In various ways, each of these critics may be right.  But perhaps its time to look at Google+ under a different lens than we do with Facebook; the internet is certainly large enough to accommodate two social networks, and they’re both different enough in some key aspects that they don’t step on each others toes too much.

It’s natural for people to compare Google+ to Facebook; they’re the two biggest names in the game right now.  But consider this; I’m not a psychic, but I’m almost willing to bet that your Facebook page is filled with status updates from “friends” whom you either haven’t talked to in years, or simply don’t have any real connections with (that girl you met at the club through your friend that one time).  My personal Facebook account currently has 386 “friends”.  I can’t honestly say I talk to more than 5-6 people on the site, and I only ever keep Facebook open for it’s chat feature when I’m bored at work.  Facebook loves to tout this time live on the site because it can rotate ads all day long; not that anyone is clicking on them.  This won’t be the last time I say this, but I think that Trey Parker / Matt Stone had it right with South Park’s portrayal of gaining friends as a form of wealth in “Friend Stock”:

Enter: Google+

Google+ seems to have taken what people like about Facebook and Twitter and combined them with a unique twist in Circles.  Now, I’m certainly not the first person to write about circles, but I will say this; it forces you to actually think about who you’re broadcasting to before you post a message.  On top of that, it allows users (and organizations) to connect with people in a very real, very direct way with Hangouts.

Consider this: Today, the White House hosted a Google+ Hangout to connect with voters and concerned citizens regarding the state of the economy, with an emphasis on “The Buffett Rule”.  A handful of people were picked to join in the conversation (yours truly included), and it was broadcast live.  After the live feed was turned off, they had asked us a few questions about what we think the WH can do to engage voters more.  I told them that they were right on track.  A few years ago (pre-2008 election) it was virtually unheard of to be able to take part in the conversation on a national level with people directly working in the White House.  It’s not hard to see why voter apathy was high among the 18-25 demographic; there just wasn’t much engaging us, even though we have so much to offer in terms of opinions; we’re smarter than they gave us credit for.

I’m not going to sit on a soapbox here and tell you all that Google+ changed the way we lived our lives since this summer; it hasn’t. Much. Yet.  But take the video Hangouts and combine it with the open-air attitude that most people have about them (people can choose to make their hangouts available to the public, and even broadcast them live and have them uploaded to their own private Youtube account if they choose).  Suddenly, meeting people in the virtual world became an instantly engaging and fun experience.  Want to find a few random people to talk to safely? Head over to the Hangouts section and see who’s talking about what, jump in whenever you want, and you’re a part of the conversation.  Everyone is friendly and open to new experiences, and wants to get to know who you are as a person.  And this is on an international level; it’s fantastic stuff.

The Business Case

As a small business owner, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the number of business use cases that the platform has brought to the light of day.  See also: Hangouts with Extras.  I run a software company, and we’re moving towards implementing a full Agile development process (see my previous post).  With this in mind, with Agile comes brief meetings to discuss progress on a project and work together to make notes about how to move forward with different issues.

In this case, Google+ is the perfect compliment to what we’re using.  Project Managers, picture this: you have your development team in one circle.  Drill down a bit further, and you can have teams of people assigned to a particular project in circles grouped together.  Want to start a SCRUM meeting?  Start up a quick hangout with extras, bring up a Google Doc, and invite an entire circle with one entry.  Now you’ve got your entire development team (or project team) in a meeting with you, sharing a document, in under 30 seconds.  Considering SCRUM meetings are only supposed to last typically between 15-20 minutes, this is an excellent tool to use.  This is, of course, assuming that your company is under the umbrella, but that’s a growing demographic anyway.

More Social, Less Network

So, perhaps rather than target Google+ and compare it to Facebook, I think that, instead, we have to expand our schema as to what a social network is.  With Google+, it seems as though they put a larger emphasis on social and less of an emphasis on networking.  If it’s my time, I’ll take my chances meeting new people in a Hangout than wading through hundreds of people to talk to a select few.  It may be bad “Friend Stock”, but I think I can live with that.  If you want to read more, follow me on Google+ by clicking my name below.  Shameless plug, deal with it.

