deeplocal: Design and Development for Humans and Machines

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 3^rd 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 3^rd 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

The Foosball table is quiet. The ultimate bean bag sacks are empty. The snarky comments are left unanswered. And (as a side note) there are too many guys in this office!

For those reasons, and the fact that we need some help, we’re seeking interns at Deeplocal for the spring semester (don’t worry guys, we won’t discriminate by sex….you’ll be considered as equally as the ladies who apply). We’re also looking for one full-time employee.
 
Here are the spring internship positions we’re hiring for:
Marketing/Editorial
Design
Technical
 
Full-time position we’ll be hiring for soon:
Full-time Technical Opportunity
 
To apply, just click on the links above and follow the instructions. Optionally, stop by at one of our Waffle Wednesdays to introduce yourself.
 
We look forward to meeting you!

First off, a little background.  This may have been mentioned before, but each week here at Deeplocal, a different person is responsible for washing the dishes.  The same person is also responsible for writing a blog post. While I consider myself to be a pretty accomplished dishwasher, this is my first foray into the exciting world of blogging so we’ll see how it goes.
 
This week I added some functionality to our RouteShout product so I thought I’d use that to talk a bit about how our development process works at Deeplocal.  The new functionality had been requested by a customer several weeks ago and we had been discussing the idea. A few days ago, we decided to go ahead and implement the new feature.  The team got together for abut 30 minutes and talked about the core functionality of the new feature, how it should work, and potential problems; then, I was off.  No functional spec document, no formal kickoff, just 30 minutes in front of a whiteboard.
 
As an aside, the functionality that the customer originally requested was very complicated.  We spent some of our whiteboard time distilling the feature to its core requirements and stripping away what we thought was extraneous.  This is a big part of our process, identifying the true end goal and focusing on it.
 
With that, I started working on the code. After about three days, with some help from Dimitry, we had the feature working on our development server.  So functionally, it was working-  but it wasn’t pretty.  That’s where Nathan and Eamae stepped in.  The new feature involves users subscribing to various transit alerts and the sign-up process was confusing.  All of the requirements were there, but something just wasn’t right.  Again, after about 30 minutes at the whiteboard, Nathan and Eamae had quickly gone through two iterations of the UI and they came up with a much better solution.  Eamae summed everything up for me with a couple of sketches and the ball was back in my court to make it happen.
 
Now, less than five days after we decided to move forward with the new feature, it’s being pushed out to our production servers. Is it perfect? Will it never need to be changed at all?  No, in all likelihood we will get suggestions from our customers or we’ll want to make tweaks on our own.  But, the important part is that the feature is out there, it works, and customers can use it. If necessary, we can make iterative improvements as we go along, but we’d rather get something usable out there instead of spending weeks making theoretical changes to it.
 
I’m not saying that lots of planning and spec documents are a waste of time or unnecessary. For some projects with large teams and scopes they’re essential to keep everyone working together. But with our small, smart team, spec changes are usually done by pushing your chair out from your desk and telling the rest of the team what you’re planning to do. If no major objections come back, you have approval. Changes to the design come when Nathan walks by and puts a printout on your desk. That’s how we do things and it works well for us. When you have a team that’s competent and confident in each other, you can be flexible, make quick changes, and “get things done” Most other companies would still be writing up specs.

We call ourselves an innovation studio and for us, that is as packaged as we would like to be. What we really are is a team of smart, creative, tech-savvy, sociable, nice people. As one investor put it, Deeplocal is a culture more than anything else. My goal has always been to build a company that someone like me would want to work at– for a long time.

We don’t hire people to burn them out.

We don’t have A and B grade teams.

We don’t sell technology.

The company was spun out of Carnegie Mellon University in the hopes of commercializing some mapping software I had been working on since 2000. That didn’t pan out (it was 2006, the year Google Maps launched), and we had to start figuring out how to make money by providing some value to local companies. We began doing technology consulting and development, with a bit of design thrown in. We helped to launch Gigapan.org with CMU, then the new Post-Gazette.com with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspaper, then just started to organically take on work that excited us: the Pittsburgh Bike Map, Children’s Museum Mobile Scavenger Hunt, etc.

We grow our clients organically.

We have a background in mobile (I was a mobile device specialist at MetaDesign in 2000, worked for Palm computing, Matthew worked for Handspring, and we operated a bunch of hacked SMS gateways from CMU when I was a researcher there). That background often gets us lumped into the mobile technology company category because we can do things like mobile marketing services.

Mobile is a type of media we can provide; it is not what we are.

