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I-SITE PRESENTS MUSIC MIX VOL. 16 – TEETH

To celebrate the launch of the White Oak Orthodontic Products eCommerce website – designed and developed by the I-SITE team – and because we at I-SITE love music, we put together a music mix that you might want to brace yourself for. Our latest mix features a variety of musicians with some real bite, from Percy Wenrich the famous composer, the ambient techno pioneer Aphex Twin, and even a track by the English neofolk group Sol Invictus. We’re pleased to present this mix that we feel everyone can sink their teeth into!

So, you know the drill! Listen Now: I-SITE Radio

The Untapped Technology Market

Join the Welcoming Center for New Pennsylvanians as they highlight new data relating to immigrant mobile technology usage. The free event, which will be held at the GPCC Conference Center, will provide an in-depth look at technology trends and how businesses can take advantage of them. The Untapped Technology Market next Thursday, January 24th. 8:30AM-10:30AM.

Location: GPCC Conference Center, 200 S. Broad Street at Walnut St., 7th Floor, Montgomery Room, Philadelphia, PA 19102

Phone: 215.557.2626

The event is free, but registration is required. Register here.

I-SITE Adds an Honorary Member to the Team

This Friday, I-SITE was excited to welcome a guest “co-worker” for the day, David Tibet of the UK band Current 93! David, who is spending time in Philadelphia over the next few weeks, spent his day in our office, working away on his laptop as if he was a member of the team. And in true I-SITE fashion, we ended the day with a drink! Thanks for spending the day with us, David!

The I-SITE Crew with David!

Plan Your Ultimate Party with Bub!

Searching for that special party cocktail to wow your guests? Tired of sending the same old tired party invite? You’re not alone!

Join our host with the most, Bub, and his special guests as they save the day with tips that will turn a mundane affair into the party of the Millenium. Now there’s no need to fear – the Ultimate Party Planner is here!

I-SITE couldn’t end 2012 without a holiday video to entertain you all! This year, we feature “Bub” the ultimate Party Planner and his special guests, as they take you through the necessary steps to building an amazing party. So, sit back, relax and take notes, as you view the Ultimate Party Planner!

I-SITE & The BABC Celebrate the Holidays!

As the holiday events role in, we keep The British American Business Council‘s Holiday Luncheon high on our list of priorities! I-SITE’s Ian Cross, also the VP of Communications for the BABC and Kara Bergman of the BABC Young Professionals Group, attended the event last Wednesday, December 12th at The Ritz Carlton in Center City Philadelphia.

This year the BABC featured Sir Peter Westmacott, The British Ambassador to the United States for his first official visit to Philadelphia and The Honorable Michael A. Nutter, Mayor of Philadelphia, who both spoke about the importance of international business relationships and continuing to build the green initiative in Philadelphia and abroad.

The event also included networking, breaking traditional British “Christmas Crackers,” and exciting raffle prizes, including a special gift certificate to I-SITE’s favorite bar, The Trestle Inn!

Hope Krebs, President of The British American Business Council and Kara Bergman of the Young Professionals Group attempt to break their "Christmas Cracker" to find the surprise!

I-SITE launches the Sprout Family Challenge iPhone App

If you’ve been faithfully reading our newsletters (and we know you are!), you’ll remember our cuddly friends, Pajanimals or the Kindness Counts Community Contest. I-SITE has teamed up once again with our friends at Sprout to build the Family Challenge iOS game app. Part of a larger ‘healthy living’ initiative called “Be Kind to Yourself“, the app was designed to encourage both kids and parents to complete healthy challenges together.

The app utilizes themes from both Sprout and LazyTown programming and presents a parent-child team with ten healthy challenges. Each challenge is comprised of an activity that focuses on healthy eating or exercise. After a parent-child team has completed the activity, they mark it as complete and move on to the next activity. At the completion of a set number of challenges, the parent-child team wins an ‘incentive’ in the form of a music video, theme song or a themed photo frame wallpaper.

From the beginning the process of developing the Family Challenge app was extremely engaging and our team had a great time coming up with creative approaches to the many complexities involved in the project. Here are some highlights.

Design

The Audience – We had to make sure the design and UI of the app were appealing and usable by both parents and kids.
Media – As the app is geared towards preschoolers, it is naturally extremely media rich and we had to come up with creative ways of managing the many required graphical and media elements.
Navigation – The Family Challenge app both tells a story and succinctly guides the user through a series of tasks and activities – an architecting challenge that kept us on our toes.
Branding – Sprout partnered with Iceland-based children’s television program LazyTown on the Family Challenge App. Both partners have a distinct, established and highly recognizable brand, including fonts, assets, characters and color palettes.