Chris

As a result of being in “start-up” mode, I often have to analyze the decisions I make or have made, and adjust things to make our internal workflow more efficient. The theory goes that the more efficient things are, the better the company as a whole will be by providing more accurate estimates, time frames and cost-effective solutions for our clients.

Everyone wants to reinvent the wheel sometimes, but having limited resources, I realize that I’m not always going to meet the perfect solution for all of my needs, and that I often have to adapt my own processes to fit the offerings of services that make it their business to make my life easier. And so, as a result, I always love trying out new technologies and services that I think may help me focus more on making quality software than anything else. Accounting, time tracking, project management, CRMs, mail, calendars, document and contract management, and invoicing. Every one of these areas has undergone a significant revision at one point or another over the past year in an effort to improve things.

I first made contact with 37Signals’ Basecamp to a serious degree sometime around a year and a half ago, let’s call it January of 2011. What attracted me the most to their Project Management solution was that they seemed to have a fairly well integrated stack of technology available to make my life easier. It wasn’t terribly complex, but also not insultingly simple. The pricing was probably a bit higher than I had needed it to be; $99 a month for the complete Basecamp / High Rise package, but it seemed simple enough, so we moved forward with it.

For that time period leading up until now, my company lived and died by the activity on Basecamp and High Rise. Estimates went through HighRise, and projects, time tracking and billing through Basecamp. I had a few extras that plugged in to the service that were designed to work with it (namely for accounting and invoicing), so all was right with the world. It certainly wasn’t a perfect system by any stretch of the imagination, but the only perfection I expect comes from the products that we push out for our clients. However, over the past 6 months I feel as though I’ve had a falling out with 37Signals, the culmination of which leads up to the announcement in this blog.

The first shot across the bow came from Highrise. Once a deal was closed, there was no way to take all of that information and turn it into a project on Basecamp. I thought it kind of odd, so I decided to give another CRM, Insight.ly, a try. It wasn’t the best, but it saved me $50 a month using HighRise. Not a week after I cancelled HighRise did they announce through their blog that they had introduced a “Create Basecamp Project” button that people could activate after a project was listed as won.

The logical conclusion to come to was that it would have taken everything that was pertinent to the project stored in HighRise, along with the contacts, notes and project name and imported it into your Basecamp account. So, I re-activated HighRise. I then come to find that it’s only when you sign up for the Suite of applications that 37 Signals offers that this button became available to you. This meant that I, begrudgingly, had to convert my account into a Suite account, which came with it the wholly unnecessary Backpack and Campfire services, which I knew I would never use. Only to find out later that when a user clicks on the “Create Basecamp Project” button, it transfers nothing but the title of the deal over to Basecamp. No files, no contacts, notes, or details of any kind.

This feature now saves me exactly 0.5 seconds of time and I’ve got two extraneous services that I dont want. It wasn’t any extra money than I was already paying, but it seemed a strange misstep in logic to not include things that I would have considered primary to the existence of such a feature. If you were to call it a misstep on my part for expecting more than what was offered, you’d be fair to make that case. However, the end result of this was my feeling a bit jilted by the whole experience and was left with a feeling that they had just used me to up their subscription numbers to Backpack and Campfire.

Flash forward to approximately three weeks ago. A notice appears on my Basecamp dashboard that informs me 37Signals has unveiled a new version of Basecamp. I’m all for changing things up in the name of efficiency, so I decide to watch a few videos on how it works. It seems pretty decent to me, and they offered a 90-day free trial of the new software, so I decided to go with it. Also aiding my decision was the note included that 37Signals would no longer offer fixes or updates to the existing (old) Basecamp, which meant an eventually stagnant ecosystem as everything moved over to the new system.