We actually hate getting lumped into that category and we make no money off of small transactions. We built an application called TinyBlast not to get rich but to provide these marketing services to companies that just want mobile alerts, etc.

We build our own products that have recurring revenue.

Our leading product is called RouteShout and it is pretty simple. We take real-time or schedule time data (depending on what a transit agency has…in Pittsburgh, for example, it’s just the schedule) and deliver transit arrival times to users who are standing at stops. The information is delivered over SMS text message, iPhone, and soon- Android. It’s a simple concept and we run it on our own short code, 25252. We have a saleperson who is dedicated to the transit industry and we have customers across the country. It’s going well!

We help advertising agencies implement their ideas.

Last summer we helped to implement the Nike Chalkbot for ad agency Wieden + Kennedy. The Chalkbot is a machine that spray painted text messages and tweets on the roads of the Tour de France. The project wasn’t just big… it was huge. We took the entire company over to France to experience the event and had a fantastic time. The project allowed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide to get their messages of hope and remembrance on the streets of the world’s largest sporting event. The entire project was built and delivered in about seven weeks.

We work directly with advertisers to develop and implement experience-based advertising campaigns.

While we can’t talk a lot about who we are working with now, we have developed a process for engaging with new and potential clients called FEED. Through this process we leverage our unique backgrounds, access to technology, and prototyping skills to develop an idea book for clients. From there we can go on to implement a concept or an idea with a client and involve outside help if necessary. Right now, many large brands are beginning to look more diligently at their advertising spend to make sure that each dollar is generating new revenue for the company and strengthening the brand. Increasingly, brands are coming to realize that what customers really want are compelling experiences that they can’t get otherwise. We help brands to leverage their current assets, relationships, and networks to identify an opportunity for a compelling user experience. In the age of too much information, too many websites, and too many emails, you have to think beyond media to really stand out in a crowd, grab attention, and ideally- devotion. We help clients spend less and get more by focusing exclusively on the experience and ignoring technology (we use whatever makes sense, no technology for technology’s sake).

We have fun.

We are deeply engaged with Pittsburgh and support the cyclist community, the arts community, the start-up community, and the non-profit community. We do all kinds of fun projects to bring these worlds together and help to build cool experiences in Pittsburgh. We have an artist residency program, we commission artists to design t shirts, we offer discounted services to non-profits, we bowl against other local start-ups we like, and we just launched Waffle Wednesdays to give away free consulting. We do these projects because they are fun for us, they add to our culture, and they help us to learn about what a compelling experience is (tech or non-tech). Consider all of these projects and programs small exercises in what big brands could or should be doing on a much larger scale. We do a lot with a very small amount of time, money and people.

So what do you do?

I wrote a book here trying to explain what we do but I hope you can understand that we live innovation. While the phrase “innovation studio” may seem generic, in our case it is not. We live and breathe innovation and try to help our clients learn through us. If you look at each of the projects we have done, on their own they may seem small but putting them in perspective, we are a seven person company (the largest size we have ever been) from Pittsburgh that has built one of 2009’s top advertising campaigns (Nike Chalkbot), has a rapidly expanding application that has seen 1000% growth in the past month (RouteShout), has had design work recognized internationally (Print Magazine award for the Pittsburgh Bike Map), and is helping to build experience-based campaigns for national and international brands (Nike, and others that cannot be named). I am very proud of what we have been able to accomplish so far. All of this has been done in total disregard to conventional wisdom. What we are, a hybrid product/services company, is not supposed to work. We are not supposed to be alive after three years. We should have learned our lesson years ago. Oh well…

We operate more like a punk band or art group than a company.

- nathan

I don’t know if ShowClix can bowl or not but we will find out tonight when Deeplocal v. ShowClix happens at Forward Lanes in Squirrel Hill. We love being a part of such a great start-up community in Pittsburgh. There are a lot of great companies here. We try to reach out to others when we can and sometimes we even make friends. ShowClix are our friends and to get our companies mingling a bit more we decided to challenge one another to a bowling match.

ShowClix v Deeplocal Tonight

On another note, we started Deeplocal over three years ago. The great thing is that we started around the same time as a lot of other cool start-ups here in Pittsburgh. It’s been fun to grow, sometimes compete, and sometimes collaborate with this community. It’s also great that programs like Idea Foundry, Innovation Works, and AlphaLab are here to help incubate these businesses. Unfortunately it has been a tough climate recently for companies to raise follow-on money and we have seen some of these companies close up shop in the past several months. One company we are very sad to see go is Impact Games, headed up by Eric Brown. This company had several cool products like Play the News and had gained attention outside of Pittsburgh (whcih we all love to see happen). Sadly, commercialization is not as simple as non-entrepreneurs usually think it is. Impact Games has closed their doors. I am willing to bet we will see both their technology/games and their CEO Eric Brown making someone else wealthy very soon though. We have been able to interact with Eric on a few occasions and always found him to be creative and hard-working – the two traits we love at Deeplocal! We wish Eric the very best.

