But Greg Sterling over at Screenwerk (with the help of our own Ches Hagen) has done just that:

StepRep Creator Adds Daily Deal Option

SMB reputation management software (StepRep) developer VendAsta has now created a daily deals offering. This makes sense; one could argue that loyalty and new customer acquisition tools are extensions of or complementary to reputation intelligence.

Couldn’t have put it better myself. For those who need a bit more context, here’s a cartoon I drew to explain the “daily deal” or “group buying” concept:

So thanks for the publicity, Greg. We’ll probably still do a press release in a few days to announce our first official partnership – we’ve managed to keep that secret anyway.

(Also, we still need to come up with a name.)

We’ve been lucky so far – in the three years of VendAsta’s existence, the party hasn’t been rained out yet. This year the skies were murky, but it was northern Saskatchewan forest fires, not rainclouds, that cast a pall over our shenanigans.

A record number of participants entered this year’s swimming race, so many that it had to be divided into an A pool and a B pool. (Both pools swam in the same pool.) Ches, who tried to back out because of a toe injury, was peer-pressured into competing and wound up dominating the A pool. Jason won the B pool. Tavis was awarded special recognition for the widest gap between trash-talking and accomplishment.

Nicole out-trampolined Tiffany, Jeff, and Ryan in her last public appearance in Saskatoon. John proudly showed off his weird hippie toe-shoes. Some people hula-hooped. Other stuff happened, I can’t remember. Luckily Krystian took a ton of photos.

Brendan in "Dear Leader" pose.	Chris pulls out his best party trick.
Ryan swoops down like an osprey.	Tavis executes a graceful parabola.

Krystian propped a second camera on top of the garage to take this time-lapse video of the pool area:

More photos, as always, on the VendAsta Facebook page.

Last week I shared out a spreadsheet and invited everyone at VendAsta to anonymously submit their suggestions. Which is how we came up with Yellow Elk, Rabid Monkey, and Grouper In A Box.

Those were the good ones.

Thursday afternoon the marketing team retired to the blounge and we spent a couple hours scribbling ideas on the whiteboard. Friday we settled on a shortlist that failed to swell our hearts with song. Then we retired to Brendan’s backyard for VendAsta’s annual pool party and put the question out of our heads for the weekend.

But now it’s Wednesday, and we still haven’t made a decision.

Complicating matters, the as-yet-unnamed product is a white-label solution; that is, our customers will be applying their own branding to it. So there are some within the company who argue that the product shouldn’t have a name at all.

We’ll let you know when a decision is reached. When the announcement comes, please – no heckling.

Then Tavis demonstrates the admin features developed for his team’s ongoing secret project. Once again, I can’t tell you any more than that. Frankly, I’m getting tired of referring to it as “the secret project” so I’m going to give it a name – Weapon X.

Shawn is our go-to guy for demos that are impenetrable to non-technical people. He throws some code up on the projector screen and declares, “It’s group code review time!” Then he demonstrates some changes he wants to make to StepRep’s wiring to make it run more efficiently. Various people offer feedback. Shawn answers their questions and receives qualified approval from Jason to proceed with the changes. “So expect that in the near future,” Shawn concludes.

Jordan is working on the StepRep executive report. This is the report that shows up in your inbox once a week, full of graphs and diagrams that break down how your online reputation is faring.

In the past this exec report was formatted using HTML, but since some email clients and mobile devices didn’t display the formatting properly, instead we’re going to send a PDF attachment that will render identically for all users. Jordan and his team are using a tool called Pisa to convert the HTML reports into PDF, and the redesigned reports should be rolling out in the next couple weeks.

Allan is last. He shows up late, ominously carrying a grocery bag. In the past, Allan’s demos have involved standing in a circle holding hands, thumb wrestling, and throwing tennis balls into garbage pails. These exercises are meant to illustrate some aspect or other of Agile philosophy, and as random as they seem, he always ties them together with a little speech at the end that makes it all seem perfectly logical.

So when Allan asks someone to put on some background music (Brendan chooses Toto’s “Africa”), Shawn immediately asks, “Are you going to make us dance?”

No, it turns out Allan is going to make us build towers out of spaghetti. According to the terms of the Marshmallow Challenge promoted by “thought-leader and award-winning innovator” Tom Wujec,

[I]n eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.

Supplies for the Marshmallow Challenge.

In the video on the Marshmallow Challenge homepage, Tom describes pretty much exactly how the tower-building exercise works out for the four teams at VendAsta:

Finally, just as they’re running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and…ta-da! They admire their work.

But what really happens most of the time is the ta-da! turns into an uh-oh! because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse.

