Randomness in ads

February 22nd, 2010 • Comments Off Blog, Web
Tags: ads, humour, Web, web 2.0

Sometimes I don’t get the criteria for an add to appear in a video. Dunno…

On a side note, I’ve been swarmed with work and not able to do any decent posts in the last days. I’ve been enjoying working at the Cowork Lisboa space very much. Lot’s of energy, great people and good environment. Best decision made in the start of this year.

New Think Orange website and projects

January 25th, 2009 • 2 comments Blog, Web
Tags: rails, ruby, thinkorange, web 2.0

The new year started with new projects and I’ve been real busy at Think Orange trying to adapt my life from all the pros and cons of being part of a startup, but that’s a post for another time.  The new website is online and I’m really proud and happy about the end result.

I think 2009 will be a difficult year but at the same time there’s lot of opportunities and space to grow.

We’ve also been working on rebuilding and preparing the app we started at the Codebits 2008  coding marathon into production. We haven’t decided on a name yet, so for now it’s “Recibos Verdes”, the project consists on a web app for portuguese independent workers to manage their finances online. The project is in alpha stage but I’m happy with the features and value we’re putting into it.

I’ve uploaded some of the screenshots to Flickr and I hope to have more news soon.

Codebits 08 recap

November 20th, 2008 • 2 comments Blog, Programming, Web
Tags: bookworms, codebits, rails, ruby, think orange, web 2.0

Last weekend, the LX Factory in Alcantâra was stage to SAPO CodeBits 08, a 24 hours programming contest for the web, with an aditional full day and morning of workshops to learn new stuff.

More intense and bigger than last year, the event had areas where you could play with machinery, RFID technology, OpenMoko’s, make videos or just invent something for the web and so there was something out there to please anyone.

My project for last year was Bookworms, a small web app where you could add books from Amazon to your personal collection and share them with your peers which appeared on the map (you could give your address which was geocoded) .

One year later and with the support of SAPO, Bookworms was presented live (scary!) at the event as a social book discovering website and now available as a beta version. The presentation went very well I think, complete with nonsense slides and chinese proverbs.

I was overwhelmed by the people’s reception and fantastic feedback received in the last days, I didn’t have the chance to include everything I wanted in the launch version but in the next weeks there’s going to be new improvements.

This was also a opportunity to unveil Think Orange – my very own startup (weee!) – which will be focusing on creating web products that drive social interaction and make you smile. I’ll be sure to give you more news on this soon. :)

Finally, the project for this year’s Codebits was a web application for portuguese freelancers to calculate and help with taxes (Recibos Verdes), you could log individual receipts, calculate how much you expect to pay by the end of the year and to complement there was also a small statistics area, all in about 14 hours I think. Done with Ruby on Rails and MySQL.

We didn’t win but we expect to launch it “soon” as an online service. (we need suggestions for the name!)

And that was it, a great experience once again. I ended the week feeling very very tired but optimistic for the future.

Once again, amazing illustrations by Bauke Schildt.

SHiFT 08 recap

October 21st, 2008 • Comments Off Blog, Events, Other, Web, design
Tags: conference, shift08, web 2.0

I’m finally at post-SHiFT mode and resting my batteries from all the information, noise, action from last week.

It was all very stressfull, for most of the time I was busy with action going on all the time (a request here, a request there) and I sure wasn’t aware at the beginning of the work involved in organizing something like this… but I think in the end everything went well, the team did a very good job and most people had fun or learned something from this conference.

There’s a bunch of things I want to do with the site, automate more stuff, make the registration independent from the site, remove bugs from some places and probably turn it into some kind of CMS for Conference Websites or base template.

For those who couldn’t attend the conference or a particular session, it seems Slideshare has some of the SHIFT 08 presentations online. But I’m sure they’ll be on the SHiFT site soon.

There’s also a lot of photos going around on Flickr and I’ve took a bunch of them too if you’re interested, check my Flickr Set.  In the meanwhile I’ve returned to my Ruby on Rails projects. I’ll probably post a interesting tutorial in the next few days.

Many thanks to my fellow coleages and to the guest illustrators – Lucy Pepper and Bauke Schildt – for their amazing work. See you on SHiFT 09.