We’ve had an incredibly busy 4 weeks, and are again looking to add a developer to our team, either temporarily or permanently. More details to follow but feel free to send us any cv’s on jobs@athium.com

We’re particularly interested in any recent or soon to be graduates in Computer Science, Engineering, maths or the sciences with programming experience. We’re also interested in a student looking for a summer placement, especially from Warwick University.

Drop us an email if you’d like to talk about any of the opportunities.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been having a number of conversations with Dr Jay Bal (WMG, the University of Warwick) and members of his team about the concepts around Smart Cities, and how they could be applied in other areas.

One of the government’s targets to improve the economy appears to be for SME’s to drive growth, both at home and by exporting. In order to support this they’re attempting to use a variety of tools with mixed success from Business Improvement Districts and Local Enterprise Partnerships to things like the Small Business Research Initiative and the National Loan Guarantee Scheme.

Some of this is also being passed down to counties. I’ve spent a lot of time working with county councils recently and I’ve been looking at whether this thinking could help a county gain a competitive advantage. I’ve come to the conclusion that if done properly then it undoubtedly could, by helping a county to improve the quality of life of their citizens, making the county more attractive to businesses and improving the participation of citizens in local government. In this post I’m going to introduce the idea of a business cloud (not mine!) and put a spin on it for a council.

Dr Bal has produced some interesting work on city clouds (for our purposes a “regional cloud”) that can drive economic growth by supporting small and medium sized enterprises. He’s also got real experience in this area, having built and run the West Midlands Collaborative Commerce Marketplace.

Dr Bal’s research shows that a city cloud can deliver significant benefits. According to Dr Bal a city business cloud has the following effects:

• Visibility to the world increases business opportunities (research shows 15% or more)
• Entrepreneurship success rate increases
• Local Collaboration increases through a common set of business apps

Copyright Dr Jay Bal 2011

• Operating costs are lowered, capital costs can be switched to revenue costs

Dr Bal’s research shows that using publicly available tools an SME could access the basic cloud services that he suggests they could benefit from for $45 – $60 per user per month. SME’s adoption of cloud services can be seen in the following graphic:

Copyright Dr Jay Bal 2011

As with many of these terms you can get bogged down in definitions when you’re talking about smart cities, especially as the term is used in different ways in different places. In practice, discussions about smart cities are talking about the intellectual and social capital of a city as well as the physical infrastructure. In other words; what knowledge is available, how good it is, and how well organisations and people work together to maximise these resources. Smart cities are often measured in six areas:

• The environment and natural resources available
• The participation of citizens in governance
• The quality of life
• The transport and ICT infrastructure
• The economy and it’s competitiveness
• The people – the “smart” human capital

A basic definition from Wikipedia is,

“A city can be defined as “smart” when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic development and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance.”

There has been a lot of work done recently by policy groups and by leading research groups on the potential benefits that could arise from smart cities. That isn’t my focus here.

In thinking about the potential for this concept, I’m interested in the potential for  “smart regions” as well as cities. The aim of many of these “smart regions” would be to deliver more for less. In other words to leverage better infrastructure and services to produce a better environment for businesses and citizens.

If we accept that the research is correct the question is how could this best benefit our economy? It has been shown that geographical regions (be they cities or not) are in the best position to create the environment for a smart city? Could we therefore have a smart county?

Going back to the initial measures for a smart city it’s very clear that all of those could apply to a county, including active local government. The question then becomes what could a county do to become a “smart county” and gain a competitive advantage and create a better environment for businesses and citizens? I’ll talk about things from a governance and engagement perspective in a future post, but here I’m going to focus on the business environment.

A county council currently has the basic infrastructure, from roads to internet access, and already has tools to maintain, improve and promote that infrastructure. What is to stop a council from developing and providing a service to businesses located in their county? Council’s often already have significant web presences, hardware and software, and even if this is often more publication that interaction, they’re considered a trusted source of information and services.

A county council could either procure or develop their own system in house. Once this had been done in one council then that could be rolled out to other councils who were interested in joining, especially with the regional groups that are often strong in some regions. This system would enable a council to provide a clear advantage to businesses that operated in their region.

I’ll be developing this idea in upcoming posts.

We use a variety of online and offline tools to help manage and deliver our projects. The way that we work requires us to be able to talk to our own team members, whether they’re in the office or not, and our clients wherever they’re based geographically. As our clients range from being in the same building as us to the other side of the world (exactly 12 hours different) we have to be able to be able to do all of our work remotely if necessary. It’s not practical for us to jump on a plane and fly for over 24 hours for a project review meeting!

We therefore use a mix of software tools, and a whiteboard, to manage the projects and to communicate with our clients.

The exact approach that we take depends firstly on the complexity of the project and the length of time over which we intend to develop it. A 1 man project lasting a day has much less rigorous planning requirements than a 2 man-year, 6 month project being delivered across multiple countries.

No matter how long the project, two things do remain constant. It goes into our internal project management tool, with an initial estimate of time and resources, and it goes on the whiteboard (despite a large amount of geekery in our office you’d be astonished how often we end up standing in front of the whiteboard all with a pen in our hands, I apparently favour purple). What happens there depends on the project.

