AI, etc.
5. No written requirements – just visual requirements
6. "Agile Conference" – 1500 – 1600 people show up. Todd’s group
   made some app in two days, for charity, and raised a few thousand bucks with
   the app.
7. Design Studio Method
1. Industrial design / architecture method
2. A methodology where you build something, sketch something – create an
   idea – and then show it to people, let them critique it and tell you what’s
   good and bad about it.  Then iterate.  Take an idea, put it out
   in front of people, rip it to shreds, etc.  But you get to do that
   to their designs as well.
3. They’ll do the Design Studio Method sessions with their clients and get
   paid for it.
4. Write down a few keywords to describe the product today
5. Write down a few keywords to describe the product 6-9 months from now
   – print this out, put it in big words in the room
6. –> allows them to see their goals –> see what it is now, and
   what they’re targetting
7. Personas – people that are going to 
8. Inspirational printouts – stuff that looks aesthetically good or stuff
   that has good interaction – stuff to aspire to include in the next version
   of the product
9. Break into teams
1. One BA
2. One speaks to dev
3. One designer
4. One sales or marketing person
5. Represent all the different viewpoints
6. Give them a design challenge and have them sketch out – generate -
   their ideas
1. Building blocks of design: square, circle, triangle, line
2. Generate ideas and pitch them: 3 minutes to present them, 2 minutes
   to critique.  Say 2 things that are strong about the idea and 
7. Process:
1. Sketch -> present -> critique
2. -> prototypes
3. -> and again: sketch -> present -> critique
4. -> validate
5. -> iterate
10. Get started ASAP
11. Messy is okay
12. Quantity then quality –> generate lots of ideas and then refine
1. Peer review then pitch -> critique process
13. Templates that they use:
1. The 685 – an "8 up template" – can put 8 sketches in there.
1. First round you do by yourself – then critique (use red and green
   marker to denote what’s good and what’s not)
2. Second round your sketches are up on the wall
3. 5 minutes to draw 6-8 sketches
4. Can also be used as a storyboard
5. One or two rounds with 8 ups – sketching, critiquing, etc.
2. Then a 1 up
14. Three rules:
1. Know your audience and intent (are you going to give sketches to a
   CEO?)
2. Plan a little.  Prototype the rest.  This guy does about
   70% in sketches / planned out, then starts prototyping.
3. Set expectations – to combat questions like "why is this B&W" or "what
   about the admin" etc.
15. Closing thoughts:
1. You can sketch.  No BS, anybody can sketch.  Anybody can
   sketch, good enough to put their idea down on paper.
2. It’s [sketches] not the mona lisa.  Just needs to be good enough.  Not
   going to live forever in Moma or the Louvre, etc.
3. If you can’t make it then fake it.  E.g. if you can’t get it to
   work in Javascript, use Keynote.
4. Prototype only what you need.  Prototype the unique parts, not
   the entire system.
5. Reduce risk.  Prototype early and often.  Do about 2 weeks
   of design studio sessions with their clients.  Then they jump right
   into prototyping.  Then they do weekly releases.  Whole agile
   argument – small and rapid iterations.

"You can fix it now on the drafting board with an eraser or you can fix
it later on the construction site with a sledge hammer." – Frank Lloyd
Wright

Todd was promoting his new book: Prototyping – A Practioner’s Guide – by
Todd Zaki Warfel, which I’ve added to my wishlist at Amazon. He mentioned that it has 6 tutorial chapters, a bit on how to sell prototyping, and some other interesting stuff.

Freeing and Visualizing Financial Data

This talk was given by Toby Segaran (@kiwitobes) and Jesper Andersen (@jandersen). They put the slides from the presentation up on slideshare. My notes:

1. Why visualize?
1. To form a hypothesis
2. To tell a story
2. Single variable – shows you that a variable is moving but doesn’t tell you why
3. Data Sources
1. XBRL – put forth by SEC – to put all corporate-filed reports into the open domain in an XML readable format
1. Capital IQ – data vendor
2. Requirement – in 3 years everything will have to be encoded in XML
2. BSYM – Bloomberg Open Symbology
1. Unique keys of finance -> links symbologies in finance.  Problem is that different data vendors have different keys and it’s a mess.
2. Competing standard is CUSIP – very expensive – but they own the data standard
3. Yahoo! Finance data – downloadable via CSV – data goes back
4. Amazon Web Services -> Category: Economics -> lots of data feeds
5. "Trader Work Station" – some Java thing
4. Freerisk – site they created

Event Tracking in Google Analytics lets the web developer track AJAX requests and by extension Flash events too. AJAX requests don’t cause page views but as more and more web applications use AJAX it’s important to track the AJAX requests in addition to the standard page requests. Here are some examples of things you can track with GA Event Tracking that you typically wouldn’t be able to track with the standard Google Analytics Javascript embed:

• Play/pause a video
• Dragging an element from one part of the screen into another part of the screen, e.g. dragging a product into a shopping cart
• Selecting a location/pin on a map
• Resizing/panning a map
• Reordering elements in a list
• Hovering over elements on a webpage

The presentation is embedded below and is also available online at http://bit.ly/gaevents.

• LifeHacker: SpotCrime Maps Local Illegal Happenings
• Mashable: SpotCrime: Mapping The Criminal Landscape
• KillerStartups: SpotCrime.com – How Safe Is Your Neighborhood?

See our original blog post on SpotCrime getting TechCrunched.

The iPhone application itself is available at spotcrime.com/iphone.php.

The iPhone application has been a success so far and is being used by thousands of iPhone users every day. It is currently the seventh most popular travel application in the Apple iPhone Travel Webapps directory.

Developing this application was a fun project for us because we were able to learn the “ins and outs” of the custom programming functions available to iPhone web applications. Some neat features of the webapp:

• Rotating your phone will cause the map to go full-screen
• User-friendly buttons for navigating the map: the buttons are round and somewhat transparent, making the most of the small screen
• Easily navigable list of cities for which crimes are reported

For more information and more images, see our portfolio entry for the SpotCrime iPhone webapp.

We want everyone in the company to be happy and have the necessary equipment to get work done efficiently.

To that effect, we’ve decided that after 6 months of service to the company, all employees get dual 20″ LCD’s. So this past week, we ordered 5 or so 20″ LCD’s to spread throughout the office. Enjoy!

• We hired Greg, Abou, Terence, Scott and Joseph
• We moved out of our apartments and into one office and then moved again into another office
• We’re working on larger and more interesting jobs – check out our Portfolio and this blog for more info

We have some grand plans for the next year, let’s see what we can get accomplished!