After about a week or so of using the new Basecamp, it dawned on me that there are a few small, yet extremely important, features that didn’t make the cut into the new system. Features that, as a result, have propelled my interest into looking at other ecosystems for my Project Management needs:

- File Revisioning
- Time Tracking To-Do Lists and, consequently
- Generating Time Reports

It seems that, in their quest to streamline their service, they looked at a spreadsheet for too long and decided to nix features based entirely on the percentage of people that used them. In their effort to make things easier, they’ve made them considerably worse, and I can’t help but think that they made Basecamp easier for the people who work at Basecamp, but not much else. Since they’ve gotten rid of time tracking, they’ve also nixed an entire list of services whose business no doubt hinged (at least somewhat) on the fact that they were integrated with Basecamp to some degree. All time tracking, invoicing and accounting software services that made a major point of it to integrate with Basecamp now have zero reason to do so. They didn’t just make it more inconvenient; they’ve overlooked the people and services who helped make them great.

In case you think I’m a lunatic, know that I’m not alone in my sentiment. One of my inquiries into the time-tracking issue lead me to be answered by a Basecamp representative. They pointed to a blog post in which they essentially threw their arms in the air and said “Whoops”, and had claimed that they didn’t realize there was going to be such a backlash to the lack of Time Tracking. You can read the full post here:

37Signals: Lessons from Launch

In the meantime, I’ve taken another look at project management thru Atlassian On Demand. Now let me just say that, coming from Basecamp, JIRA is certainly no walk in the park. Indeed, it can get incredibly complex and deep to drill down into, but the level of customization is truly staggering; something which the power users I’m sure will find helpful. However, for all its complexity, it’s also incredibly encompassing and easy to manage. For exactly $30 a month (or 33% of the cost of Basecamp, for those of you keeping track), it offers:

- Project Management
- Time Management for individual team members
- Time Tracking for any and all
- AGILE Planning
- SCRUM Rapid Boards
- SVN / GIT / Mercurial code hosting solutions
- Google Apps Integration

All of this, coupled with the as-you-need-it scalability, makes JIRA and it’s offerings an incredibly attractive package. If I need, for example, to spin up a proper testing environment and invite 20 or 30 testers to hammer on a project, I can do so by flicking a switch and writing up some emails. Plus, I know I’ll never overwork someone accidentally because of their built in timing for tasks.

Again, I never expected Basecamp or 37Signals to provide all of what I needed for my company. However, I have a tendency to lose a tremendous amount of faith in a company that provides services that doesn’t understand the impact of the things it changes on such a grand scale. It’s that lost faith that forced me to look elsewhere for my software solutions, and what landed me on Atlassian On Demand.

Count Studio Symposium as one company who didn’t buy into the new vision for 37Signals’ Services.

Chris

God Made Outer Space
By Heno Head
Explore outer space that God designed just for us!
Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. Level 3 books are specifically designed for independent readers and use longer stories, greater vocabulary, paragraphs, and more complex subjects.

God Made Puppies
By Marian Bennett
Cute and cuddly, fluffy and funny—look at all the puppies God made for us to love!
Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. Level 3 books are specifically designed for independent readers and use longer stories, greater vocabulary, paragraphs, and more complex subjects.

My Story of Jesus
By Jennifer Holder
Learn about who Jesus is and the things that he did!
Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. Level 3 books are specifically designed for independent readers and use longer stories, greater vocabulary, paragraphs, and more complex subjects.

I Can Be a Good Sport
By Robin Stanley

Whether on a team of just playing games with your family, you can choose to be a good sport.
Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. Level 3 books are specifically designed for independent readers and use longer stories, greater vocabulary, paragraphs, and more complex subjects.

Prickle Says I’m Sorry
By Lisa Wilkinson
Prickle is unkind to all of her friends. But when she says she’s sorry, everybody feels better—even Prickle!
Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. Level 2 books are specifically designed for beginning readers and use harder words, longer sentences, simple stories, and dialogue.

My Bible Says
By Margie Redford
This book features 12 Bible verses every child can learn and grow from.
Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. Level 1 books are specifically designed for pre-readers and use familiar words, simple sentences, large type, and repetition.