A large project could now require some detailed planning and estimating. We normally do this in Merlin, and convert it into Project if it’s required. Although at this early stage there’s a lot of flexibility in our work, and this flexibility carries on throughout the process, we need some initial estimates to give clients and ourselves some idea of how long a project will take, what we can deliver and how much it will cost. Simpler projects use simpler tools, but the basic premise is the same.

The key to this we find is the next stage. Once you’ve got your project plan, agreed it and begun development, it’s vital that there is regular and open communication about what’s going on and why. We use a number of tools to communicate, from our own systems to Skype and the telephone, but we like to talk around 2 single page documents, even for the most complex of plans.

The first document is a single page overview of where we are in the high level project plan and the current most important risks facing the project. The second is a single page listing what’s happened since the previous meeting, key risks (again), next actions for ourselves, next actions for our clients, and any other issues.

Clear communication, supported by two very simple documents, are the key to managing all of our projects.

How do you manage your projects? And what applications, online or off, do you find most useful?

So today I’ve started looking into redesigning our website, which let’s face it after 6 years of trusty service is long overdue!

The world wide web has moved forward a very, very, very, very, long way since our existing site was first published and having spent the morning trawling through a seemingly endless list of sites I have to admit that some of the examples of innovation and superb design out there today are simply genius.

One of my favourites is – http://www.soleilnoir.net/believein/#/end – because the use of strong colours and simple layout makes the site a genuine joy to utilise.  The key messages come across without filling the page up with unnecessary blurb or trying to be too clever. Unfortunately this scrolling concept doesn’t match our requirements but there is no denying that it’s a fun and impressive looking site that a lot of organisations would do well to heed lessons from.

I have to mention Alex’s suggestion of – http://www.bestradio.gr – for their stunning looking site. I don’t want to give too much away here but instead simply implore you to take a look and play around on the site even if you don’t like the music, which is automatically piped through the site, a pretty clever trick in itself. Again, this incredible feature isn’t of much use for our requirements but it had everyone in the office stunned, and yes my chin may have hit the desk.

This website – http://www.the-studio.co.il/ – may not initially look the most impressive but the simplicity of layout, easy of use, and visually pleasing design has not happened by accident. The ste-by-step concept is not exactly ground breaking but this example has simplified it down to the extent where less is definitely a whole lot more! Whilst the entire concept doesn’t quite match up to our needs I will be taking several lessons away with me; keep it simple, keep it logical, and remove anything that doesn’t serve a clear purpose.

As for – http://www.ok-studios.de/home/ – I could easily write an entire blog just about this site. It is simply stunning. It really is. With a similar scrolling theme as SoleilNoir and eye catching images not only is it visually stunning, but with the inclusion of the lateral scroll bar this website genuinely has dimension to it. Furthermore, this site is functional in that it provides enough information to point users in the right direction, and incorporates a transparent heading bar which stays at the top of your browser as you scroll down. Again, not a new idea but the combination of all the ideas utilised provides an example of how an organisation’s website can be visually stunning, whilst providing content and simple navigation.

Finally, a quick mention to XPrimeGroupe for their ‘social wall’ concept – http://www.xprimegroupe.com/social-wall – which neatly brings together their individual online activities into a smart looking web presence. So there you have it, the inspiration behind our new look website will come from bicycle companies in Germany, a book shop and many more, and with that it’s time for me to sign off and get busy designing our new lay-out which will hopefully rival the above for quality, and do justice to the exceptional services we provide.

We’ve recently undergone a recruitment process. For the first time since we started Athium we have had to recruit for a position without knowing the person that we wanted to bring in.

After building up our products over the last couple of years we took on some exciting projects in the second half of last year. We therefore decided that we needed to hire at least one new team member.

We started this process the same way we often do when we’re not 100% sure of the best way to do something. I headed up to the university for a chat with Dr Mark Swift, head of SME programmes at the Digital Lab at WMG. Over lunch we talked about a few different ways of finding the right person.

After that lunch, and another one (not on the same day!) with Jay Bal and Radu Sora we decided that we could look to approach this in one of two ways. We could either look to immediately hire a permanent employee, or we could look to work with someone on a temporary basis and then look to make it permament if things worked out.

Deciding to hire a permanent employee we knew nothing about (we’d already tried our networks), especially in December or January appeared as if it would be a very difficult task, especially as the pool of graduates is much larger in the summer. We also decided that this would be quite a long task, Making sure that the person we hired had the right skills, the right personality and would fit into our team would be difficult.

One interesting post on this process can be found by Lauren Drell at Mashable, including an infographic from General Assembly .

We therefore decided to try and hire a temporary employee who we could look at making full time and permanent if everything worked out. The first approach we tried was to contact the university careers service, engineering and computer science departments and ask them if they new anyone or could recommend anyone we could approach. We didn’t get much interest so decided on a second approach.

