Our joint venture with Spiral

14 10 2009

Well, we have been very quiet over the past three months on our website and this blog. The reason is simple. We have been very very busy.

When I first started working in software – it was the golden age of web 1.0 bubble and I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Whilst I had intentions of working in film doing software for companies like industrial light and magic, I was drawn in to developing for the Internet instead.

My first job was with the Sydney office of Euro RSCG – the worlds number five advertising agency network – and it was a heck of a ride. Within a year I was appointed the technical director and I was very fortunate to work on amazing brands doing some amazing things. Several world firsts. It was a buzz.

In 2003 I started Pixolüt to focus more on complex business application development. It has been a completely different ride in the world of startups – I have developed four unique platforms for four very different companies since we started – as well as countless hours of consulting for other businesses.

Recently I started working with Scott Wenkart of Mobux fame – one of the businesses which we developed technology for over the years. Scott had started Spiral from his strong background in media. He has been quite visionary over the past few years in understanding inscentive based online experiences and more recently in the space of social media.

As Scott was working with more and more media agencies we found there was a dire need for the experience Pixolüt had already built up in developing the Mobux platform and social applications to enhance the brand experience on these social environments with brand pages and applications.

After some deliberation, Scott and I established Spiral Digital as a joint venture. It has been a joy to work together over the past few months, it reminds me of all the fun aspects of my early days in advertising – only this time I have the benefit of nearly 15 years of experience and a spectacular team backing it all up.

We will have the new Spiral Digital website up soon, however if you would like to contact the team at Spiral check them out at http://www.spiralglobal.com

Below is a show reel of some of our recent work.

Pages
Pringles Australia – www.facebook.com/pringlesaustralia
Red Bull – http://www.facebook.com/RedBullXRAY
Grinspoon – http://www.facebook.com/Grinspoon?v=app_138339362688
Vanessa Amorosi – http://www.facebook.com/VanessaAmorosi?v=app_142539181926

Apps
Pringles – http://apps.facebook.com/pringleskingcanparty/
Smirnoff Champion’s Pass – http://apps.facebook.com/championspass/
Red Bull – http://apps.facebook.com/redbull-xray/
Nike+ – http://apps.facebook.com/nikeplushumanrace/
Lode Busy Summer – http://www.facebook.com/lode
Orcon Iggy Live – http://www.facebook.com/Orcon
Mobux SMS – http://apps.facebook.com/mobuxsms/page


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : pixolut

Designing Applications for Social Traction

31 08 2009


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Industry Opinion

iTOK Captures “Top 25 Under 5″ Award for Fastest Growing Companies

11 08 2009

Leading Remote Computer Service Company Recognized as one of the Fastest Growing Companies in Utah

Lindon, UT (PRWEB) July 22, 2009 — iTOK announced today that they have received the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum’s “Top 25 Under Five” award. The “Top 25 Under Five” award recognizes the 25 fastest growing companies in the region that have been in business less than 5 years.

“iTOK is the leader in remote technical support because we focused on our core business,” said Seth Bailey, iTOK’s co-founder & CEO. “Our first goal was to get our service model right so we could grow profitably. Now we can scale to meet the needs of our large, national customers.”

The founders started iTOK in late 2004 to provide remote computer help and maintenance to customers at their homes or home offices right through the Internet. Their flagship PC Care membership service provides quarterly maintenance to keep computers running smooth and clean, giving their members peace of mind. iTOK services their members directly or through partnerships with some of the largest Internet service providers in the nation.

“This is a tough economic climate for all businesses, right now, especially start-ups,” said UVEF 2009 chairman Roger Andrus. “These Top 25 winners overcame great odds by growing their revenues and creating jobs. They represent the spirit of entrepreneurship that will serve this state well.”

About iTOK:
iTOK is the leading provider of US-based remote technical support for home and home-based business computers. Since 2004, iTOK has been building a team of trained, fluent English-speaking support representatives based in Utah that eliminates the frustration of working with the cheaper foreign-based computer service companies. With the click of a mouse, a user can immediately connect with a service representative, get help on a technical problem and schedule routine maintenance, all while working with someone who knows their computer, their issue history and their language. iTOK provides service to thousands of customers directly and through major broadband service providers.