All God’s Bugs
Laura Derico
Butterflies and bees, beetles and fleas—join a boy and his grandpa as they discover all the bugs God created.
Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. These books are specifically designed to help children honor God in every holiday and season.

Jesus Blesses the Children
By Karen Cooley
In the open arms of Jesus, children discover just how much he loves them and wants to bless them.

Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. These books are specifically designed to teach Bible stories every child should know.

Fun on the Farm
By Robin Stanley
God made the animals on the farm, and he wants us to care for them.
Explore the world of Happy Day® Books—filled with fun-to-read stories that teach Christian values. These books are specifically designed to help children honor God in every holiday and season.

For more information, please visit The Happy Day Books iTunes page

Studio Symposium teamed up with White Gorilla Media to develop Lucent Lock for the Android Platform!  Beautiful, Simple, Fast and easy to use, Lucent Lock Screen allows you to access your weather, music, messages, power and volume settings from one easy lock screen!

Lucent Lock Screen gives you access to all of the most-used controls on Android devices:

Weather: Customizable weather updates available based on GPS or pre-determined location entered by you.

Music: Read the current playing track, control the volume and play, pause, and skip forward and back from one screen.

Messages: Don’t have time to unlock your phone? View your latest text messages and tap to open them in case they’re important!

Connectivity: Going on a flight? Toggle “Flight Mode”, or simply use the control widgets on-screen to toggle WiFi and GPS connections.

System Volumes: Control your notification, ring-tone and music volumes directly from one screen. Don’t want to drag your finger all the way to volume down? Simply tap the red speaker to instantly mute that particular volume!

The Lock Ring: Our fast-acting lock ring gives you access to the most used functions on Android devices. It’s easy! Swipe up for that quick text message, left to capture that moment you can’t afford to miss, down for your full music controls, and of course right to unlock!

*Coming Soon*

- Full Tablet / Honeycomb Support
- Ice Cream Sandwich Support
- Improved Graphics

For Download Information, please visit the Lucent Lock Screen Page

The recent political climate here in the United States would have some believe that large corporations need to be protected from high tax rates; if they aren’t, then they’ll simply move more jobs oversees.  The idea of tax protection also comes from what’s called the “Trickle Down” effect; basically stating that if a company has more room to move with their taxes, that they’ll apply those savings in hiring more people.  The sad truth of the matter is that this is simply not the case.

I’m a founding member and owner of this company, and have been for over 2 years.  And while, in the grand scope of all things business, we’re still considered a zygote, I’ve learned a few things along the way.  One of which is that if I don’t have to pay taxes, I’ll try my best not to.  At the end of the year, if I can pay an accountant to make things disappear so I owe Uncle Sam a bit less, than I’m going to do that.  And while I won’t be able to get away with paying zero for long, I have a hunch that I’ll try to keep that momentum going as long as I can.

As we grow larger every day, I’m inclined to go against the grain on the corporate tax issue.  Last I had read, approximately 70% of Americans want corporations and wealthy individuals to pay a larger percentage in taxes vs. regular, middle and lower-class families.  The majority of people seem to now agree with the sentiment that if you’re making over $250k a year, you’ll get by if they take a few more percentage points.  Thirty percent would cripple you if you made $30,000 a year.  If you made $250,000, not so much.

If corporate taxes are not mandated and properly supported, then it’s human (corporate) nature to try and get away with whatever you can.  Don’t believe me? Try this one on for size: Due to loopholes in the tax code, along with a few accounting tricks, General Electric paid $0 in federal taxes during 2010. On $14 billion in income.  If you give an inch, they will take a mile.

I’m writing this as a plea to our elected officials; listen to the American people.  Close corporate tax loopholes, and raise the taxes on those who are most able to afford it.  As a business owner, if I can get away with GE levels of scamming the tax code, I realize that something is very, very wrong.

I want to pay my fair share.  Please take my money.