I contacted Jason Haygarth at Unitemps and asked if they had any potential candidates that they could send through. After three or four rounds of CV’s we’d narrowed the field of potential candidates to three that we wanted to interview.

I set aside a couple of hours for each interview, spending 60 – 90 minutes with each of the three candidates and then spending 30 minutes or so making some notes. It was apparent that all three had the technical skills, but we selected Alex to join the team, initially on a part time basis.

Doing it this way gave us the opportunity to evaluate his skills in a more realistic environment. This clearly worked out for us as after only two weeks we asked Alex to move up to full time. This is an approach that we would take again, especially if we wanted someone quickly and didn’t have time to go through a full evaluation.

If you’re interested in talking to us about jobs then please drop us an email on jobs@athium.com

I was very interested to see the rapid scaling of Draw Something in the last few weeks. From the numbers that are currently circulating it appears as if the app was downloaded 35 million times in a seven week period, with virtually all of those downloads occurring in the last 3 weeks of use (Never mind that the company that produced it OMGPOP increased in value from very little to $210 million in the same time frame!).

Not all of the information is available on the technical architecture of Draw Something but it is known that they’re hosted in the cloud (but not Amazon), and use a Couchbase NoSQL cluster. To handle the more than one billion pictures (currently around 3,000 per second) that have been created this cluster was reconfigured with the help of Couchbase themselves (who also count Zynga amongst their partners) to handle tens of thousands of operations per second and several terabytes of data.

Similar things have been seen in the past, from Animoto to Pulse, and demonstrate the ability of a well designed application hosted in the cloud to scale horizontally and to cope with increasing demand with no downtime. As customers become more demanding, and applications and web sites can become overnight sensations then it’s vital that applications are able to cope with viral trends and the growth that could come their way. It’s not possible to do this in a cost efficient manner without using a cloud setup. The speed at which a product, especially an entertainment mobile phone app, can go from launch to incredible success has also shortened considerably (think of AngryBirds as well as Draw Something).  Do you remember the old days (and I use the term very loosely) when popular new websites often used to collapse under the load (not so old if you’re selling Olympic tickets). A good technical architecture and appropriate plan should ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

One of the things that has little coverage in all of this is Couchbase, a company formed only last year from a merger of two of the early NoSQL startups, CouchOne and Membase. Since they merged they’ve produced an integrated product that combined MemBase’s Server key-value store, CouchDB’s document database and UnQL. It’s UnQL that is actually the most interesting aspect of this, only released in July last year it was developed by Richard Hipp (creator of SQLite) and Damien Katz (creator of CouchDB) to attempt to provide a standardised data definition and manipulation language for NoSQL. Although it is only early days, if this does mature and gain widespread adoption then it will have a significant impact on this area.

It’s clear that Couchbase, and their products, has been a significant reason that Draw Something, as well as other customers have been able to scale so quickly and effectively.

However, lots of software companies, from Google to 37 Signals, prefer the soft launch, often limited to invitees in the first instance. This is now no longer a technical necessity. It might still be desirable from a business perspective, allowing you to tune your product before pushing it out to the world, but your architecture should let you launch to everyone immediately.

After a few years without anything more than a cosmetic change we’ve decided to have a complete overhaul of our website. It’s been a year since we last made any changes to the look, and around 3 years since we did anything more significant.

In those 3 years we’ve made a number of changes to our systems and now use virtually all of our own tools to run our systems and projects. We made a conscious choice a few years ago to concentrate on developing our own systems and focused on that for a couple of years. Now, often the first thing that we do when setting up a project is to give a client access to one of our systems to manage and track the project. We’re now going to look at providing a more intuitive, integrated experience, where all of our services are offered through our own web site.

Our technical infrastructure also needs to change. Our own website was the first thing that we built on EC2, over 5 years ago now. Although we’ve continued to update the system it has still followed that original architecture. In the five years since the landscape and tools available to us have changed significantly and we’re planning on taking advantage of that.

This project therefore has two aims. Firstly, we want to improve our website. From a user perspective we’re going to increase the amount of information we make available, improve the amount of content and the look. On top of that we’re planning on improving the technical architecture and making the site easier to use on tablets and mobile phones.

Secondly, we want to integrate all of our systems in one place. We’re very proud of the supplementary services that we provide to our clients and the fact that we have long term relationships with them. We want to make it easier for clients to access that information. We also often use a very iterative approach to working with our clients. This means that we have a lot of communication during the development process and we’re planning on doing that through the new site.

Finally, we’ve got several products that we developed over the last couple of years, including our imoSports line, that are available immediately either as a service or a product. We want to make interactive demonstrations of those products part of the site too.

This week Liam is going to start putting together a strategy for developing the new site. He’s going to spend a few days thinking about it, looking at the best that’s currently out there and what we can do now and in the future. We want to build this for the future as well as now, so are going to try to stretch the boundaries in some areas, especially in the members area.

I hope you’ll follow us over the next few months as we put this together.

Welcome to our new blog. This is going to replace our previous, infrequently (very) used one, and is the first step in the update of our web site.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to be updating the whole of the website, and will be putting several posts live.