It was a killer last three weeks. A few bank holidays and a bunch of things outside of work have taken us all away from any major new developments. There are still a few interesting things we can talk about that we did manage to accomplish over these weeknotes!
Week #376
We met with the great folks at SKÝ about working together on the upcoming Material Conference. We also continued to work on a few things for our survey clients, minor tweaks to the questionnaire before they are back on the road. We also continued to work on the TextStats app, mainly to get landscape and iPad support using the DetailView Controller.
On the Friday and Saturday the Smart City department of Reykjavik had a small hack-a-thon. We went to both show our faces and add support, but to also begin to think about an API for location tracking. Building a simple Location Broker for internet of things objects; Spimes. We managed to get pretty far on our simple little app. It works, without any layers of user accounts, but you can attach location data to an object via an API.
Week #377
May 1st is May Day, a public holiday in Iceland. Then the rest of the week was spent out of the office. We intended to get more done, but sometimes life throws you a curve and you just put your tools down and focus on other things for a while.
We were still on call and did manage to get yet another survey up and running. That’s less of a reflection of our speed and skills and more a pat on the back for our years of building a set of tools to make it very easy to deploy a whole new collection survey server into the cloud. Then for other non-developer team members to complete the setup with customer specifics like the survey questions and importing of lists. It is a great feeling to be able to have a deploy that works so well.
Week #378
This week had another public holidays, Ascension Thursday. Which makes the week a bit more chopped-up. We did manage to get back on top of emails, news and tasks after last weeks absence.
Next week, we have a few pitches for projects on the West Coast and our contribution is all the numbers we’ve been scraping over the last few years. We re-ran our reports to gather the data into something more usable. It is vague, but when you go into investor meetings and say we’ll make $X no one believes you. But if you go in and say the current options are making $X, we can certainly do better. Then they start to listen. Starting from factual data really helps your revenue and projections. They know it isn’t something you pulled out of thin air.
We also met with the EU Grant team about our application. It seems that we were even closer to getting funded than we thought. The downside is that we could submit the exact same application and get a lower score. It really depends on the random judges we get assigned, how they are feeling that day, etc. So we met to refine our text based on the comments and prepare to submit it again in a few weeks.
Internal Notes
When it rains, it pours. We’ve focused mostly on internal projects recently. A few app ideas, two or three grant applications for internal ideas. But we do still take on external projects. At the moment we have several both waiting to start, but also a few that ended and we are chasing-up invoices for.
We’re pretty good when it comes to getting paid. This week we finished our VSK (Value Added Tax) report for the last two months and all the invoices we sent out have been paid.
But in week #378, we were contacted by (at least 3) companies to pick-up on old projects. More writing for Salary Surveys for O’Reilly in the coming weeks and a new map project coming. Then an old map project was finally published and we can invoice for that, a really, really old project which sort of just lingered has now been closed, so that needs invoicing, and some consulting around surveys and data collection also warrants an invoice, but more work is coming too.