In the blog of Pantha Corp, we share with our readers the personal view and insights we have on developments in the technology sector. And as that is nowadays quite a broad sector, we set our eyes on many diferent topics and questions facing society. We also post entries on recent developments of Pantha Corp as a company. For us, it is a part of an ongoing collaboration and communication with colleagues, clients and friends.
We are very happy with the initial feedback received for version 2 of Show the Loo, three weeks after its launch. Which dear reader if you haven't downloaded it already, can be accessed here on the iTunes App Store. Some updates on its overall placement, ratings and a visualisation of all (!) the loos across Australia we are covering in this entry...
We have not added an entry in a very long time. I guess it goes on to show that we have been a little surprised by the sudden increase in additional work and have been under heavy workload for the whole year.
There's some really exciting changes and great projects we'll be launching in 2011 but for now let's at least list the projects we completed in 2010.
Just happy to see our product become popular :-)
I must admit I am probably one of the biggest fan of the SURFit app. First thing I do when I wake up in the morning ? Fire-up SURFit ...
We are incredibly psyched that SURFit iPhone has launched, bringing you the worlds first LIVE interactive surfcams.
You can download it here from the app store.
The initial release is packed full of features already. The available surfcams stream live to your iPhone - either over Wifi or 3G - and can all be remote controlled. Following an overview of the apps features in detail.
Show the Loo was rebuilt from the ground up, offering an overall improved user experience and first and foremost drastically increased speed.!
Christophe Baudia, who's been a scrum master with us since day one (about 1.5 year ago), decided to obtain the Scrum Master certification proposed by the Agile Alliance.
Last month we launched the 1001artists.com website. A little less than 4 months were required to give birth to this ambitious web-based art marketplace, conceived by an artist herself, Caroline Perletti, for the artists and their fans, and just about all the lovers of all things art.
The site is in French but the intent is global, and an English version is on the road map.
4 months-long...a global team to deliver from idea to market ... and quite a challenge !
Here is the "making of" story in short words, leaving some of the pain aside and focusing on the constructive aspects of the endeavor....
I will not comment much on this article but i thought it was well worth posting a link to the 'freakishly fast' Ruby coming to the Mac.
Over the last couple of days, we have been quite busy on migrating our dedicated server to a new major operating system version. This was the reason - alongside being very busy on setting up a new agile outsourcing client - for the blog silence of the last week.
We have unfortunately received a negative response from the 'Commonwealth Copyright Administration' that will not grant us a license for the government funded project toiletmap.gov.au. Based on the reply, there do not seem to be any hard, conclusive reasons for not granting Pantha Corp with a license other than that information should be always "correct and up to date"
Throughout the last two years, starting with the development of the simple website publishing system transLucidonline, Pantha has built up a unique project management framework for agile outsourced development.
Since then, we have had the pleasure of supporting a range of clients from Europe and Australia (start-ups to large corporate), providing them with agile outsourcing teams that have launched and maintained many online applications with great success.
We have shared some of our stories in several blog entries here. One on 'agile software development for teams' and how this can be applied to start-ups and companies of all sizes.
At some point we wondered why it still seemed difficult to explain the benefits of agile development and its potential to change how outsourcing at this point in time is done. What if we could demonstrate it placidly somehow to new potential clients? What if it could be made much easier to engage with people interested in what Pantha offers and show how fast concrete outcomes could be delivered given a mini project? Almost like going to a car dealer and asking him for a test drive?
Which is exactly what we will do, starting now of course.
Following an overview of Pantha's agile outsourcing services. Interested parties can register their interest for a test drive of agile outsourcing here.
I have become a regular reader of 'The Future Of Things' that always contains something interesting for the Sci-Fi mind.
Today they linked to a study on a new drug called propranolol that "is usually used to control blood pressure" but has been found to have the possibility of reducing "strong fearful memories" for people suffering from traumatic events, xenophobia and so forth in a human study.
Read here in full, the article has the catchy title 'Drug banishes bad memories' which isn't really what it's about as the researchers themselves assert that one of the results was to confirm that the drug did not remove the memory itself but the fear to the object shown to the study participants (a spider). Quote: "the drug treatment didn't affect how well the participants remembered the link between the spiders and the shock. They could recall the link clearly, but the fear response had gone."
I wanted to share a message from someone here in Australia who is personally very exposed to the fires ravaging Victoria. If you can, please do donate with the Australian Red Cross for the thousands who have lost all they had and the countless others deeply affected.
Following her message which speaks best by itself.
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[...] in relation to the horrific Bushfire situation in Victoria, Australia.
I live in the rebuilt township of Cockatoo, Victoria; the worst hit town, obliterated in the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in which 75 people died and 2,545 homes were lost, total land area burnt was approximately 2,100 km².
On the weekend I evacuated my young family ahead of the warnings that the fire conditions on Saturday 7th January 2009 would be worse than those on Ash Wednesday, and they were.
Thankfully our area was spared this time around, however many areas weren't.
The current situation is that there are 25 fires still burning out of control and a total 152 fires burning in Victoria yet to be declared safe, 173 people are confirmed dead and over 750 homes lost, 3,218 km² of land burnt, and still more to come.
I personally have dear friends still missing in Kinglake and Narbethong, including two children aged 6 and 3, and several other friends are thankfully safe, but without homes.
It cost $1.3 billion (in today's adjusted terms) to rebuild after Ash Wednesday. Victorian citizens, Corporate and Government have already raised $26 Million, however it will take much more to rebuild after this devastating event.
