Context
March 16th, 2010 by eamae
Last week Chloe and I went to Context, AIGA Pittsburgh’s annual exhibition and award night. It was great to see Pittsburgh’s design community gathered in one place—namely SPACE gallery Downtown—to share the fruits of our efforts. I remember earlier years (okay, I’m not that old; it was like 3 years ago) when the featured work was mostly print design and, as a student, my “experimental narrative” project sat meekly in the corner on a laptop with a small handful of other interactive and digital projects.
I’m pleased that the range of work has become increasingly diverse, and this year was no exception. Screen printed posters hung alongside with digital projections, along with shelves of all sorts of design artifacts. I’m also very pleased to announce that both of Deeplocal’s featured pieces—Nike LIVESTRONG Chalkbot, and the 2009 Pittsburgh bike map—received awards of distinction at the show. For me, it’s a nice message of acknowledging both high-tech interactive work and more traditional printed work.
Marketing on Meth. Go Fast.
February 24th, 2010 by nathan
We often talk a lot about design and technology but not enough about the value of marketing. In the past few days, Deeplocal and/or it’s associated work has appeared in Wired, Fast Company, and Communication Arts, and received a best of interactive award from Communication Arts, two Pittsburgh AIGA awards and an award from MassTransit Magazine. 
I just returned from a transit conference where we were presenting our RouteShout project (featured in Wired and MassTransit) where I was astounded how many in the industry knew exactly who we are and what our product did. This comes from two things: 1. having a great product, and 2. making sure people know your product exists. Most companies, including our own at times, fail horribly at making sure people know their product exists. We have no big marketing department or budget, we are just diligent and responsive. We pay attention to what is being said about us, thank people that help us or go out of their way for us, respond to questions and phone calls, and keep people informed when something cool or exciting is happening here at Deeplocal. This has worked very well for us. We remain a small but driven team, we are growing slowly and expanding our national client base. We are doing this because of yes, technology, but also, because of marketing.There is no real formula for this that I can share. It is literally just following leads, staying in touch, and treating your product or company’s network as you would your personal network. Stay in your room and watch TV and people start to forget about you. Be visible, active, and help the world in some way and you will make friends.
So consider this a thank you to our team that works hard to let people know all of the cool stuff we are doing here.
Thankfully our team keeps delivering cool and fun stuff to talk about but I promise you that alone is never enough. Being from a smaller city (Pittsburgh) that is outside of the major U.S. media centers like NYC and LA make it a challenge for us to get noticed. Thanks also to the journalists and writers that work to support companies like ours in Pittsburgh. So yes, there is nothing that important or enlightened in this post but I just was feeling all warm and fuzzy lately. I am proud of our team that has managed to stand out among some very large competition and continue to let people know that we have something special here and we built it from the ground up here in the great city of Pittsburgh. Now come eat waffles with us.
Don’t actually use methamphetamine – think metaphor (I think this is a metaphor…) people.
Meet Deeplocal in LA This Week
February 2nd, 2010 by nathan
I will be in LA all day Wednesday and Thursday. We don’t get out to the west coast all too often. I would first like to invite you to what will likely be a great event in LA. Presented by Trailer Park and Contagious Magazine, Next Generation Content will tackle the challenges of figuring what comes next for brands and advertising. Deeplocal will be presenting our approach to working that we like to call Gutter Tech. If you would like to meet, please call our office and they will put you in touch with me. I expect warmth and sun.
If you can’t make it to the event, no problem (I think it is actually sold out!). I’ll still be wandering around and if you want to talk about potential projects, just reach out to our home base in Pittsburgh. We won’t bite.
Keep Fighting Carly
February 2nd, 2010 by heather
When the Deeplocal team journeyed to France last summer for the Nike Chalkbot project, we were excited to be involved with the Tour de France, but we had no idea how much the Chalkbot’s messages would affect each of us. We also couldn’t have anticipated what the words that Chalkbot printed would mean to the individuals who were currently battling or who had battled cancer.
Each early morning (think 4 or 5am), our team would get the Chalkbot prepared to print, and as it was printing, many of us would walk behind it and read message after message. Long after we’ve returned home from the Tour, we’re still seeing the Chalkbot’s affect on individuals and their families. One story that we want to share with you is about a four-year-old girl who is battling the rarest form of a pediatric brain tumor; her name is Carly Mitchell.