For more information about iTOK, please visit www.itokhelp.com.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Industry Opinion, iTOK

We’re Hiring Again!

22 07 2009

At Pixolüt Industries we write software. We do it for fortune 500 corporations and seedling start-ups in Australia, Europe and the United States. We primarily develop interactive web based applications for global advertising clients. A lot of our projects are bleeding edge applications on Facebook and other social platforms. Every day is a new adventure!

We need a very bright and motivated developer for a full time role. You get to work on some of our key projects – you get to learn and use cutting edge technologies in your day to day role.

On top of your regular development you get time to experiment and research as well as contribute to open source projects. You will be working with a team of excellent developers and you will be provided mentoring opportunities and training as well as learn industry best practices. We really want people who want to learn as an ongoing process and love to write code – we don’t expect you to have huge amounts of .Net experience, we would rather you just be yourself, learn as you go and be part of our team.

Working at Pixolüt you will be in a very casual environment in our lab located in Sydney’s south. Definitely no suits or ties necessary. Its near the beach and we encourage a life/work balance – so you can take time to enjoy it… There is no peak hour traffic ever, its just a short walk to the train station and there is free all day parking too. On average its a 30 minute commute from the city.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Please provide a concise resume in .DOC or .PDF format. Ensure your resume has evidence of education history and skills. To be eligible to apply for this position you must have an appropriate Australian or New Zealand work visa.

Applications should be sent to jobs@pixolut.com


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Jobs, pixolut

BizBlox 1.7.2 Release

10 07 2009

The latest update to BizBlox has been released today. This update has fixes for unicode support and a small issue with transaction management.

  • BizBlox used to use the local database collation settings for handling content, however this update forces unicode coalescence to comply with the way .Net handles strings (all unicode!) and makes dealing with multilingual content a no-brainer.
  • Failed transactions will no longer throw ‘null reference exception’.

Get the latest release from http://www.pixolut.com/bizblox


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : BizBlox, Open Source, Software Development

jQuery AJAX form serialization example

25 05 2009

By Stephen Trembath

Just a quick example of using jquery to submit form data without a postback which may (or may not!) be of interest…

It is useful in this case because the page is very big (the page to process a lead/ticket), and we want to avoid doing post-backs wherever possible. It finds all elements in the pnlChecklist panel which have an attribute named ‘metaid’, e.g. <asp:DropdownList runat=”Server” metaid=”Spyware risk” />. It submits the data as a serialized string (metaid1=value1&metaid2=value2) to a very basic code-behind page, which splits and saves the data, and then returns a script for evaluation on the client-side. It’s pretty heavily snipped to make it a little clearer.

Client-side:

<a href="javascript:;" onclick="DoAudit();">Send System Audit to Customer</a>

function DoAudit() {
            var id = $('#<%=Me.hiddenSupportRequestID.ClientID%>').val();
            var serialized = '';
            $('#<%=Me.pnlChecklist.ClientID%> [metaid]').each(
            function() {                 
               var attrib = $(this).attr("metaid");
               serialized += attrib + "=" + $(this).val() + "&";
            }
            );
            $.get(ajaxUrl, { method: 'getaudit', supportrequestid: id, data: serialized }, function(data) {
                // Handle the response
                eval(data);
            });
            return false;
        }

Server-side:


        SecureSession.ValidateOrRedirect()
        Select Case Request.QueryString("method")
            Case "getaudit"
                        Dim data As String = Request.Params.Get("data")
                        Dim htData As Hashtable = AjaxUtils.SplitSerializedPostData(data)
                        ......
                End Select
                Dim script As String = "alert('Test');"
                Response.Write(script)
       End Select

Comments : 1 Comment »

Categories : iTOK

BizBlox 1.7: New fundamentals

6 04 2009

The BizBlox OR/M API has been in development for 5 years and is actively used in many commercial enterprise and light weight applications around the globe. The key premise of BizBlox has always been to keep databases simple. NO MAPPING, no complexity, no scripts. Its funny that layers on top of nHibernate like Fluent and even the Microsoft Linq for SQL have been trying to get this right over the last year or so – but BizBlox did it this way from the beginning. Naming parity; where classes names should match table names; property names should match column names makes perfect sense for a lot of applications and the complexities which a lot of object relational mappers introduce makes life hard for developers; both initially and especially further down the track in maintenance. Also, removing the need for special mapping scripts or weird GUI mapping tools. Just export your SQL from the enterprise manager/management studio and you’re done. Developers can just concentrate on developing business logic.