I am making a heartfelt appeal to anyone who can spare a few dollars to please make a donation to the Australian Red Cross, Victorian Bushfire Appeal 2009 on this link, every single dollar counts.
Please could you also share this email with your professional networks.
Thank you for your consideration and for sparing a thought for all who have lost beloved ones, pets, homes and memories.
Kind regards,
[...]
PS: Here are two pictures that show how close the fires are to me.
Cockatoo
The view from my home this morning; as you can see there are still fires burning, so a wind change in our direction would mean we too would lose our home.
As a first degree connection, you now know someone personally affected by this tragedy.
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I thought this article, entitled "Future Watch: A.I. comes of age" from ComputerWorld might be worth posting that i found on Slashdot.
Reading how the robot would understand a natural language query, move about in the real-world to look for an object, pick it up, bring it back to the person who had requested it in the first place with the words ""Here is your stapler," says Stair, handing it to the man. "Have a nice day." might not sound like such a big deal at first glance as this would be something that any human (from the age of 4+ :) ) would consider to be a mundane task. However the fact that this robot can understand, learn and adapt to his environment have been formidable challenges that have gone unsolved for a very long time and it is encouraging to see strong progress being made.
What really reminded me of the book "The Singularity Is Near" from Ray Kurzweil was a quote from one of the researchers Tom Mitchell from Carnegie Mellon saying: "Suddenly, we have ways of observing what the brain is really doing, via brain imaging methods like functional MRI. It's a way to look into the brain while you are thinking and see, once a second, a movie of your brain's activity with a resolution of 1mm."
It's been exactly those sort of trends that Ray says have exponential qualities to them as in the discoveries and advancements we make in important fields such as genetic or robotic research and this will ultimately lead to an ever increasing speed of evolution. There might be hope that he could be right and we could end up getting the 'benefit' of for example drastically increased lifespans.
I recently came across an interesting article written a few years ago, still, illustrating perfectly the benefits of an agile approach to outsourcing as we practice and advocate so actively at Pantha Corporation:
Everything You Know About Offshore Outsourcing is Wrong
As you can read, one of the largest European bank (ABN Amro) found satisfaction with this model a while ago. This corporation undertook a major strategic change a few years later, fully embracing outsourcing and restructuring accordingly. They also ended up working with multiple suppliers rather than one large one.
Several aspects spoke about in the article syncs amazingly with our experience at Pantha and lessons learned found their way into our framework documentation. Here are some snippets matching the Pantha way:
Agile methodology works best for fast paced application development:
"... the bank [ABN AMRO] 's North American technical architecture group deliberately sought out offshore providers who were not focused on the traditional development processes."
Iteration period needs to be defined on a case by case basis, depending on the context. Success can only be found if the entire project team (client, offshore supplier and Pantha) conforms to our framework:
"We use iterative development in two-week intervals. While one iteration is underway, we start on the next one,"
"It turns out that just because you use short iterations it doesn't mean you have no process."
The client's in-house liaison needs to be dedicated and have authority:
"You must have a local liaison, no question," said Matthias Autrata, senior vice president of IT Architecture. "This person participates in one- or two-day design sessions during which 'stories' are written that describe the user interaction with the system."
"Of course, the local liaison also has to acclimate to our culture," said Autrata. "Often they must learn to be more aggressive, to go and get what they need."
Requirements made of user stories including technical solutions, are to be signed-off on the client side:
"Another [lesson learned] was that the ABN AMRO team had to get its own requirements agreed to before communicating with the liaison; working through conflicting or inconsistent needs real-time was not efficient "
etc.
The article also strikes the importance of understanding the culture (both on the supplier's and on the client's sides) which we have put focus on from the beginning and worked through with our long-term-relationship offshore partner in India.
Here below a slide that summarizes our solution to some common issues in an offshore setup:
There are a number of different ways to get in touch with us to provide feedback for 'Show the Loo'.
No toilets in your area? Anything in the user interface/ interaction with the app you dislike?Did the application crash unexpectedly? Found loo's you had no idea of existed before? Do you have great ideas on what you would like us to add in future releases?
We want to know from you and can be reached via our support site and on Twitter under the id panthacorp. Soon we will open up the blog for comments as well.
We are quite pleased with the first reactions we've received and are certainly not going to sit still for very long in making adjustments where necessary and adding some features that we felt would risk the necessary perfectioning phase of version 1.
Testing prior to the release showed that the update to iPhone firmware 2.2 improved stability drastically as we are relying on Firefox for the time being to display the map. For future releases, we plan to have a native Objectice-C implementation. We recommend anyone who might not have yet updated to move to the version 2.2 which also brings along many other nifty new iPhone features alongside improved overall stability.
In the coming days we will approach the Department of Health and Ageing once more with an official (this time) request for a license of the toiletmap.gov.au data. We have always meant for this app to remain free and there theoretically shouldn't be a compelling reason to reject our request. It appears however that we are not the first to try and fail, judging by this blog entry by Joshua Gans on CoreEcon. I fully agree that data that was created by public funding should be accessible to all Australians and am looking forward to being in touch with the Commonwealth copyright administration to discuss the matter.
We have not added an entry in a very long time. I guess it goes on to show that we have been a little surprised by the sudden increase in additional work and have been under heavy workload for the whole year.
There's some really exciting changes and great projects we'll be launching in 2011 but for now let's at least list the projects we completed in 2010.
