News from July 2009
Sweet Georgia Brown!
July 31, 2009
You may have heard of a little something called Twitter. The other day, Luke discovered that if we went to Flirt Cupcakes on Whyte Ave (here in Edmonton) and said ”Sweet Georgia Brown” we’d get free cupcakes. So we did.
Apologies to Adrian, who got shafted in the this is the Lift crew intro at the 0:17 mark ;)
In the middle looking out
July 24, 2009
Business at Lift has been good lately. We’ve been diversifying our client base and taking on all sorts of new and interesting projects. (We really should update our portfolio sometime soon.)
However, by putting our heads down to get a bunch of projects done, we may be letting other (and perhaps better) opportunities slip past us. It’s not that we aren’t trying to make good choices but sometimes the best choice right now is not the best choice in the long run.
For example, we recently had to review one of our projects with a senior IT guy (former business owner with a lot of technical skills too) and he came up with a couple brilliant suggestions. We had been so busy building the software for ourselves and developing our own sales channels that we completely forgot that we could approach other companies to be partners. In all honestly, finding partners can be difficult work and most of the time partnerships fail or at least don’t work out for at least one of the parties. Despite that a partner that might bring in a lot of business, even if it means more work for us now, would be well worth it. We should be investigating this sort of thing more.
It’s hard not to get buried under a mountain of work. It’s even harder to keep your eyes open when you are.
Where is summer going!?
July 21, 2009
Especially for those of us who live in the North, summer goes by in a flash. So, what have we been up to for the past couple of Months? (Obviously not writing blog articles.)
It’s been a busy summer at lift as we’ve completed a number of projects and started a few more. Some of the notable upcoming works include:
AppBoy
AppBoy is a social community for mobile app lovers and app store in one. It doesn’t discriminate as all the major platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android and soon Pre) can be viewed, rated and purchased from one place. Users will also be able to post ideas for apps that the community can vote on in hopes of winning cash prizes. Sign up here to be notified when the public beta launches.
Alberta Union of Provincial Employees
The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees is Alberta’s largest union with over 72,000 individuals. We were recently awarded the contract to redesign the organization’s websites into one full-featured web presence. The site will be launched on the Enterprise version of our Inflight CMS. Stay tuned… we hope to launch before the end of November.
Strathcona County
Through the month of June and July, we’ve been working with the communications department of Strathcona County crafting a new user experience and look and feel for the county’s upcoming site overhaul. Although an arduous task, we’ve greatly enjoyed the experience and challenges. Initial designs will be complete in the next couple of weeks as we prepare to pass of templates to the team responsible for CMS integration.
TrekStorm
TrekStorm will seek to make travel planning more interesting as it brings together experiences from around the globe. I’ll keep most of the details as a surprise for now, but I can say that we’re really excited about this concept and the way the design is turning out. Start jotting down your summer travel experiences and plan to share them on TrekStorm this fall.
Parade
As always, we continue to dive deep into our subscription product for photographers. This summer we’ve been designing new features, templates and additions. We’ve also been exploring some new technologies for storing and delivering data. This summer’s improvements will produce a faster, more efficient Parade for our growing base of users. Check out plans and pricing here
That’s been some of the highlights of our summer. What have you been up to?