Pixoüt have just released BizBlox 1.7 on Google Code. The new version delivers greatly increased performance and flexibility, with major improvements to the DataObject caching algorithm, the addition of column attributes to the DataObject class, and the ability to handle a greater range of data types.
BizBlox 1.7 now caches information about the structure of a DataObject, including properties and column information. This information was previously loaded using reflection on every Load() and Save() of a DataObject, but it is now cached in a DOInfo object the first time an instance of that DataObject is created. While there is a minor performance penalty on the very first load of an instance of the type in the App Domain, subsequent performance will be improved as there is no locking or reflection on any object.

BizBlox 1.7 also introduces column attributes in DataObjects, including PrimaryKey(), Persists() and Identity() attributes. The PrimaryKey() attribute provides flexibility in selecting the UID column for the DataObject. The Persists() attribute allows the addition of custom properties to a class that are not saved to the database. The Identity() attribute allows the use of a SQL Server Identity (auto-incrementing) column, by excluding that column from an insert/update.

You can find out more about BizBlox by going to the BizBlox home page. BizBlox is an open source database mapping framework developed by Pixolüt Industries.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : BizBlox, Open Source, pixolut

Open letter to Senator Conroy

26 03 2009

This blog has never been political, however I am irate that one stubborn senator who clearly does not represent the will of the general public, or even any minority group – can continue to waste vast amounts of our money. Every day this ridiculous exploration continues costs Australians hundreds of thousands of dollars.

This is just another slap in the face after the last government launched their multi million ($185,000,000) dollar client side filtering software which was not only broken by a child the week it was released – today has shown that the take up rate for the software was abysmal and further – the whole thing was fundamentally flawed (read more).

When can the government FINALLY realize it is NOT in the IT business. Market forces exist for a reason – if you want to find a brilliant internet filter which parents can use – put it out to tender for existing vendors who have years of expertise in the space. Spend the money on public education and public awareness – which is what the government SHOULD be doing with our money. Heaven forbid you actually try to catch online criminals by funding the federal police appropriately.

Ultimately parents have the responsibility to protect their children and there are many free and paid products which do a spectacular job such as OpenDNS (www.opendns.com)…

As a citizen, taxpayer and parent I am FURIOUS!


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Industry Opinion, pearls of wisdom

Pixolut: HUGE REBRANDING

25 03 2009

www.pixolut.comPixolüt Industries is proud to present their new website with a great new visual style and branding – building on the theme of the second generation Pixolüt logo launched in 2003 with a fresh new photographic style.We have created the new site to better convey the areas of the business and the values and essence of our brand.

Visit the new site today and please let me know what you think.

You can still get the ‘flat 2009′ style logo at our store for the next month or so until we launch the new branding cloting and accessories.


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : pixolut

Why we moved to Google Code

29 12 2008

We have been using SourceForge for a long, long time hosting all our Open Source projects. It was a tough decision to move away from SourceForge, however as our teams and projects grew – and as time went on – we felt SourceForge had lost touch with some of the fundamentals of software development for the sake of monetization.

Over 2008 I saw SourceForge move towards a services based model to attempt to support the projects which reside on it. In and of itself this is a great idea, however the real problem was that the world of web based applications had rocketed ahead whilst the core platform of SourceForge felt like it lagged behind.

Google Code was launched way back in August 2006 and has adopted the typical Google approach to its developer platform. This approach means that adding content, code and downloads is super simple and whilst the Issue Tracker in SourceForge was turned off for all our projects since it was so cumbersome, the Google Code Issue Tracker is just a joy to work with.

Overall, we feel that the impact on development and team collaboration will be vastly improved by making the move.

The Pixolüt Industries projects on Google Code are:

BizBlox

PreNIS

xReplace


Comments : Leave a Comment »

Categories : Google, Industry Opinion, Open Source, Software Development

« Previous Entries