This Thursday, August 12th, is the first ever Boys and Girls Club of Tampa’s “Be Great Film Festival” and we are excited and honored to be part of it in so many ways!
First, a little about the contest: local youths were challenged to write, direct, and act in films that help encourage kids to be great in different ways. The first category, ”Be Great, Don’t Bully”, is for children ages five to nine. Ten to 13 year olds created short films emphasizing “Be Great, Recycle” while high school students ages 14 – 18 focused on the theme “Be Great, Graduate”.
Four finalists from each category will be chosen to be judged on Thursday and voting is going on now! To watch the videos and choose your favorite, visit http://www.tbtff.org. On Thursday, August 12th, at 6pm, the winners from each category will be announced at The Children’s Board in Ybor City.
HD Interactive is supremely proud to help the Boys and Girls Club and the TBTF Foundation make this contest and festival a success. We designed the page and voting system to enable the choosing of finalists and have helped sponsor the festival event. I, along with Lindsay MacDonald, local TV personality for Daytime, Linda Olson of the TBTF Foundation and WOMbeat, and Bob Riddell of the TBTF Foundation and Alvarez & Marsal, will be judging the finalists to help choose a winner in each category.
I’m really looking forward to attending the “Be Great Film Festival” on Thursday. Admission is free, so please come celebrate the talents of our area youth and encourage them to follow their dreams!
We are happy to reveal the new website for Screen Hair Care USA, the US distributor of a professional hair care line that caters to salons and stylists. Andrea Bogden and two of her friends started the USA distribution to revolutionize the way professional salon products are sold in the US.
Screen USA believes that professional hair care products should be crafted of quality ingredients and sold in a respectable environment. Knowing that customers are the reason they stay in business, Screen strives to create solid customer relationships by offering free resources on their website, live help and advice, and free products. They tailor the buying experience to each customer, offering both small and large quantities of numerous hair care products, including shampoos, conditioners, color treatments, and more.
Screen’s commitment to selling products to salons for use and resale is evident on their website. The main site is informative and visually interesting. Interested salons can create an account to purchase items directly from the Internet through the invitation only e-commerce site, ensuring that only licensed professionals have access to Screen’s products.
We built Screen USA’s site using PHP/MySQL and the CodeIgniter Framework. There is also a jQuery scroller on the homepage.
Screen USA’s new site has just gone live and we’re excited to see the positive results! To learn more about their products, visit them at www.screenhaircare.com
Lots has happened at ChessJam since our last post: increased exposure, thousands of new signups, and millions of moves as well as a new update!
We’re really excited that Adobe was so impressed with our AIR chess game they’ve begun promoting it on their Flash site! This has led to an amazing increase in new sign ups, games played, and moves made which means more quality playing for our users. We now have 20,000 ChessJammers from almost 200 countries which means opponents are easy to find anytime of the day or night.
ChessJam now has 11,000 fans on Facebook, too! Check out the fan page and like ChessJam to get involved in the conversations, hear about new updates, and keep up with the top ranked countries and players.
ChessJam version 3.4, the latest ChessJam update, offers some new features to make the chess playing experience even better. We have improved ChessJam’s Facebook integration, making it easier to share your winning games with your Facebook friends. You can also use your Facebook credentials to log in to ChessJam if you don’t have a ChessJam account, which will more easily allow your Facebook friends to challenge you to a match. The log in screen comes directly from Facebook, and ChessJam does not store your Facebook information.
To make the rating system more fun, each player is now represented by a different chess piece based on their user rating. 2400 or higher gets you a king icon, anything below a 1600 is a pawn, and assorted other pieces represent values in between.
We also made playing robots a more enjoyable experience by correcting a bug; now, when the chess robot runs out of time, the robot loses the match.
Our next big project is creating a version of ChessJam that can be played entirely on Facebook, so stay tuned for that!
STAR Recruiting Service, a new service that makes connecting high school athletes with college coaches easy, is the brain child of Chris Swezey. He came to HD Interactive with an idea to simplify and modernize the college sports recruiting process in a way that hadn’t been done before. Chris’s vision targeted players, coaches, and parents in every state and from every college in order to ensure that each athlete was placed in their optimal college with the most scholarship money possible.
Students sign up for the service and immediately get STAR help. The company films the athlete in action and edits the video to show the student at his or her best. The athlete also creates a personal profile that lists their personal information, game stats, extracurriculars, GPA, and more so that coaches get a full view of the student.
The young man or woman also has access to the STAR Search College Locator function to find schools that offer their sport, desired major, etc. He or she can then denote schools of interest in their E-STAR Recruit Profile preferences. STAR sends their profile information and 90 second highlight video to the coaches at the athlete’s desired schools.