Position: iOS Developer
Responsibilities

- Develop applications in a most optimal & cost effective manner.
- Participate in writing software specification documents with the coordination of his/her team leader or independently, as required.
- Implement Development Tasks:
- Cost (Level of Effort) development tasks
- Perform code analyses
- Perform unit testing
- Refactor / optimize code
- Review code
- Integrate code changes
- Participate in Peer-To-Peer code reviews.
- Troubleshoot and debug software.
- Conduct research & complete proofs of concept.
- Participate in database design (CoreData).
- Participate in software design (architecture).

Qualifications

- Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering.
- 2 years experience writing applications for the iOS Platform.

Skills

- Ability to work independently and in a team setting.
- Proficiency in Xcode 4 or higher, Interface Builder and Instruments.
- Solid understanding of iOS Application development process.
- Solid understanding of CoreData.
- Solid understanding of UIKit frameworks and the iOS SDK.
- Solid understanding of the StoreKit framework.
- Solid understanding of Apple development guidelines and best practices.
- Solid understanding of Object Oriented Programing and Design.
- Experience with using version control repositories such as Subversion and Git.
- Familiarity with OpenGL es and 3D graphics is a plus.
- Knowledge of the C language a plus.
- Having applications posted on the App Store is a huge plus.

Interested parties can contact:
Chris Culos
Business Director
Studio Symposium, LLC
(732) 604-2403
Chris.Culos@Studio-Symposium.com

After about 3 weeks settled into the office, the members of the team at the office took a lunch with me, drove to my house, and uncovered my old fish tank.  We brought it to the office, and spent a while setting it up after I bought BBQ for everyone who helped.  We ended up solving a few problems that we couldn’t have foreseen, and after about an hour or so it was filled with salt water and ready to go.  A day later, I went to the local fish store and stocked the tank with rock from Fiji called “Live Rock”, the benefits of which will become apparent in time.  Next week, we have a few fish that will be going in the tank, then a few corals, and so on.

The tank in the office could be used as a metaphor for owning a business.  You start small, with an idea that a few people can rally behind, and you build it slowly.  As the time passes, you add things, or subtract them, based on whether or not they work well in the environment you’ve created.  If all goes well (and you keep things fresh), it begins to flourish as a result of the hard work you have put into it.  And, finally, if you see it every day, the changes aren’t immediately apparent.  If you take a step back and look at it as a time-lapse, the amount of growth in your effort may surprise you.

Studio Symposium was founded in March, 2009 by myself and Alex Karpodinis, with the goal largely in line with what we have managed to accomplish.  We have an office, an excellent team, and plenty of work coming in.  However, sometimes in business, just as with the fish tank, you need to shuffle things around a bit to make them work more efficiently.  On July 1, 2011, Alex sadly submitted his resignation.  Moving forward without Alex’s input will prove a challenge, but not one that can’t be overcome.  His contributions to the company helped make Studio Symposium what it is today, and I’m truly sad to see him go.  Perhaps if the environment were different, things would be more conducive to his continual contributions to the company.  However, as Studio Symposium grows moving forward, it will have to do so with one less fish in the tank.

Personally, I look forward to the positive things that this challenge represents, and am excited to see what the Studio Symposium ecosystem is able to accommodate moving forward.

Salut

It’s hard for me to say that I’m anyone’s boss.

The atmosphere of the night club was energetic, and the people were packed in like so many sardines in a can.  As I pulled up, I had thought about the implications that I was about to meet my employee and his girlfriend for a few drinks after a long day at work.  At a dance club.  To say that I have to walk the balance of defining “appropriate behavior” is an understatement.

But, as promised, I walk into the night club and immediately find my coworker and his girlfriend hanging out with a few of their friends.  And then, the phrase finally hit:

“This is my boss, Chris.”

I stumble a bit with figuring out how carry myself in this situation, and confirm that yes, I am indeed the boss in this situation.  As the night goes on, jokes are made at my expense as well as that of my employee (threats to fire him if he didn’t buy me a beer happened at least twice), but I eventually overcame the idea that I was someone’s boss for the night, and had a great time meeting some truly great people.  It inspired a confidence level that likely wouldn’t have been reached otherwise through standard operating procedure at the office.

