The latest issue of Fortune magazine features a nice profile on Charlotte as well as pieces of an interview with Skookum Digital Work’s co-founder Bryan Delaney. Why, just look at this cool map of all the business hotspots in Uptown Charlotte.
Listed on that inset map are a bunch of companies WHO OWN THEIR BUILDINGS and a wee 26 person (and growing) application and software design and development consultancy. Quite the honor.
In house engineers are our friends. Except for nacent startups, there’s hardly an execution that lives in a vacuum with only SDW Cast and Crew behind the wheels. Collaboration with client devs often happens with integrations, data dumps, new deployments, and even training.
There’s a cool project floating through the shop right now for a really successful business in NYC. Their team is small, and the customers they’ve been able to attract are impressive. Still, sustained growth means an overhaul. Scaling has become difficult. Legacy code unwieldy.
Luckily, we know a thing or seven about being discreet. There’s a hotel right across the street from SDW HQ. We have various disguises to cloak the 200′ walk. And our windows, have blinds. After all, Skookum Digital Works was started by two programmers with security level three (Top Secret) clearances from the DoD.
So, “Developer X” came to visit. We’ll be excited a year from now (yes, their competition is crazy fierce) when we can reveal some of the state secrets.
…but until then, it’s our job to go out there and whack them around.
Two makes it a ritual
Though Skookum Digital Works was founded in 2005, the (official) first annual golf trip didn’t happen until 2010. Funny enough, it came at my expense.
See, just a little more than a year ago, I was a client. I was the digital guy at an agency in New England, and the crew at SDW had built out a bunch of executions for me over a couple years.
And I totally screwed them.
The details won’t be interested to anyone outside of advertising, but on a Friday during a known, several-month timeline, I called in a nuke. I begged to have three of SDW’s finest crank over the weekend. They made it so I could make my client happy—I sent them a fat check.
Though we had a great relationship, Founder & VP Bryan needed some convincing.“Dude, If I do this for you, I’m actually going to shut down for a day next week to apologize to my team for ruining their weekend. Like, I’m literally going to take part of your rush money and bring everyone golfing.”
Over the phone, I laughed because I knew he was serious. Also, I was fine with this arrangement.
Second Time Around
SDW makes non-office company time a priority, so we plan group outings on the reg. (*See also: paintball.)
However, sometimes getting away as a group is very hard. We are teaming with startup businesses and custom software development, so our shop is slammed. Alas, a few us had to stay behind and tend projects at headquarters (better luck next time with the short straws Corey, Hunter, Chris S., Jon, Kenny, Rebecca).
And as you can see from the video, the 2nd Annual Skookum Digital Works Golf Outing was long on smiles and short on technique. We hope to share even more of these fun moments as our studio continues to grow. (And grow, and grow, and G R O W.)
Join the team, will ‘ya? Besides, how many other places can you play golf a week before Thanksgiving? (Charlotte FTW.)
We were lucky enough to have one of our very own Skookumites present a 5 minute “microtalk” at Ignite Charlotte 3.
Josh Oakhurst’s talk was entitled: “So You Like Your Spacephone? Things are About to Get Weird”. I think everyone’s favorite part of the presentation was one specific slide–it even garnered some love on Twitter.
Listen in as Josh tells us about some hot toaster on refrigerator action and why the Earth’s “neural network” is expanding like crazy with self-contained non-sentient beings connected to the intertubes and what you need to do to prepare (hint: tinfoil hats).
Cows Tweeting? Plants that kill other plants over the internet? I’ll let you discover it on your own in this 5 minutes microtalk where the slides auto-advance every 15 seconds.
If you’re like many smartphone users, you’ve wondered about the other side of the fence. And if you’re like only a few smartphone users —say, all 16 of us, you’ve wondered how the top smartphone platforms would handle the battlefield.
Wonder no longer.
Pretext
Blame the tinkerers. We couldn’t just go play paintball. No, no. Already been done. We needed it to be faster, more efficient, more intuitive, and decidecly more… geeky. There really wasn’t a whole lot of discussion about it. We decided we needed two native apps and it was off to the races to see who could get them done first (Mark Rickert won on both counts.)
One thing we pride ourselves on at Skookum Digital Works is displaying the quickest ability to go from idea to implementation. So, this was that. “Hey, that would be awesome!” Done. Made. Realized. Had.
And thoroughly enjoyed.
Development
Not enough mobile apps harness the true power of our phones. Especially for brands, you see a lot of re-skinned websites posing as apps, brochures masquerading as digital-must-haves, and general lack of creative or technical ability to build something truly useful for the end user.
Audio I/O. Video I/O. Accelerometor. Bluetooth. The touch screen. GPS.
In this case, especially GPS. Each mobile device sent data back to a web-service at regular intervals. The devices reported their date/time, longitude, latitude, GPS accuracy, and team (iPhone or Android). This data was stored in a MySQL database which grew to almost 16,000 records in the span of two and a half hours.
The location plotting after the fact was actually pretty straightforward. We wrote a PHP script that pulled each unique user’s device records out of the database, filtering on records with 40 foot accuracy or better (since GPS reporting can sometimes be wildly inaccurate till a signal is locked-on). This PHP script spit out some basic XML which we packaged into a Google Earth KML file. From there, Google Earth could plot everyone’s locations over time, as well as provide a birds-eye-view of the playing fields (literally) and our locations at any given time. And just by assigning image files to the user ID, we were able to plot the location of the days events, group by team, and also filter by specific users (so we could track the actual air-speed velocity of an unladen Don Post). We created not only a real-time CIA-spy-mission-map but also a short trail of everyone’s movements to give a sense of direction and speed. Like that hockey-glow-puck thing that nobody remembers.
On-field viewing of the map was only hindered by our crappy cell coverage at the playing field. Also, the live Google Maps webpage was kind of a hog on some of the slower phones (eherm, iPhone3 lame-o-s), so those players were less digitally effective (because projectile games that cause pain and body bruises can always use more expensive, breakable silicon, glass and plastic, right?)
Practical Applications
As if playing smartphone paintball wasn’t good enough purpose?
Group Game
Large outdoor venue. Concert. Festival. Players work either collectively or in teams to locate other players or teams. Team Blue only knows where Team Red is. Team Red only Team Green. Plants in crowd or actors tip off teams and provide clues. AR, QR code, social media, buzzword, buzzword, something something.
Transportation
Bus schedule/route tracking anyone? “Gee, was that last bus early or late? How long am I going to stand here? Oh look, the #7 is only four blocks away. Sweet.”
Logistics
Have a fleet? Need to see where all your trucks/vans/pizza delivery dudes are at any certain time? (Note to Pizza Dudes, this doesn’t have to be nefarious—maybe your team needs you pick up some more ice on your way back.) Want to manage your vehicles to compensate for traffic patterns, congestion, and time overruns?
Art
Want to drive out your name in cursive across the country?
Venue Managment
Want to see that Popcorn John is in Section 134 and Soda Jane is in the nosebleeds? For large outdoor venues, an execution like this would work great (and in case you needed it to work inside, we’ve thought of some non-GPS versions too).
Point Being…
All of those above possibilities have been available for years. But only now are sophisticated systems like this available for the marketer, consumer, small business, or local government. The hardware is no longer a barrier.
But your current mobile application “developer” might be.