For the scouting coach, STAR offers a way to find talent without expensive travel. Coaches simply log on and search by sport, high school, etc. to find their perfect candidates. Coaches are able to watch the short student game highlights video and introduction without downloading anything onto their computers. And coaches use STAR for free.
Parents like the STAR system because it not only relieves some of the stress of college hunting, it helps ensure their children are going to the right school. STAR even helps the students get sports scholarships, eliminating some of the financial burden.
We built STAR using PHP, MySQL, jQuery, Flash, and FlowPlayer.
Chris has already received testimonials from happy customers and we are pleased that we had a part in STAR’s success. If you have an idea for a new site, email us and find out what we can build for you!
Last week, I was invited to speak at the Internet Technology Summit in Orlando, Florida. The summit is a focused event that packs loads of technology information into two days of interesting presentations and fun networking events.
On “Day Two: Tools and Applications”, I was a member of a three person panel that included Greg Wilson and Charles Armstrong. The focus of our panel was mobile development, and I used my presentation time to discuss the three A’s: Apple, Android, and Adobe. As you may have learned in some of our previous posts, we’ve been working to create Apple and Android applications for our customers using Adobe software.
Unfortunately, the politics of mobile development is causing shifts in how developers can create useful mobile tools. We were excited to build iPhone and Android apps using Flash but Apple recently banned the use of Flash on its phones. The Android platform is open to Flash products, however they have not released the update that will allow Flash to work properly. I explained how, at HDI, we’ve put a hold on the creation of these applications in Flash until they are better supported on phones. Instead, we recognize Ansca‘s Corona as one of the best options to build cross platform app solutions.
Through my presentation, I also wanted to help people understand how important these platforms are in the marketing mix and how the small investment to create a piece of mobile software could yield huge results, not only in the amount of sales, but also in customer loyalty.
Another topic I discussed was how companies can make decisions on which mobile platform is right for their company’s needs and how to strategize the implementation of their application to maximize benefits.
The Summit had a great turn out and I’m glad to have been a part of the information sharing. Thanks to David Glass and Michelle Malott for organizing a great event!
At HD Interactive, we enjoy making web applications that solve business needs. For Viking Media, that meant creating a lead portal for the use of car dealerships around the nation, located at Vikingleads.com.
The application works by collecting leads generated by television ads that Viking produces. Each ad aired has a specific phone number and website that viewers who are interested in purchasing a car can call or visit. They are asked a few simple questions about their needs and income, which are entered into the Viking database automatically, in real time, and used to help salespeople better accommodate the client.
Viking then sells listing subscriptions to car dealerships, who are given login credentials and can access the database and search for leads. A list is generated and contact information made available for download so the salesmen can contact the potential clients and offer their services.
Though we didn’t create the subscription sales service, we built the front-end lead search and dealer lead management system, as well as an administrative back-end, reporting system, and a REST based web service to take in the real time leads, in PHP/MySQL.
The Viking Lead service is already in use, connecting customers with qualified salespeople for an enjoyable car buying experience.
The day the iPad came out, I bought one. I’ve been playing with it for the last month and have discovered a few areas in which it is useful, and even fun, as well as some limitations.
As a gaming device, it is one of the best I’ve seen. The picture quality is fantastic and the screen is very easy to interact with, making games quite addictive. I’ve already finished Plants vs. Zombies. This attribute makes the device fun for the family; my three kids, whose ages range from the very young to pre-teen, have all used and enjoyed the iPad.
The iPad makes a decent e-reader as well. The best part is that major e-reader companies (Amazon’s Kindle, for example) have free applications for the iPad, making your list of possible titles to purchase somewhere in the hundreds of thousands or even millions, I’m sure. You effectively can combine all the stores together to practically ensure your book is available. Of course, Apple has their own store now, iBooks, but it seems to be in its infancy and has not been able to amass the same number and quality of books as the large book stores. Once you find your book, reading on the iPad is a pretty good experience. The large screen and the ability to adjust the font size make reading easy. In the shade, it works quite well. In the sun, however, it’s impossible to see, as the shiny screen reflects just like a computer.
Photo Credit: Apple.com
For traveling, the iPad can make a decent laptop replacement, especially if you spend the extra money and buy a wireless keyboard. Our project manager, Trae, has traveled with only the iPad and keyboard and done very well answering emails and Skyping with his team. It’s also good for surfing the Internet, and the app store has a lot of great applications that can help you get your work done on the go. Other editing and productivity apps available in the iTunes store, such as the Keynote presentation software app, make the iPad a great business tool.
And, of course, you can store your iTunes songs on the iPad and listen to music.