By all standard definitions, I am a boss to a growing number of software engineers and designers alike, but whenever I am introduced to someone by one of my employees, the word “Boss” makes me cringe slightly.  For me, I suppose, it conjures up images of a stuffy office building, wandering around from cubicle to cubicle and standing over people’s shoulders.  Or, perhaps, calling people into my office to make them sit uncomfortably across from me as I ramble on about maximizing ROI, squeezing peak efficiency out of the employees or, god forbid, hosting a motivational speaker.

But what makes a good boss in the first place?  Does my displeasure in the idea of being a boss stem from the idea that a small team is more manageable?  Certainly, things may be a bit different if I had, say, 150 employees to preside over.  Surely I can’t give individual attention to each of them.  My developers have a philosophy that everyone on a project should have an equal voice over it’s production, and as of yet there haven’t been any problems with this approach; in fact I rather prefer it.  Though at times it’s good to remember that there is a difference between the people who started a company vs the people who help run it.

If it comes down to being the strict type and squeezing a little more work per hour out of my employees, or taking a more relaxed approach and having happier employees, I’ll take the road that leads to the bar at the end of the work day.

Software Engineers are a lot of things.

They can be night-owls, they’re intelligent, usually well prepared for most situations, and can be the modern-day equivalent of factory workers; working long hours through the day to get something finished by a deadline.  As much respect as I may have for our development team (and trust me, it’s plenty), there are a few things that I know they are not.

Even though any good technology is virtually indistinguishable from magic, they are not magicians.  They are also not mind readers, invincible, or infallible.  They’re human.  Readers of this blog may be inclined to ask “why are you mentioning this?  Everyone knows that software engineers are just human like you or I”.  To that extent, you may actually be surprised to find out that people often seem to forget the simple notion that communication is key.

I’ve been in this business for over 2 years now.  The one thing that consistently comes up as a point of contention between client and vendor is the requirements game.  Sometimes it seems that if we give an inch, people take a mile, and that’s not fair to anyone involved; neither client nor vendor.  At Studio Symposium, we take each project and break it down into very specific chunks, which each serving it’s own very important purpose.

The first phase of software development can, at times, be the most difficult.  Obtaining the requirements from a client in order to produce an application or website that represents their vision as closely as possible.  For example, if someone says “this is pretty much everything” when giving a run-through of an application idea or concept, a word of advice: it’s usually not, and the things that are left out of that “pretty much” can make a very, very big difference, and can make or break the process.  We recently had a project carry on for an unprecedented amount of time simply because the requirements were never nailed down the way they needed to be.  This can be viewed as a mistake from both sides of the deal, but the percentage of time that was spent by my team to discover the requirements (something they had to largely accomplish by reverse-engineering the clients existing software without so much as a PDF of the processes the app follows) amounted to a whopping 75% of the total time put into the project, which had gone, when all was said and done, about 400% over the original scope in terms of hours.

Having a project go over by 400% because of requirements deficiencies is an extreme case, I’ll admit, but it serves a purpose: get everything you can written in paper, drawn out, sketched on a cocktail napkin, signed, approved, sealed and delivered before you even start the user interface construction.  If you can do that, you’re in a much more advantageous position to make everyone happy, including your team.

As an extension of the requirements game, you also have to make sure that any estimate, contract, proposal, or quote that you may write up serves to protect both the vendor and the client in a manner that both can agree on.  Make sure you take the requirements game very, very seriously in proposals, and let the client sign off on the document knowing full well that any extra work not specifically outlined within the proposal will result in an extra fee.  Else it’ll be a case of the goal post being continuously moved, and that’s not fun for anyone.

It can be a zoo out there, just know that your development team can be the ones who are able to navigate it the best.  Consider taking care of them and what they need before anything else.

- Chris