We found out about Carly when a family friend submitted a message for the Chalkbot that was printed on the course of the Tour. Carly has been undergoing chemotherapy and keeping an eye out for clinical trials that she’s eligible for. Her family has been fundraising to pay for Carly’s medical bills; one of their recent fundraising efforts is selling short and long-sleeve shirts with Carly’s chalkbot message on them, “Keep Fighting Carly.”
We wanted to pass along the information about how you can purchase a shirt or make a donation:
To place an order, email keepfightingcarly@yahoo.com
Checks and money orders can be made payable to Keep Fighting Carly, P.O. Box 182, Plainfield, PA 17081
We’re Hiring for RouteShout.com!
January 14th, 2010 by heather
We’re expanding our RouteShout.com sales team and we’re looking for smart, upbeat, articulate, well-organized individuals with experience in sales and a proven track record of success. We have a great product that has been named one of the top new tech innovations in transit, and we want everyone in transit to know about it.
If you’re interested or know someone you think would be perfect for the opportunity, take a look at the job description here
You should be comfortable with the following for this opportunity:
- Managing the entire sales process from prospecting to close
- Making dozens of cold calls per day, generating interest, qualifying prospects, and closing sales of $15-150k
- Understanding customer needs and and requirements
- Technology: you don’t need to have a technical background, but you should be able to understand and learn basic computer and mobile technology
- Make presentations, webinars, and demos and articulate what RouteShout is and how it works
- Close sales and meet or exceed quarterly sales quotas
The position has very high earning potential; it is not an entry-level position.
The coolest aspect of this opportunity is that you’ll be working for an exciting company (last year we helped to develop the Nike Chalkbot and our entire company went to Europe for more than a week for the Tour de France, not to mention that we have an extremely smart, talented team of engineers and designers who work fast and love what they’re doing). Also, you’ll be selling a product that’s truly valuable and has already garnered tremendous interest from the transit industry.
If you think you’re up for the challenge, email me directly: heather@deeplocal.com with your resume and a cover letter.
Happy Holidays- Now stop coding and start selling!
December 23rd, 2009 by nathan
We are finishing up a few last minute things in the office right now before we head out for a little holiday break. I have not posted in awhile and wanted to take a few minutes to write about a conversation I had recently with another start-up at a holiday party. I like to think of our blog as a diary of what it is like to be a start-up in Pittsburgh. As part of the diary, it’s my objective to share our ups and our downs and hopefully a little of what we have learned can be of benefit to others like us.
One thing I have learned the hard way is that technology does not usually sell itself. The exceptions to this are FDA approved medical devices and patentable inventions. Unfortunately as a web software company, we are not a member of this fantastically funded group. We try to keep our eyes open, listen to our customers, and deliver real solutions. Sounds good, but we haven’t always been the best at getting products to market, letting people know the products exist, and following up with interested customers. I have seen products we have launched be replicated by others and sold only to gain attention and dollars. I am not bitter over this. Instead I use it as a chance to learn what I could have done better and attempt to improve as quickly as possible. Good salespeople can sell anything. Good technologists can’t necessarily sell anything. To be a profitable company, you have to be making money somewhere. We hired our first dedicated salesperson in 2009 and have seen the benefits. We are now looking to expand that part of the company to take advantage of opportunities that we otherwise miss.
When you sit and code but forget to sell you may be missing huge market opportunities. Many start-ups develop technology only to see lesser technologies (meaning functional subsets) sell more, faster. We’ve been there. To some degree, we are still there. Selling is not easy. It can be made easier when you have good technology that solves problems. I know it’s hard out there but no matter how small you may be, burn some of your capital and team time on making sales and getting your stuff in front of audiences.
About a year and a half ago I got to meet the CEO of Kayak at a private event in NYC. I was impressed by him and love his product. He bragged about spending $0 on marketing. Turn on the TV now and you will see Kayak commercials (one of the older old medias – TV). I don’t criticize him for this. What he likely saw was that the early rapid growth they observed at Kayak was shrinking and competition was growing. What was a functional advantage was shrinking. They had to start burning capital to sell themselves to their customers a bit more.