All in all, I’m really excited about and impressed with the iPad. It has some limitations and is not perfect for all situations and all places, but it works great to play games on your couch, read in the back seat of the car on long trips, or meet with clients in a conference room. The iPad is the first of its kind, and it’s setting the stage for even more innovation in the form of updates and competitive tablets. As other companies get into the market, we will see great advances in the usability of tablet devices, and that is exciting. (The Android tablets coming out later this year are pretty hot!)
Developing apps for the iPad is also exciting to me and to everyone at HDI. Using various technologies, we’ve begun building applications to help iPad owners use it to its fullest potential. When we have some completed, we’ll let you know!
As an Adobe partner, we believe in and use a wide array of Adobe products, including Flex. Flex is a developer toolkit used for building Flash sites and AIR applications. It’s free, open sourced, and in the words of Adobe, “deploy[s] consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems.” We work with the Flash Platform a lot at HDI, from our Augmented Reality sites to our successful chess game, ChessJam, so we have grown to love Flex.
Recently, our friends at Adobe hired us to complete a full redesign of their Flex informational site, Flex.org. The site educates developers and technology strategists on Flex and its uses. Our goal was to make Flex.org more consistent with the Adobe brand and make the experience more appealing.
The highlight of the redeisgn was to create an organized, visual gallery of Flex projects, called the Showcase, to exhibit examples of well made Flex applications. Already, people are finding the new site useful, citing the Showcase as a great resource to see Flex’s capabilities in action. They are fantastic examples that demonstrate how Flex can often be an optimum solution for online and offline projects.
It was important to Adobe to have a visually stimulating, functional website and our redesign accomplished their goals. If we can help you build a functional new web site, send us an email.
With the release of phones like the iPhone and Android-based phones, tablets like the iPad, and other web enabled portable devices, like the iPod Touch, mobile Internet is growing at a staggering rate. In 2009, mobile Internet usage grew 110% in America, according to a Quantcast study. Mashable reported that Morgan-Stanley analyzed the rate at which smart phones are being purchased and how they are being used; the results show that mobile Internet could be more widely used than computer-based Internet by 2015.
Though many people may not know it, a pretty website on one’s computer does not guarantee an attractive mobile site. Is your website optimized for the mobile market? It should be.
At HDI, we’ve noticed this trend and are now creating mobile sites. This step requires extra programming, but is important to reach a wider audience. Each portable device has different resolutions, browsers, et cetera, so in order for your site to look correct, it must be programmed for and tested on each of the top devices: iPhone, Blackberry, and phones running the Android operating system, for example.
Photo credit: Verizonwireless.com
Building a mobile site is similar to creating a regular website, but smaller, obviously, and with certain limitations: limited javascript / AJAX support, slow connections, little or no multimedia support on most older devices, multiple versions of the same browser, different device screen sizes, etc. The code we write for this site must take into account all of these limitations to ensure a site that is consistent. Though this can be a challenge, the results are quite rewarding.
Once the site is programmed, we test it on different mobile browsers and devices. Since we don’t physically have every cell phone running every browser, we use DeviceAnywhere, a program that shows us what the site will look like on each device when run in each browser. After the testing phase, adjustments are made to correct the look and utility of the site.
Now, our client has a great, working desktop site, as well as a consistent, beautiful mobile site to reach and satisfy their customers no matter where they may be.
If your website could use a mobile counterpart, email us!
With 10,000 users and over seven million moves made by people all over the world, ChessJam is always jamming. It has become a great place for people to meet up for a friendly match, practice with chess-playing robots, or test their skills in nail-biting live tournaments.
As the game grows, we continue to develop new ways for people to play chess and enjoy ChessJam. The castle now boasts a new tournament room, as well as two new rooms still under construction: one that will be full of chess videos and another that will feature a user guide of helpful ChessJam tips.
The new castle room that is open and active houses our weekly Big Dog tournament. During the week, ChessJammers play as many games as they can, gaining a point for each victory and bonus points for defeating a higher rated player. Losing a match does not result in points lost, so users are encouraged to play multiple games against players of different ratings. Scores are displayed on the Big Dog board located in the playing room.
The live Turbo Tournaments were a huge hit with ChessJam users, so we’ve increased the number of Turbos run per day to accommodate. Additionally, there are now special Turbo Tournaments available for users with a game rating of less than 1700.
At ChessJam, we want to ensure that every player can play anytime. To accomplish this, we’ve updated the code to allow users to play on Netbooks and other low-resolution computers. ChessJam will auto-size as needed. To read more about this, please visit ChessJam’s blog.
Keep up with ChessJam’s updates on the blog, by following ChessJam on Twitter, or join our fan group of 5,000 by liking us on Facebook to stay updated and interact with fellow players!
This Thursday, August 12th, is the first ever Boys and Girls Club of Tampa’s “Be Great Film Festival” and we are excited and honored to be part of it in so many ways!