Good Luck Eric!

Next bowling competitor: Bright Innovation on November 18th! These guys beat us out at Tech 50 so this is sure to be a violent blood bath!

Let me ask you something. You like syrup? How about breakfast? Do you eat breakfast?

Great. Then this just might be up your alley.

What are these alleged Waffle Wednesdays that you speak of?

Need marketing, tech, or design advice? Developing a new project or business idea that we can help you to evolve? Interested in working with Deeplocal but not sure how?

We’re offering free consulting and free waffles.

We’re opening our studio from 9am – 11am on selected Wednesday mornings to chat about whatever issue, idea, or project you’re focused on and to enjoy a tasty waffle breakfast with coffee.

Alright, I’m interested. When is the first Waffle Wednesday?

Our first Waffle Wednesday will be held November 18 (from 9am – 11am)

We don’t claim to be waffle experts. We just want to have friendly discussions and to get all of our networks (artists, start-ups, non-profits, etc.) talking more openly. Rather than creating another evening event, we thought- why not just make some waffles and chat?

Do I need to sign up for this?

Nope.
Everyone’s invited.
No RSVP necessary.
Totally informal.
Completely free.
Just show up.

Where is this shindig happening?

Waffle Wednesdays will be held in our studio. Deeplocal is in the Liberty Bank building (across from CVS) at 6101 Penn Avenue, Suite 602. Parking is available in a lot behind the building; use the dial pad at the front door on Penn Ave. to call our extension; we’ll buzz you in.

If I can’t make it on Nov. 18, will there be other Waffle Wednesdays? If not, I might cry…

Don’t cry, dry your eyes. We’re going to this this biweekly (with some exceptions). Here are a few other upcoming Waffle Wednesday dates if you can’t make it on November 18:

December 2
December 16

I love Deeplocal events; they are so clever. How can I stay abreast on all of the wacky things your team is doing?

I’m so glad you asked. Sign up for our Deeplocal Events mailing list. You’ll never miss a Deeplocal event again.

When I first heard about android I was excited but also a little confused. It seemed like a recipe for a “mobile windows” – the argument that most Mac folk use to explain why we don’t like windows is that it is itself not a bad thing, but that its need to support hardware that isn’t defined by the people writing the OS is what causes it problems. I remain confused about this in Android, but thats another post. I downloaded 1.0 or something like “Android SDK Labs Google Invite Only Invites to Send did we mention Labs?” version of the SDK about two years ago and got started. Two days later I deleted it and said I’d come back once it seemed to make sense. Once 2.0 came out I decided to give it another shot.

This time I actually like it way more, eclipse has only killed my kernel twice, and I’m getting a fair amount of app development in. There’s just one problem – I’ve got a professional background in Java and in Objective-C. I’ve done programmatic layouts and also Interface Builder (which makes more sense to me) layouts. Android’s copious use of xml definition files for layouts (yes yes, i know one can design them in code) is really complicated to understand at first.

If you want to get started quickly in Android your choices are sort of boring. A “Hello Android” tutorial which just puts some text on the screen of the emulator (which for some reason takes about 2 min to launch for the first time on my MBP) and thats pretty much it. There are also view tutorials. These are where you get into the cool stuff like tabbed interfaces and maps. Maps seemed like a natural for me (hey, ever heard of RouteShout?) so I jumped right in. My decision to go from “Boring Text on Screen” to “Tabs with Maps and Data” in one step is where I learned some interesting things about android as a platform.

• get a maps API key in a way that is new to you
• Change your Build Target
• Edit the Application Definition File
• Change your default Activity (or in my case, make a new one, and then deal with the new one in the default one)
• Follow an odd circular explanation of how this all works
• Add a layout file for the map
• Change your layout file for your tab interface
• Add a string in the strings file
• Find some 404s in the Docs
• Yell at eclipse for a while for marking your XML files as all “warning”

Eventually I ended up with something like a map under a tab…and I got that feeling that everyone gets the first time they complied and ran an iPhone app in the emulator.

