Dub5 is hiring!

Are you a post-secondary student in Edmonton looking to make some extra money over the summer? Are you well connected and involved at the U of A, NAIT or MacEwan College? Are you an outgoing person keen on meeting new people? Does the notion of working at an energetic startup company sound awesome to you? Then you could be dub5′s campus Touchpoint Coordinator!

We’re demoing tonight!

I’ve been invited this evening to the Social Web Meetup at NAIT to demo the dub5 core product. This will be a great opportunity to show off some of the newer features (including the dub5 group functions) and describe some of the upcoming features we’re looking to implement for the U of A SU’s Advocacy department, U of A Tutoring, med student scheduling, and a few other neat little functions we have coming down the pipe.

If you’re interested in coming, point your browser the Social Web Meetup page and RSVP. You can also watch a livestream of the demo at www.fusedlogic.com.

And now that we’ve moved forward on a few things and are smoothing out our workflow, look for the return of weekly blog posts. It’s an exciting period of growth for out little company, and we’re eager to share our grand vision and current projects with you.

<3 bingofuel
on behalf of the dub5 team of cyborgs.

Dub5 at MacEwan Blogcamp

The people at Edmonton-based Fused Logic invited dub5 to participate in the forthcoming MacEwan Blogcamp. We happily accepted.

Group it. Group it real good

After a tremendous development effort, we’re happy to announce that we’ve released our basic groupware functionality.

SMS integration FTW!

I was at a meeting with the director of the U of A Students’ Union‘s Advocacy Department last night, discussing ways for Advocacy to use dub5 to schedule work, develop metrics, and do on-the-fly meeting changes. It was a terrific sit-down, and I’d like to thank Chris for taking the time to chat with me, and for his enthusiasm and awesome ideas as well.

While we were sitting there eating our dinner, I received an email from Jeffu, dub5′s resident Programmer-in-Chief™. It was some of the best news I’d read in a long time.

Soon to come: group functionality

The dub5 founding team met briefly last night to discuss impending victories. In particular, Jeffu introduced us to the Group Functionality we’ll be rolling out in the next few weeks. (See screenshots after the jump.)

The tubes swallowed my post

Hey dub5 stalwarts. I was typing up a blog just now and hit the old publish button, and all but the first sentence vanished. Grr! It was a gooder, too: a tale of our first office, in the west-end commercial/industrial park of Edmonton. I will post more on that later this week… So along with this post, you’re going to get three, all told.

Curse you, interwebs!

A quick update…

Not a ton to report this week. Jeff, that magnificent coding genius, informed me that contacts are now editable! So, if you’ve just been staring down at a list of phone numbers and keep having to remind yourself who they belong to, you don’t have to wonder anymore.

Sometimes it’s the simple updates that make me smile the most.

Next week, I’m going to write a little something about the first ever dub5 offices (which we no longer occupy). It’s a tale of hilarious woe, beer and junk food. Stay tuned!

Sign me up

You know what I’ve never been a big fan of? Signing up for things. In my youth (ed note: still young, relatively speaking; other ed note: I am both the author and editor, so this who parenthetical statement is rather superfluous), there was part of me who liked filling out forms, writing all my vital information down, recalling that — yes! — in fact I am a male, and thank you for asking FORM. Nice to make your acquaintance!

The novelty wore off rather quickly. As more and more services online require me to fill out fairly detailed information I’m finding myself increasingly more selective about what exactly I’ll signing up for. This is precisely the sort of thing we want to avoid at dub5.

In a perfect world, everyone who comes across our system — either organically or through vigilant encouragement from dub5 founders and our champions — will sign up. But as history has proven, this world is hardly perfect. Users are like me: selective. They aren’t going to go through an onerous sign-up process unless it’s going to benefit them significantly. And even then, asking for too much information from users creates a pretty hefty and sometimes unnecessary barrier to entry.

Who cares, right? We all know this, savvy Internet denizens that we are. The point is we’re working right now on integrating Facebook Connect with dub5!

I met with developers and founders Andy and Jeff today (at the very lovely Remedy Cafe on 109 Street in Edmonton), and they were pretty excited with the app’s progress. Jeff mentioned that he’s working on a few others new dub5 developments which I touched on in the last post, and he’s hoping to deploy them early next week (including the ability to edit the contacts in your list — something I DEMANDED. I was nice about it, though).

What else, then? We’re creating a new, more functional corporate site over the next month or so, and it will integrate a “proper” dub5 blog that matches the look and feel of the rest of our web presence. It will pull together the app login page as well, so all the dub5 information you need you’ll have in one location.

Oh, and you can also follow us on Twitter (@dub5). I’ll be maintaining our Twitter account, so if you start using d5 and come across issues, you can get me there, or you can complete a bug report right in the app. That’ll get your results sooner, of course, as Jeff and Andy are always on top of that stuff. But I’m way funnier than those guys, and a good listener.

Right, fellas?

Describing software in analogies

Jeff and Andy, dub5′s two developers, often joke that there’s really no way to describe how they’re writing the software for dub5 and what it does. Everything is explained to Clark and I — the business development guys — in analogies. Yesterday, Jeff and Andy pushed out a new version of the site, which you can look at and play around with here. It improves the navigation quite a bit from our previous site version, and it even previews a few new GUI features coming down the pipe — particularly the use of a traditional calendar view to navigate around your schedule.

Jeff did his best to describe the work he and Andy have been putting into the site — basically ensuring that the code we have is a solid foundation upon which we can continue to build:

“Since we all love analogies, what you see on the site now is a new foundation, new framing, and a new roof. The individual rooms themselves still need work, but that can be remedied with a bit of plaster and a new coat of paint. It will be much easier to add new rooms in the future. It’s as if Mike Holmes learned how to program. Wearing overalls.”

See, that I understand. But you start throwing out terms like “Ruby on Rails,” and “Cascading Style Sheets,” and suddenly you’ve lost me. So, we have the basics in place — a solid base from which to continue to build. We’re currently proceeding with developing the follow mission-critical things:

1. Implement month navigation on the sidebar (currently only an image placeholder)
2. Implement “nicknames” for contacts (no more User 17804353454 in your list)
3. Implement simple but complete group support

These are our three priorities right now. It’s not all we have on the go, but we view these as critical to enhancing the dub5 user experience .

Some of the other things we have on our radar:

1. A more robust “Edit Event” panel.
2. A less buggy day calendar that spans the full 24 period of a day.
3. A better looking “event information” page.

This stuff will come as the guys get the time to get it done.

Meanwhile, we’re continuing our push to integrate the system on campuses in Edmonton. We’re working closely with the U of A Students’ Union to get things moving — they’ve been really helpful in helping to guide our efforts. It should be an interesting 2009. Nay: it will be.

Remember, you can email me here if you have questions about dub5. If you want to, you can start using the system right now!