Week #289-290

Sunday, September 4th, 02016 at 21:12 UTC

Week 289 share’s its fame with the dialling area codes of Southern Ontario. Also with the unusual Main Belt asteroid 289 Nenetta. This asteroid is interesting because the spectral analysis reveals it is made of Olivine, which is relatively rare in the asteroid belt. Week 290 share’s its fame with a Main Belt asteroid discovered in 01890 only 10 days after 289 Nenetta. 290 Bruna is named after the Czech Republic city of Brno which is about ~290km from Dresden.

Week #280 was slow. Mostly around internal projects. We did have a few meetings with friends and prospective clients. Summer is certainly coming to an end and more and more people are back at the office, answering emails and projects are beginning to come alive.

Week #290 saw the closure of QuizUp. We did a lot of work for them over the last two years helping as part of their Data Team. All the numbers are probably not public and never will be, but we got to look into how many people were using the application daily, weekly, monthly – all the retention info, churn, etc. It was fascinating stuff. Many of the ideas, pitfalls and problems we’ve taken on board as we work on other projects.

We’ve also rekindled a few older customers who have new projects. We’re looking into the UX and improve the workflow. These are great projects for us. They aren’t super sexy portfolio types, but they are difficult problems with unique and interesting solutions.

We’ve also have a few leads down-under on projects in Australia which we’ve been following-up on. These all take time to pan out. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. At some point we really should look into our success rate of winning projects and the time from proposal to closing of the deal or getting rejected.

Travel preparations for heading off to New York at the end of September for the O’Reilly Strata Conference for a half-day workshop on Data Visualisations and D3. We submitted the same talk to their San Jose event and the San Francisco Design Conference. So maybe a bit more traveling in 02017.

We’re also planning some internal training for companies in October. If that’s something you or your organisation is open too, let us know.

We’ve also been working on some prototypes for tech travel bags. When we travel, we’ve slowly been perfecting the whole EDC (Every Day Carry) for travel. The “What’s in your bag” has helped us to find great products that do as much as possible, taking as little space. Continuing along those lines, we now need a minimal bag to store it all in. EDC bags are great, but we’re not trying to survive an end-of-world scenario. We’re trying to keep track of house keys, passports, various cables and tickets. There is a lot of overlap, but we’re still seeing what’s unique for frequent fliers.

Finally, we’ve been continuing to move forward with our big top secret project. Not much more we can say about that right now. But no matter the outcome of our meetings, we should be able to show off some prototypes afterwards.