I know, I know I’m being pretty hard on Android here for comedic effect. I’m not nearly experienced enough on this platform to have more than this basic “Awww man, it wasn’t super simple for me to do something totally awesome? WTF?” attitude mainly because it hurt my pride a little bit to be so lost for a change.

I’m looking forward to finishing this app I’m working on and getting it out there for people to try on devices. I have sort of a sick anticipation to see how it works on different hardware – a feature unavailable on the iPhone for obvious reasons. Thats really what draws me to Android – the chaos of writing an application and waiting to see what its like once someone uses it. The environment is controlled to a point, but it gets really exciting when that control is lost.

I do plan on talking more about Android as I use it more. I think there’s a lot to learn about the API, but more importantly, how it reacts to different users and different hardware. Who knows what someone’s phone looks like to them – that’s where app development gets interesting for me.

Oh also, if you’d like a step-by-step on how to do this, I will happily post one here. I’m just not sure its particularly interesting to anyone who isn’t a totally raw newbie.

We built Pickupalooza.com for fun primarily. We had great support from people like Councilman Bill Peduto, our friends like Eric at Blackberry Studios, and Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. It was great as long as we all came to games and stayed motivated. The problem being that we get busy sometimes. It was an awesome way to meet new people and is still used by people we love like Colin at Fossil Free Fuels. We want to keep Pickupalooza going especially here in Pittsburgh but until Sunday I wasn’t sure how to get the energy back from last summer. That energy came in the form of Adam Nelson of Obscure Games. I spent nearly four hours on Sunday playing at Frick Park. I played games like Drop-In, Friggat, and Circle Rules Soccer. I told Adam it could have gone either way but it was awesome. Adam is like a camp counselor (in fact he has been one) and is a member of Pitt’s Outing Club. He is motivated and is able to rally people to play games nearly every day. The games were really fun and just competitive enough that anyone can play. I talked to him about the challenges we had with pickupalooza and the great thing he does is decide what game to play based on turnout. This way you don’t have too few for soccer or too many for something else. I think we are going to help Adam in his planning for a festival he wants to pull off next summer. The festival is tentatively called the PghPLAYS Festival and you can help Adam out by visiting the PghPLAYS blog. This festival will introduce you to a tone of cool games. For now you can find Adam’s games listed under the category Obscure Games on Pickupalooza Pittsburgh. Go Adam. Thanks also to all the cool people we met like Simon from SmallFarmCentral. Get out and play. It’s a great way to meet people. My only problem is that at age 32, things are starting to hurt a bit more. Running this morning was rough.

Our friend Adam is getting Pittsburghers together on Sunday (11/8) to play some obscure games. A few of us at Deeplocal will be attending and we’d love to see you there too.

Sunday, November 8, 11:00am at Frick Park (Regent Square) in Regent Square

Here’s the info, straight from Adam:

Obscure Games are weekly meet-ups to play sports you’ve never heard of. Popular games in the past have included Circle Rules Soccer, Oblong Highball, Foxtail Drop-In, Friggat, and others. On Sunday mornings, we’ll play at a different location each week, and I’ll bring coffee and bagels/doughnuts for everyone. Please sigh-up so I know how much to get. Games are free, but I’d appreciate a couple of bucks to cover the costs of the food.

Sign up on Pickupalooza.com

Check out the PghPLAYS website for more info. about obscure games.

Hmm. Yes I suffer from the problem that every few months I have a desire to rearrange the studio. Heather says it is the most often heard phrase in the studio. David actually suggested it this time. We have some friends coming in from NYC tonight to visit the studio and thought it best we just go for it. Let’s move some sh*t. So we went to lunch with my Dad (he stopped in to drop off some cookies he made – he enjoys baking cookies but only one kind). We got back to the studio at 2:00 and just now finished rearranging. When we moved into this office we were 4 people strong. Now we have 6 here all the time and #7 (Zack) stops in every so often – he does have a desk.

So, rearranged. I recommend it because it. Rearranging calms me. I do it at my house every few months as well. Plus, now I have something to blog about. Dave believes I rearranged just to have something to write about. Here is why I rearranged:

1. we now have 2 large memory foam sacks and they take up several hundred square feet each

2. we have now a real paper shredder which is fantastic and eats staples and it takes up space

3. Zack is coming into the office more often so we need a better spot for him

4. We really needed to clean the cabinets

5. We are preparing for a really awesome surprise on wednesday mornings. Stay tuned to twitter to find out what that surprise is. It will result in people other than ourselves in the office and we want to make room for that.

Something is coming soon to Deeplocal studios on wednesday mornings…..