I whine a lot here about getting our stuff in front of potential customers as fast as possible. I will never whine if a potential customer says no. I will start throwing things if a potential customer doesn’t even know we are an option. It should be our job to at least give our potential customers the chance to say no. If we don’t give them that chance, we have nothing to complain about.
HARVEST interview with Deeplocal
December 15th, 2009 by heather
We were recently awarded a spot in Harvest’s “New Founders Program.” Harvest is “a time tracking and online invoicing application for small business and freelancers.” Being part of the New Founder’s Program means that Deeplocal gets a one-year subscription to Harvest. We were chosen because the folks over at Harvest think we have a cool company and an interesting story…thanks guys.
An Interview with Deeplocal: A Culture of Innovation
by HARVEST
Deeplocal is our latest New Founder, and was founded in 2006 by artist and former punk rock singer, Nathan Martin, in the post-industrial city of Pittsburgh, Pennslyvania. One part consulting company and one part mobile app product development company, their team of eight is comprised of top talent from companies like MetaDesign, Yahoo, and Apple. We had a chat with Nathan about the importance of art and culture on Deeplocal’s business model, hacking police scanners, and how the Harvest iPhone app has changed the way they work.
What was the inspiration for starting your company, and how is it different from the typical business model?
Deeplocal is a culture first, and a business second. I have always been very passionate about what I do in my life, and in building a company I decided that I didn’t want to be a traditional manager early on. I wanted to build a team of people like myself that were passionate, hard working, creative, and talented, so I had to build a culture that attracted great people. I am no different than my co-workers in that I want to be a part of something that has impact, and presence. Because of those needs I chose to build a business that splits it’s time between consulting work for clients looking for new ways of using technology, and developing our own consumer-facing products. We use our consulting work to generate IP that we either use internally or license, while earning real revenue.
In what ways are the arts an integral part of Deeplocal?
We believe that artists are very similar to entrepreneurs and that we can learn a lot from working with and for them. We run an artist residency program that brings artists into our studios, and gives them access to our proprietary technology and engineering assistance. We play a lot of sports, and even started a site called Pickupalooza.com to get ourselves more involved with people outside of our normal scope. We challenge other start-ups locally to bowling nights, so we could create a peer-mentor network. We have an open studio called Waffle Wednesdays, where we invite the public to come for a visit and get free consultations. We work with a number of cultural institutions here in Pittsburgh, like the Mattress Factory. We do all of these things to cultivate our culture of innovation – it is our core asset.
At a recent Waffle Wednesday Open Studio
What does a typical day entail for you?
We are a small team, which means we require open and constant communication between one another. We begin each week with a 15 minute meeting where we use stickies on a white board to see what each of us has to do, is in progress, or is completed. We try to let each person here own a project or a task, and we have a very thin management layer. We all handle multiple tasks, talk directly to clients, handle customer service, and do the dishes. Our development process is also very agile, and our designers and engineers share some level of comfort with each other’s skill set. This makes for very fast and effective design and development, and we usually have a few new ideas a day. We try to vet those internally, and when possible, prototype ideas in a few days. I think our approach has always been that things simply need to get done and if you can help… then help.
Why do you track time, and how do you guys use Harvest?
We had tried a few time tracking apps out in the past and really found them far too cumbersome for our environment. We wanted something that was simple and didn’t seem like a burden. Our CTO had read about Harvest, I took a look, and we were instantly hooked. It is clearly built by people that use it themselves, people like us. We use Harvest to track time for hourly consulting projects. The iPhone app helps a lot with that when we are working off site or can’t get to a connected laptop, and we also use it internally for part-time staff as a timesheet. We plan to institute the invoicing shortly!
It seems you incorporate mobile phones in many of your projects, like TinyBlast, the RouteShout signs, and Urban Sweep.
We like to think of concepts first, and technology second. Most of our products come from real client needs: RouteShout, our main product, came from work we had done while at Carnegie Mellon University. We had hacked a police scanner to pick up radio signals telling us where some of the local buses were located. Years later, we were invited by that agency’s CEO to build a pilot system for them that allows bus riders to find bus arrival times over SMS text message or smartphone.
What is Chalkbot, and how were you able to realize that project?