My own team fails to build a stable spaghetti tower. We’re aiming for a tripod a couple feet high, but the tape is too flimsy to reinforce the spaghetti legs as we’d intended. The other teams don’t do much better. Brendan’s team manages to at least build a freestanding structure that collapses with the addition of the marshmallow. Jason’s team comes up with a bizarre spaghetti gallows that dangles the marshmallow below the level of the table, but Allan rules that negative height doesn’t count in the contest. No winner is declared. A poor showing for VendAsta.

Afterward, Allan explains what the Marshmallow Challenge is all about. I hate to ruin the punchline for anybody who’d like to try the game with their own team, so I’ll just give you a hint: the marshmallow is a metaphor.

Nicole’s been with us since the summer of 2008, when we were still in our old offices on the other side of the river. Now she’s going to seek warmer pastures on the west coast. I repurposed this old drawing of Nicole (from one of the Spokesmonster cartoons) for her farewell card, but Allan thought the tone was too negative.

“It seems like she’s saying that anyone who still works for VendAsta is a sucker,” Allan said.

“You misunderstand,” I said. “She’s saying that anyone who still lives in Saskatoon is a sucker.”

In the end we went with a different picture for the card, a shot of Nicole doing a high-kick with an expression on her face so goofy she’d probably high-kick me if I published it here.

Good luck in Vancouver, Nicole. We’ll miss you.

Nicole and her farewell umbrella.	VendAsta's shrinking female contingent.
Champagne corks popping.	Jeff fends off the paparazzi.

Two demos on Friday. Shawn’s was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation with the title, “Finite State Machines Implemented With Task Queue”. I have no idea what it was about. He referenced this article by Jilles Van Gurp and Jan Bosch of the University of Karlskrona in Sweden, whose abstract begins,

Finite State Machines (FSM) provide a powerful way to describe dynamic behavior of systems and components. However, the implementation of FSMs in OO languages often suffers from maintenance problems.

Too deep for me. But the technical folks seemed pretty spellbound. Blair asked, “Have you thought about how to handle recurrent transitions from same-state to same-state?” I tried to take down Shawn’s reply but it had some acronyms in it and I got lost. I think he also used the word “pickle” as a verb. Someday I’ll have to ask a techie to explain that one to me.

Anyway, Jason (our CTO) seemed pretty jazzed about this Finite State Machine business, so I’ll probably be hearing more about it.

Then it was Tavis’s turn. (Going from one of Shawn’s demos to one of Tavis’s is like going from Gravity’s Rainbow to Charlotte’s Web.*) I’m still unable to speak openly about the project that Tavis and his team have been working on for the last couple months. But it’s nearing completion. I’ve been told that maybe next week I can start to publicize it.

Anyhow, Tavis showed us a web page and invited us to offer criticism. The consensus was that the button didn’t look buttony enough. Tavis said he’d take care of it. Phoenix raised an eyebrow. “Well,” Tavis added modestly, “I won’t take care of  it myself.”

PS. Tiffany has been posting other pictures (including some more shots from Nicole’s farewell party) to the VendAsta Facebook page.

–

* Gravity’s Rainbow and Charlotte’s Web are both extraordinary works of literature, but one is a little more challenging than the other. That’s all I’m sayin’.

I have nothing to say on this subject. But following Megan’s links I came across this comment from a small business owner named txjim on the Coyote Blog :

BTW my favorite interview question that has held up well for 25 years is “what was the last thing you built in your free time?” For some reason it works surprisingly well no matter the industry or type of position involved. Some struggle with answering and some can’t wait to tell you what they accomplished. Guess which I favor?

That’s a question I’ve never encountered in a job interview, but I hope it catches on. (And while we’re on the topic, would someone please drive a stake through the heart of “what is your greatest strength / greatest weakness”?) I’m not in charge of hiring around here, but I’d say that “building stuff in your spare time” is a strong indicator of the kind of temperament VendAsta looks for in an employee: creative, curious, hands-on.* This point isn’t entirely moot, because we’ve got several job openings right now.

Not only are we encouraged to build things at home, VendAsta gives us a couple office hours each week to build stuff and bone up on new technologies. It’s called Jam Time, and it starts right after our Friday demos.

This Friday, Ryan and Dave showed off their new Jam projects.

Ryan Baldwin is going on “a jaunt into the unknown”. He’s working on a mobile app for the Android platform that he describes as “a location-centric version of Twitter” that will let users “tag” locations in the real world with short messages, pictures, or videos. (“There’s a million other guys out there with variations on the same idea,” he admits.) People standing at a certain location will be able to see, pinpointed on a map, tags that other users have left within a certain radius of that location. Eventually Ryan foresees an augmented reality view where the screen will display a live picture of whatever the camera is pointed at, with tags superimposed.