Development

Tracking user activity – The app tracks a user’s progress on completing challenges in order to issue the corresponding multimedia incentives. We also had to build the app to allow for a user’s progress to be reset so that they could start over and run through the challenges again.
Changing Technology – Apple released the iPhone 5 mid-way through our design and development process. Our designs accounted for the iPhone 5’s new screen height.
Complex media layers – We built the app to easily manage the many media layers associated with each activity. Media layers included a Twitter string, Facebook string, voiceover audio file, congratulations message, title, subhead, body, and four associated images.

Ready, set, go! Head to the App store and download the Family Challenge app today.

BarCampPhilly 2012 – An I-SITE Review

In recent years ‘unconferences’ have been popularized by the bored, traditional conference-attending masses. Over the past few years in Philadelphia there has been a flavor of unconference for everyone, including journalists, educators, and tech geeks! On November 10 several of us at I-SITE attended BarCamp Philly 2012. Though Barcamp Philly is largely geared to the tech and web community, the spectrum of talks varies greatly (from “Transition .js” to “Fermenting Fantastic Foods”). It’s an I-SITE favorite and we were proud to sponsor this year as well as attend.

Beyond the day’s programming, the collective takeaway is that BarCamp Philly is always a great opportunity for discussion and socializing with others in the tech, web, and creative communities in Philly.

I-SITE digichemist, Chris Ell, chose several sessions presented by fellow developers from the Philadelphia community. The “Transition .js” session provided a brief overview of Transition .js – a custom testing framework for javascript that has an in-browser UI built specificly to run cross-platform. Chris also attended “Nontrivial Node” – another javascript-oriented session. went beyond the typical ‘hello world’ example of using Node .js and gave attendees a practical introduction to building a web framework in node .js. “ABCs of AWS“, presented by John Rivello of N3RD street company AppRenaissance, explained why using Amazon Web Services and it’s cloud computing platform, EC3 are good for one’s business.

Dana Pavlichko, Web Designer extraordinaire, also attended BarCamp Philly and found one talk in particular inspiring. Kevin Hale (https://twitter.com/ilikevests), Founder and Designer of Wufoo (wufoo.com), gave a talk about Expanding Your Design Vocabulary. Wufoo is a much admired form-building site for its UX and personality, and is used as a primary example in A Book Apart’s Designing for Emotion, by Aarron Walter (http://www.abookapart.com/products/designing-for-emotion). Hale’s talk began with color systems spanning throughout the ages and how different cultures have created their own systems of interpreting color. He spoke about how the area of your brain that processes colors is the same part that processes language, and about how each color has an emotion attached to it. Everyone interprets color differently, and cultural context plays a huge role in our interpretation of color. Overall, it was a fantastic talk that opened the discussion of how we should be paying closer attention to the details of how we communicate & discuss design. Choose the appropriate mode for recovering data from an unallocated SD card. how to recover files from chkdsk Slides from Kevin’s presentation can be found here: https://speakerdeck.com/roundedbygravity/expanding-your-design-vocabulary.

I attended sessions on a wide variety of topics (the beauty of an unconference – and perfect for a project manager!). It’s a known fact that I am perpetually hungry and subsequently perpetually eating, so give me a talk on food and I won’t be able to resist. In the afternoon I attended a great (if not slightly smelly) session on food fermentation presented by Amanda Feifer, local food blogger and ‘fermenter’ extraordinaire. Her presentation inspired me to try my hand at making kambucha and I currently am growing a live scoby in my kitchen at home. Not to be distracted by food entirely, I also attended a stellar talk by Kelani Nichole, a Digital Strategist at Big Spaceship. The session was titled, “Content Mapping: A Methodology for Structured Content”. She walked us through several of her methods (both tried and true and experimental) for conducting content analysis as she works with a client to build or revamp their web presence. In addition to more traditional methods of content analysis and planning (like creating content audit spreadsheets) she demonstrated several more visual approaches of understanding an organization’s content visually using whiteboards, different colored lists, category icons, and font size.

Chris, Dana and I all found BarCamp Philly to be refreshing. It gave our team an opportunity to exercise our grey matter outside our daily context and engage with a diverse group of people who are actively engaged in the tech and web community in Philadelphia and beyond.