The Chalkbot was built for Nike’s ad agency, Wieden + Kennedy for last year’s Tour de France. We were asked to build a machine that would spray short messages of hope and inspiration on the actual Tour de France route. We worked with a friend’s company, Standard Robot, to go from design to shipment in just about 7 weeks. Users would submit messages less than 40 characters through text message, Twitter, or the web, which would then be sent to the actual Chalkbot machine. The machine would then use 48 spray nozzles to spray an emulsified soy based chalk onto the roadways printing a user’s message. After each message was printed, the machine would snap a photo, grab the GPS coordinate, was then shared through Google Maps and Google Earth.
You can view the original post here.
Apply for the New Founders Program
PDF generation, the easy way
December 10th, 2009 by dimitry
Thanks to a tip-off from Matthew, I’ve finally seen the light in efficient, on-the-fly HTML to PDF generation. Prepare to be enlightened.
The old way
First, you’d need to install a PDF generation library such as PDFLib or FPDF. Then you need to study its documentation and figure out how to lay out the PDF document to closely mimic your HTML page. If installing one of those libraries is not tedious enough, step two is exceptionally time consuming and irritating.
To add to the headaches, you now have to make changes in two places, making maintenance harder. Do you like to do extra work? I don’t. I’d rather be outside, frolicking in a field, chasing butterflies.
Enter the new way
The new way calls for a browser. Instead of designing a custom PDF document, we simply want to take our current HTML, print it to a PDF file and serve it to the user. Mac OS X users have had this functionality for years. In Windows, printing to a PDF file required installing a custom printer driver. Yuck. We decided to take the end-user’s capabilities out of the equation and simply installed a browser on our server.
The idea is to take an HTML file, load it in the browser on our server and make the browser print it to a PDF file.
Sounds simple, right? Almost. Turns out that running Firefox on a Linux machine requires an X11 display to be available. This adds another layer of complexity that we didn’t want. Then I stumbled onto wkhtmltopdf (read: Webkit HTML to PDF) and it saved the day.
Latest version of wkhtmltopdf doesn’t require an X11 display, freeing up resources and headaches. More importantly, check out the easy of use:
wkhtmltopdf http://www.deeplocal.com deeplocal.pdf
Genius! Now we can limit all the maintenance to one HTML file. Time is saved and we’re all happy.
Deeplocal is hiring and needs you to spread the word
December 5th, 2009 by nathan
This is not our normal blog post. My right hand is broken and typing is VERY difficult. Hopefully we will have something of more interest up next week. Also, we have a new team member joining on monday. I will wait until then to give an introduction but Heather will no longer be the only female at Deeplocal. 
Deeplocal needs your help. We have been having so much fun lately we forgot to hire more help…
Seriously, we have an immediate need for more help with both our internal product work and our external consulting work. We are actively seeking the next 1-2 amazing people to join our team. Do you know anyone?
Feel free to forward this around. We are interviewing now.
Job Opening: Creative Senior Software Engineer
Benefits
Primarily 9-5 M-F schedule, Full Health Care, 3 Week Vacation, Waffles on Wednesdays, Company IRA plan with matching contributions, Bowling against other start-ups, Limited oversight, Team environment, Loft office space, Bean bag chairs, Highly competitive pay,
Job Overview
About Deeplocal
Located in Pittsburgh, Pa., Deeplocal spun out of a Carnegie Mellon University art and technology research lab, following more than three years of research into local and collaborative information collection, storage, and visualization. Our company’s client list includes Nike, Volkswagen, and Coldwater Creek. We are a company of creative designers and technologists developing our own products, licensing our IP, and doing consulting design and development. We are a small team of eight looking for 1-2 more technologists to join soon with one immediate opening. Deeplocal is a start up now over three years old with consistent 200% revenue growth YOY.
Full-time Technical Opportunity
Deeplocal wants to meet our next tech team member. We’re a small team working on cool projects, so a good fit means more than someone who just knows buzz words.
What we’re looking for
- Familiarity with concepts such as remote APIs, client-side scripting, and query tuning.
- Ability to change direction on projects quickly or change projects completely.
- Interest in new tech plus a fascination with and knowledge of old tech.
- Ability to work independently without constant supervision.
- Desire to learn new technologies and play around with them to experience their capabilities.
- Comfortable being a single point of contact with a client from design phase to maintenance phase.