That’s in the future. Right now Ryan is just learning his way around the Android framework. He’s never developed a mobile app before. Why start with Android? “Because it’s on the way up. It’s what I use and it’s what more people are using. And the market is less diluted. There are over 130,000 iPhone apps, but only 50,000 or so for Android. There’s a better chance of getting noticed.”

Ryan deliberately chose a project that would expose him to core mobile technologies like map integration and location awareness. “There’s so much stuff in there I want to learn,” he says. But it’s not just an academic exercise; he intends to develop a releasable application. We’ll let you know when he does.

Dave Mosher, meanwhile, has been messing around with the latest version of Blender, the free open-source 3D animation suite. In the past he’s used Blender to create, among other things, “a 3D drumkit and a bouncing pea”.

Right now he’s working on a 3D version of the VendAsta logo. (“I call it BlendAsta”, he says.) In the finished version, the pieces of the “sail” icon will fly in from the corners of the screen and assemble themselves.

It’s a little scary. If Dave gets good at this 3D animation stuff, it’s going to make my contributions look rather flat by comparison. Maybe it’s time I started building something of my own…

–

* On the other hand, it’s possible that asking “what was the last thing you built in your free time?” unfairly penalizes people with a less creative bent. If you put in eight quality hours at the office every day, does it really matter if you spend your evenings vegging out to The Real Housewives of New Jersey rather than, say, creating an Android app or learning 3D animation? If your main pastime is playing video games or Ultimate Frisbee, you can’t really be said to be “building” anything, except perhaps hand-eye coordination. Are you less deserving of promotion than the Lego enthusiast in the next cubicle? I dunno…

Dave growls back at some angry park food.	Jordan demonstrates his refined eating habits.
This slice of cake was slightly smaller than Ryan's head.	Phoenix keeps a wary eye on the photographer.

Back in the office, waiting for demos to begin, we discussed our culinary adventures.

Tavis: So which was better, the deep-fried Oreos or the deep-fried ice cream?

Tiffany: Oreos. The deep-fried ice cream isn’t very exciting. It’s just a big ball of ice cream.

Tavis: What do you mean, just a big ball of ice cream? What could be better than that?

Tiffany: My tastes are pretty refined.

Krystian showed off all the photos he’d taken of people eating with their mouths open. Ryan and Jordan traded mock spoilers for the movie Inception to annoy Jeff Read, who hadn’t seen it yet. Finally, Brendan tapped the music stand with his baton and the group fell silent.

Demo # 1. Brendan walked us through the most recent improvements to StepRep.

On the Overview tab, the Keywords feature has been given a bit more intelligence, so that it will now include word pairs such as “las vegas” rather than treating “las” and “vegas” as separate concepts.

(Since word pairs are only being calculated on new results, if you’ve already got a StepRep account it will take a while for the word pairs to start pushing the old single words out of your Keywords cloud.)

Next, Brendan demonstrated how a persistent bug has finally been hunted down and squashed. For months we’ve been aware that StepRep would take an embarrassingly long time to load when you accessed it with Internet Explorer. Last week Dave managed to isolate the snippet of JavaScript that was giving IE the vapours and replace it with some Microsoft-friendlier code. As Brendan clicked briskly around the site in IE, it was obvious that Dave’s fix had been successful.

“It’s just as fast as Google Chrome now,” Brendan observed.

Someone joked that we can now add a “This site is optimized for Internet Explorer” badge to the bottom of each StepRep page. This provoked much derisive laughter among the Apple faithful.

Demo # 2. Tavis reported his team’s progress on a secret project whose nature I’m still not permitted to discuss. I can only tease you with the news that we will soon be in a position to begin soliciting subscribers in our first market, Winnipeg.

Subscribers to what? Stay tuned, Winnipeggers!

PS. Friday’s photos were courtesy of Krystian. Tiffany will be posting the rest of the photos on the VendAsta Facebook page.

After lunch, as we sat around belching and patting our bellies, Allan demonstrated a video game called DJ Hero, a variant of the Guitar Hero / Rock Band concept that replaces toy guitars with toy turntables. Projecting the game on the big screen, Allan made us sit through the introductory sequence, set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where DJ superheroes knock down entire cities with their mixmastering skills. Brendan seemed confused. “What does this have to do with being a DJ?” he asked. “This doesn’t make me want to play the game.”

