We have held back with the launch of the updated version of Show the Loo for a number of months due to commitments on another top-secret iPhone application but the new version was approved this week by Apple.

Show the Loo was rebuilt from the ground up, offering an overall improved user experience and first and foremost drastically increased speed.! The initial version was really a proof of concept for us here at Pantha Corp to see what you could do with the early iPhone SDK.

View screenshots and download the new version here.

We would still love to incorporate the excellent data of toiletmap.gov.au

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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.

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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....

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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.

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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.

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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"

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Like many other like-minded people, I tend to see more positive things and trends on the horizon than bad. So linking to positive news is a good idea. The signing of a free trade agreement with ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) and New Zealand certainly falls under that category. It's the setting of positive signs that is the most important right now.

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.

Without comment.

Taken from physorg.com and the article "Internet Growth Follows Moore's Law Too".

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:

Thanks to being in between the years, there seems to be some breathing space for us to finally reconsider the branding for Pantha. We know that we have a lot to offer to current and future clients when we look at the mix between our core strengths of business analysis and project management and the agile outsourcing framework we've established. How to bring that across? Below a little experiment for a banner that might feature on a re-designed pantha.net website that i thought worth sharing.

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.

After many days of waiting for Apple's approval, 'Show the Loo' can now be downloaded for free in the App store! We also launched a mini-site under showtheloo.com for product support.

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Ever since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone SDK roadmap (talk about goosebumps), we have been keeping a keen eye on the evolution of the iPhone ecosphere. Due to other commitments we haven't been able so far to dive into developing an application but we are certainly going to give it a try at some point. Allowing transLucidonline customers to manage their sites and comments is one of the possibilities of delving into this space.

It is clearly fascinating to see how fast the market for iPhone application seems to be maturing. If we were to get into this space now as a provider, only seven months after the launch of the SDK and app store, we could be considered opportunistic rather than cutting-edge and early adopters.

Nonetheless, it is good to see that there are still segments that - even though they seem obvious to launch an app in - have not yet been well catered for. Example: Surfers. Living in Australia and having an office at the beach must sensitize me to this particular lack in solid offerings. :) Here a good overview from MobileCrunch describing the recent launch of an app by Oakley providing surf forecasts around the globe.

We'll see what the future will bring. Surely it's going to stay an exciting market and maybe we'll decide to get into it as well.

From hereon and actually since the 23rd of June 2008, Theandb Pty Ltd has been renamed to Pantha Corporation Pty. Ltd (official certificate). There were many good reasons for this change.

There are now on a constant basis anywhere between twenty and thirty people working on Pantha's projects. A personal brand such as Theandb did not seem to make a lot of sense any longer for what is fast becoming a web-strategy and technology execution company to be reckoned with. Other factors contributing to the name change were questions such as how we could bring a third director on-board in the future and/or the ability to exit from the business at some point with a more easily pronounceable and well recognised brand name increasing the likelihood and success of a sale.

All taken together, it had to be done.

For now, given the fact that we are very busy on numerous client engagements, we have not yet had the time for a proper branding exercise. But we will... as soon as we can. Wait for a relaunch of theandb.biz as well as pantha.net which we hope to get through with beginning of next year 2009.

Now: Champagne and a toast to Pantha Corporation!!!

Across several blog posts, we have covered agile development for teams as well as agile development outsourcing for startups. It should not be a big surprise to anyone therefore, that we have been forwarding our experience in outsourced agile development to a growing list of clients.

What we offer are dedicated agile developer teams where the development is completely managed through us. Welcome to your outsourced project office.

We can do the writing of the user-stories (core story, wireframes and acceptance tests), the project management of the development (iteration planning, daily update meetings, status tracking & reporting) as well as the initial acceptance testing. What we find is that every project is different and we adjust our agile development outsourcing framework to these requirements. The existence of a concise framework allows us to quite rapidly set-up operations for new clients and ensures that learning's can be leveraged across our clients.

At the heart of all project management stands communication. We use a range of tools to support communication across distances. These are in no particular order Skype, conference-call rooms, project intranet and a fantastic collaboration/ white-boarding e-room. We've played with the idea of sending Mac Mini's out to clients that have a permanent team-size of >=5 to allow smooth video-conferencing via iChat (as opposed to the poor quality in Skype) but have yet to act on this thought.

We strive to provide the ultimate in transparency and as much information as possible as to the current status and delivery dates. And working in short iteration cycles of about 3-4 weeks, depending on the client, with tools (currently XPlanner, although we might start using TargetProcess) to monitor the progress of a project provides us with a wealth of information. Every day, a core group of people receives a daily update status mail that lists progress on the different stories we would be working on. Every other week, we issue a bi-weekly report and at the end of every iteration we issue a report on what was completed and moved to the next iteration.

It can be challenging to attempt agile development across distances and throughout the last year we have had many good learning experiences. Not everyone has a unit-testing framework for example so continuous testing and starting with tests is not an option (although we will propose implementing a framework at no cost as it will help us increase our overall throughput and raise code quality). Not having the customer with you means that acceptance testing feedback can be difficult to collect (we now do 'live' testing sessions using our e-rooms screen sharing and note-taking facilities). Knocking on doors to get quick feedback on interaction designs will not be possible (so we always start with a wireframe exercise, now using Axure to create very realistic demo's of the user-interface).

All in all though we know that the outcome using our agile development outsourcing framework guarantees our clients greater flexibility in their planning, increased ability to provide us with feedback that will actually be integrated, a better sense of the different project status and a higher overall output than compared with outsourced development teams operating "the old" way.

Soon we will provide some examples of how we perform our iteration planning sessions, keep clients on top of things and collaborate with them and our outsourcing team on project requirements and execution. We are considering providing a "test-drive" to a selected few interested parties tempted to try our agile development outsourcing services as well, more on that coming up.