- Willingness to “own” projects and manage them from conception through final development.
- Capable of understanding mobile technology and its uses
We’re interested in someone who has experience working with applications in all phases of their life cycles. A good understanding of PHP or Java is also useful, as is attention to detail, strong written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to manage multiple tasks simultaneously.
How to Apply
Send an email to Deeplocal (info@deeplocal.com), with your resume and a short explanation of why you’re interested in working at Deeplocal. Additionally, feel free to stop by and meet us during one of our Waffle Wednesday events.
Why we roll…
November 19th, 2009 by nathan
Last night we bowled (rolled) against a team from another Pittsburgh-based startup Bright Innovations. I’ll reveal the outcome of the game after I first try to answer the question of 
why we roll. Immediately before racing to Dormont lanes for the game, I was sitting on a panel at Carnegie Mellon on entrepreneurship, etc. All the panelists had started at least one company and were there to provide advice and feedback to students looking to launch their own companies. We were asked how we would recommend going about getting mentors and advisors. Now I am not bashing this answer but what is very common is to hear entrepreneurs repeat what they were previously told when answering questions like these. We learn like anyone else in any other discipline and repeat the classroom rhetoric. The rhetoric goes something like “find people that have done great work in a related field or have grown successful businesses or can introduce you to new markets…” I prefer to be very direct with people (especially students) when answering questions like these. I will respond to this question here in this post because I feel I did an inadequate job of communicating the answer to that question last night. The answer is really the same answer to “why do you bowl against other companies?” I’ll try to answer more common questions to entrepreneurs in later posts, but for now let’s handle this first one.
My mentors are the other startups going through this experience RIGHT NOW.
I am not saying that you shouldn’t have well informed, connected, and experienced advisors. There is a very big need for that. The need that often gets forgotten though is the need to know what people are experiencing right now, to feel comforted, and to feel as though you are learning immediately appropriate knowledge. To put it simply, imagine you are a 3rd grader learning about the world, you can learn a lot from adults but they will never know what you are going through because this is your time. Think Goonies.
So yes, I have business advisors and they are very helpful, but I will say that more helpful than those advisors have been the connections we try to form to other local startups. We are bright passionate people and when you meet founders from other startups (even competitors) chances are they are bright passionate people as well. It is a great community of people.
We are based in Pittsburgh. It’s a medium sized city with some great universities and resources. It now has a pretty vibrant software startup community. Three years ago I complained that it seemed every company I heard about was in the medical device world. No offense intended to those companies, it’s just not what Deeplocal was doing. Now, we have a pretty substantial number of small teamed software startups. It’s great for the city and it’s great for us. My 3rd grade class size went from five to fifty. Now I can make friends, play, and learn. I want us to grow together and it’s primarily selfish. Deeplocal gets better when we learn and adapt. We learn from our peers. Bowling (and the mix of other crazy things we do like Pickupalooza.com) help us to always be expanding our classroom size.
So to put it simply again, bowling is one way that my entire company can have fun, stay excited about one another, and meet other people with somewhat shared experiences that are very much my advisory board. And to put the answer to last night’s question from students about mentorship more simply, become a part of a community and make sure that community keeps growing. That community of people in your time and in your place are your mentors. We are all Goonies and it’s our time down here. no offense intended to the successes of ten years ago, just don’t bulldoze my playground.
P.S. Bright Innovations beat us out a few weeks back for the Tech50 Art and Technology Award so last night had all the energy of a steel cage match. We wanted our revenge and… We Won! The team was awesome. I didn’t know anyone other than Minette and Jason before we showed up but they really have a very nice company and some amazing bowlers too. We met one another, mingled a bit, and shared moments of drunken awkwardness. It was a very close match. Thanks to Bright for providing the bowling pin trophy. We thought we would stand it up next to our runner-up Tech50 trophy.You tell us which one is better. So let me tally this up: Deeplocal (2-0), ShowClix (0-1), Bright Innovations (0-1). We are a little bowled out right now but we welcome new challengers. We are going to pass the trophy on to the next winner and get that trophy moving around the city. You could be next.
Bowling Rules:
- At least 5 people per team
- We mix players up from each company
- We add up all scores and average
- Highest average wins
- Usually play 3 games, 2 game minimum