Chris pointed out that Brendan, whose musical tastes are arrested in the Bob Seger era, is probably not the target audience for DJ Hero. Brendan stalked off to feed his pet dinosaur while Chris and Dave faced off in an epic turntable battle that blended Blondie’s Rapture with a latter-day hip hop tune, to perplexing effect. “If I wasn’t watching the screen, I wouldn’t be able to tell when you screwed up and when it was supposed to sound like that,” Jeff R. complained, on behalf of all the old people in the room.

Demo # 1. Shawn showed off the work that he and Blair have done to optimize the Overview screen in StepRep. That’s the first screen you see after you log in, containing a bunch of little charts and graphs, each of them requiring one or more time-consuming queries to Google App Engine. Luckily we can use our asynctools toolkit to run those queries in parallel, thereby reducing the time it takes to load the page.

Jason mentioned that Shawn and Blair’s work will be the subject of VendAsta’s upcoming guest post on the official Google App Engine Blog. I’m sure we’ll be bragging about this a lot more in coming weeks, but hey, you can’t start too soon.

Demo # 2. While Tavis struggled to connect his wheezing old Dell laptop to the projector, Mariatta showed up with her new kid, Jonathan. Mariatta has been on maternity leave for the last month and this is the first time Jonathan has shown up in the office, so everyone jumped out of their chairs to crowd around the baby.

Eventually the room settled down. While Jonathan burbled and blatted in the background, Tavis talked about the secret project he and the Scrumdogs have been working on. He flipped back and forth between the PayPal API and App Engine to demonstrate how transactions will work in the new application.

Tavis also showed a cartoon I’ve been working on to promote the secret project. Here’s a sample frame; unfortunately I’ve had to redact some of the text.

Demo # 3. Dave and others have been making some significant changes to the design and layout of StepRep. These will be pretty obvious next time you log in to your account. As part of the update, they’ve moved several screens from subnavigation menus up to the top-level navigation bar, which now looks like this:

Demo # 4. Thanks to Jeff R. and his team, it’s now possible to edit your “anchor data” within StepRep’s Visibility tab. (The “anchor data” is the information StepRep uses to identify your listing wherever it appears on business directory websites – your business name, phone number, address, etc.)

Demo # 5. I took some notes on Jason’s demo, but he heard me typing and said, “This is covered under a non-disclosure agreement, so no blogging.” That’s okay, I didn’t understand what he was talking about anyway.

Demo # 6. Lastly, Brendan reported from this week’s Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. Apparently he uncovered a lot of new partnership opportunities for StepRep, but there’s nothing official to announce yet.

Brendan has been going to Inman every year for almost a decade and he’s pretty familiar with San Francisco by now. He told us how on a previous visit he, Jeff Tomlin, and some other guys were walking back to their hotel late at night and Jeff balked at walking down a rough block in the Tenderloin district. “So we went through the Tenderloin and Jeff went the long way around, and Jeff was the one that got mugged!”

Jeff piped up indignantly, “I didn’t get mugged.”

“No, you just gave that guy your wallet,” said Tavis.

As demos broke up, Jeff was explaining how he didn’t actually get mugged, and Tavis and Jason were Googling the origins of the name “Tenderloin”.

PS. Thanks to Krystian for assistance with photography this week. You can tell which photos are his because they’re not blurry.

Another Friday afternoon tradition is Demo Time, where someone from each team shows what they’ve been working on for the last week. Demo Time used to come at the end of the day, when everyone was sleepy and eager to head home for the weekend. Friday, for the first time, we had our demos just after lunch, when we were all sleepy from eating schnitzels.

As an experiment I thought I’d try blogging Friday’s Demo Time.

I neglected to take photos, so you’ll have to visualize the scene. Twenty or so developers seated around tables in the boardroom. In front of each one, a paper plate oozing grease. Blair and Tavis lounging on beanbags by the supply closet. John leaning in his customary place against the window, coffee cup in hand. Guy rings the Demo Bell with uncharacteristic gentleness (seeing as how we’re all gathered already) and we get started.

Demo # 1. Phoenix projects a few screens of the application she and her team, the Scrumdog Millionaires, are building. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to blog about it before the product is officially announced, but we’ve already formalized a partnership deal with a couple of Canadian directory companies and we think the product has a lot of potential.

Phoenix gets into some back-end stuff that I don’t understand. I manage to scribble the words “PayPal API call” and “transactional task queue” before my brain falls asleep. I guess it has something to do with how the website will process credit card transactions.