Abby Fretz Exposed

Skills:
Project Management, Communication, Creative Brainstorming, Making up new words, Mead-making (developing)

Tools of the Trade:
Anything I use on a consistent basis, from the basic whiteboard to issue tracking software, needs to clearly and simply address a part of my daily routine. I regularly use Evernote, Basecamp, and Google Apps. I’m always on the lookout for fabulous new tools of the trade and will consider adopting as long as they don’t complicate and actually help keep the PM process simple.

What is your project management style:
I approach each project with no expectations, knowing that I will have to modify my approach to each project based on the team I’m working with, the client, and on the parameters of the project (timeline, budget, etc.). A good project manager needs to be malleable but stick to their core set of standards for any project.

I-SITE project most proud of:
I’m most proud of the Sprout Family Challenge iPhone app. It’s the first app I-SITE launched since I started here. On a fairly fast-paced timeline, we successfully designed the app to be enjoyable and usable by both parents and kids. The app had to deliver a lot of information in a highly visual and consumable way. We also worked with two partners on the project whose brands were quite different and smoothly merged them into a cohesive design.

What makes the perfect client:
The perfect client is engaged in the project and enjoys being involved as the project evolves. I’ve worked with a huge range of clients from those who are highly technically knowledgeable to those who have only recently started using the internet. The important thing is that a client cares about the project and has the desire to work with you to produce something amazing.

How beekeeping relates to websites and apps:
Though there are generally accepted rules and standards for both beekeeping and developing websites and apps, there are also a ton of unknowns. As a beekeeper or a web creative, it is vital that you continue investigating, learning and trying new approaches to solving problems in order to adapt to a changing environment. Any beekeeper will tell you that there are a thousand ways to approach a single problem (I realized pretty quickly a question to five beekeepers gets you five different answers) and it is up to the individual (or team) to experiment and identify solutions that work for your very specific environment, type of bees, season, resources, etc.

Brushing Up On eCommerce

White Oak Orthodontic Products is a family owned and operated distributor of quality orthodontic products that launched in November 2012. This passionate father-son duo identified several “glaring unmet needs” in the orthodontic supply marketplace. After reviewing what their competitors were doing online, they knew they needed a way to make their innovative products stand out while also focusing on ease of use for their customers.

In anticipation of their launch, White Oak selected I-SITE as their partner to design and develop an eCommerce website with the goals of creating an easily navigable catalog of their extensive product lines and a seamless order system. Their main goal with customers is to establish trusting, lasting relationships. As the orthodontics industry has not historically been accustomed to using the web for conducting business, it was vital that White Oak be able to encourage customers to use their website by providing them with a straight-forward, secure online account that allows them to easily login and browse products, place orders, track, review and reorder.

I-SITE built the site on the Magento ecommerce platform, which enables White Oak’s staff to continually modify and update their highly curated online product catalog through a simple CMS interface. The site also features an integrated database that gathers information about the customer base and tracks payment, discount, and order information. White Oak’s modern brand was fun to play with from a design perspective, resulting in a clean site that still has a bit of fun to it.

As part of an ongoing partnership, I-SITE is committed to helping White Oak introduce new product types and grow loyal customers. We always love to see our clients smile, and the perfect smiles over at White Oak are no exception!

I-SITE Helps in New York’s Hurricane Recovery

Our friends at The Lower Manhattan Downtown Alliance were affected by the recent hit of Hurricane Sandy, as some of the worst storm damage occurred throughout the lower half of New York City and Long Island. Due to flooding and widespread power loss, the Downtown Alliance office was closed for several days, and many employees did not have power at home either. Despite these hardships, the employees of the Downtown Alliance were committed to keeping the residents and workers within their district informed with up-to-date information about building closings and the city’s cleanup efforts.

Through a combination of posts via their website, iPhone app, and email list as well as their Facebook and Twitter accounts, the Downtown Alliance was able to provide the residents of Manhattan with updates that could affect their home or office in Lower Manhattan with information from various agencies including New York City, New York State, MTA, Port Authority, Con Ed and more. Downtown Alliance employees would post news from mobile devices when they were able to find available wi-fi networks. The closely integrated data shared between the website and app that I-SITE developed helped the Downtown Alliance team be as efficient as possible in these difficult situations. I-SITE also assisted with updates to the site when Downtown Alliance where unable to due to loss of power and web connections.

The diligent efforts of the Downtown Alliance staff were extraordinary in the face of such adversity, and I-SITE is proud that our technology solutions were and important part of that process. Downtown Manhattan is well on the way to recovery, you can keep up to date with their efforts on their site.