As Phoenix wraps up, Brendan interrupts to say that Ches is on the phone from the west coast. Ches is on the highway near Whistler (I guess it’s still legal to talk on cell phones while driving in BC?) and he’s eager to describe a possible partnership opportunity for StepRep. So we listen while Ches shares his story over the speakerphone, interrupting himself every few minutes to ask “Can you still hear me?” It’s a good story, but again I’ll have to keep it secret as it involves one of our competitors.

Demo # 2. Shawn and Blair have been working to decrease page load times on StepRep. Shawn throws some code up on the projector and starts talking in technicalese. He mentions something about “asyncifying queries” to optimize pages – I gather this is a reference to asynctools, VendAsta’s great contribution (so far) to the world of Google App Engine development.

Someone asks how much quicker StepRep will be after Shawn and Blair’s improvements take effect. Shawn isn’t sure, but Jason (our Chief Technical Officer) speculates that certain pages that used to take 1.5 seconds to load could now load in half a second. That’s a pretty huge jump, percentagewise.

Demo # 3. Nicole, Mike, and Jeff are making changes to the Visibility tab in StepRep. That’s the tab where you can see all the places where your business listing appears. The changes involve how listings are “scraped” and compared with the “anchor data” in StepRep’s database. Sorry for the jargon; the gist of it is that the Visibility tab will soon be showing more accurate results.

Demo # 4. Before his demo, Chris takes a moment to promote his band Sexy Mathematics. “Just thought I’d mention that there’s a really good band at Amigo’s tonight,” he says, “and we’re opening for them.”

Chris and Krystian have been working on improving StepRep’s partner tools:

A search form for the Partner Admin screen, which will make it about a million times easier for administrators to search for users.

A custom signup URL field, which will permit partners to send new customers to a page of their choice rather than using StepRep’s default signup form.

A welcome field that partners can use to define a customized email message to send to new customers.

Demo # 5. Jason provides a summary of his visit last month to Google headquarters for the exclusive App Engine Developer’s Summit. This was a big opportunity to get face-time with the guys who built the system our software runs on.

While he talks at length about everything he learned down in Mountain View, I allow myself to be hypnotized by Jason’s emphatic hand gestures. Periodically he pauses to apologize for the dryness of his presentation, though I suspect for the geeks in the room it’s the highlight of their day.

Jason describes his visit to the famous Google cafeteria for lunch, with its multiple mini-restaurants featuring different types of cuisine. He says you can distinguish new Google employees by the way they load up their plates with heaps of food, while the long-time Googlers, accustomed to the superfluity of options, take more modest portions; or, as Jason puts it, “You can tell how long they’ve worked there by the size of their plates.”

Since he got back from the summit, Jason has been periodically testing the developers with App Engine trivia challenges. The winner of Friday’s challenge was Nicole, who correctly identified “the function you call to set the default multi-tenancy namespace for the current HTTP request”. Nicole got a Google App Engine t-shirt and the rest of us went home jealous.

–

Corrected July 14, 2010: Jason emailed to point out that I’d originally written, “Shawn and Blair have been working to increase page load times on StepRep.” Down, up, less, more; who pays attention to the details?

“What they love” is designing software, and their specific method of helping those in need is to build iPhone apps, sell them for $1.99 at the App Store, and give the proceeds to local charities.

This whole freaky idea was dreamed up by ex-VendAsta developer Dale Zak, who helped get it off the ground in Halifax last year. At that first iPhone Hackathon 4 Charity, fifteen developers donated their weekends to help create the apps Meet Me Here and Wish You Were Here, with proceeds going to the Halifax charities Feed Nova Scotia and Phoenix Youth Programs.

In the wake of that successful Hackathon, Dale and his Halifax buddies incorporated a company called Apps4Good and set out to spread their idea around the world. Now Dale has expanded the event to a second city, with over fifty developers participating this year in Halifax and Saskatoon. The Saskatoon group, which included Phoenix, Krystian, Jordan, and Allan from VendAsta, divided into three teams to design:

• ShouldI, a social decision-making app, to benefit the Saskatoon Friendship Inn.
• CoachPad, a handy sports team sketchpad, to benefit North East Outreach.
• WeDJ, a social DJing app “with a twist”, to benefit Choc’laCure.

I’m not sure what the “twist” is and I’m excited to find out…but I’ll have to wait a few months for the bugs to be ironed out and the apps to be officially released. Hopefully they’ll be hits and generate a little revenue for the charities in question. We’ll let you know when they’re available for purchase.

So good job, Dale and everyone. Some photos below, with more to see at the Apps4Good Facebook page.

Dale and team in the VendAsta blounge, with Halifax on the projector screen.

Krystian slouches for charity.