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.

The MashedIn team has created a game to show I/O attendees how common connections can be revealed across social graphs. Conference-goers with location-aware smartphones can play the game at mashedin.com/io. At the end of the conference, the player with the most connections will win an iPad!

There’s more about the game over at the MashedIn blog.

Saskatoon, SK and Charlotte, NC, April 19, 2010 – UniversalBusinessListing.org (UBL) and VendAsta Technologies today announced a strategic partnership to offer reputation management services integrating their product offerings.

UBL has become a recognized component in the local business listings marketplace where it has guided individual companies and major interactive agencies with the submission, correction, and enhancement of their online business profiles to over 250 search publishers. UBL is a service of Name Dynamics, Inc. (PINK SHEETS: BBTC.pk)

VendAsta’s reputation intelligence solution StepRep serves large agencies and directory publishers providing solutions directly to small and medium businesses. StepRep helps businesses discover what is being said about them online, benchmarks their footprint against competition, uncovers trends, and provides solutions to increase buzz.

“We are very pleased to announce our partnership with UBL. One of the things that StepRep does is show a business where they are visible and where they should also be listed. It frustrates a business owner to tell them about a problem with their marketing but not offer a solution,” explains VendAsta CEO Brendan King. “UBL’s syndication solution helps us take it a step further and actually improve that visibility.”

Doyal Bryant, Name Dynamics’ CEO, said: “VendAsta has created a powerful and cost-effective tool for our businesses to keep a watch on their online identity; it’s a logical fit with our listing distribution. It is critical today that businesses not only ensure they are accurately represented online, but are able to rapidly respond to comments, reviews and ratings.”

The companies will be showcasing their solutions at the Yellow Pages Association annual conference in Las Vegas from April 17 to 20th.

About UBL

UniversalBusinessListing.Org is a Local Search Industry service that allows businesses to post their business listing once and have it distributed to all major Search Engines, Online Yellow Pages, Social Networks, 411 Directories and GPS Navigation Devices. The Universal Business Listings are a service of Name Dynamics, Inc. (PINK SHEETS: BBTC.pk), headquartered in Charlotte, NC. It was founded by media and telecommunications veterans Doyal Bryant and Chris Travers. For additional information, please visit www.UBL.org.

About VendAsta

VendAsta Technologies Inc. (www.vendasta.com) is a software development company based in Saskatoon, Canada. VendAsta develops reputation intelligence and social discovery tools. It first launched StepRep, its reputation intelligence solution, in January 2009. At the beginning of 2010, MashedIn was launched as a social discovery platform that searches across multiple social networks. VendAsta raised $3 million in venture funding in the summer of 2008.

Saskatoon, SK, April 14, 2010 – Flutter, released today by the MashedIn development team, could be used by those looking to network at conferences, break the ice at social events, or find out whether they know someone in an unfamiliar city.

Flutter (www.mashedin.com/flutter) examines the user’s network of friends across three different social networks – Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. From this data the application can identify connections to people that the user might not personally know, but with whom he or she shares mutual friends.

When the user logs in on a location-aware mobile device, Flutter displays a list of other mobile users who’ve recently tweeted or visited Flutter within a given radius. The list can then be sorted by the number of shared connections, by proximity, or by time.

CTO Jason Collins said that the power of Flutter is that it can uncover relationships across multiple social networks. “For instance, someone who only uses Facebook might turn out to be connected, via a mutual friend, to someone who only uses Twitter.”

Flutter was designed to showcase MashedIn’s powerful cross-platform social discovery technology. The MashedIn platform grinds through massive amounts of data to help reveal previously concealed connections among social network users.

MashedIn is a product of VendAsta Technologies, based in Saskatoon, Canada. In 2008 VendAsta received $3 million in venture funding to develop social software solutions for small and medium businesses.

Saskatoon, SK, January 28, 2010 – Today, VendAsta Technologies announces the release of MashedIn (www.mashedin.com), an application that allows people to discover mutual connections across multiple social networks. MashedIn provides the user a widget that can be added to a website or blog where visitors can authenticate with either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to reveal common connections to the widget owner.

People have different groups of friends or connections on different social networks they use.  Being able to see mutual connections across multiple networks increases the chance you’ll find common linkages.  Mashedin provides a great value to businesses and business professionals. People can visit a business web presence or profile and be able to see if anyone they know is connected. For the business, it is like receiving a warm introduction to someone who is otherwise completely anonymous. Each connection you uncover provides more context for the visitor.

“MashedIn, like life, is really all about who you know and who they know,” says CEO Brendan King. “MashedIn allows people to leverage their investments in social networks like Faceboook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. People use these networks to connect with weak ties – people they didn’t, until now, communicate with all that often. MashedIn lets you profit from the experience and knowledge of your close friends, weak ties, and everybody those people know – without explicit communication. It does this by building trust, which is attained by discovering common ground and mutual connections. After all, let’s face it, recommendations from people you know trump all other types.”

The MashedIn team overcame considerable technical obstacles to make the application a possibility. “MashedIn is deployed entirely in the cloud on Google App Engine,” notes CTO Jason Collins. “This framework, combined with MashedIn’s parallel processing extensions, allows us to query social networks in a massively parallel manner and traverse large graphs of social connections. This approach allows for relevant, meaningful social connections and recommendations to be presented to the user almost instantaneously, despite having to gather and process large amounts of data from a number of third-party sources.”

VendAsta, (www.vendasta.com) based in Saskatoon, Canada, develops software to leverage social networks and improve trust. The first solution released by the company in early 2009 was a reputation management tookit for small businesses called StepRep. MashedIn is designed to have broader applicability for people to improve trust and identity through social connections.

VendAsta raised $3 million in venture funding in the summer of 2008.

For the last couple months there have been murmurs around the office that one of our developers, Kevin Pierce, was up to something pretty amazing. Those of us who don’t know JavaScript from a jack-in-the-box were kind of left in the dark, but we were told his project had something to do with dramatically improving page load times for our application MyFrontSteps.

MyFrontSteps, to put it simply, lets you share your list of trusted home service experts with your friends. Say you’re friends with a bunch of people, and each of those people trusts a number of experts. Every time MyFrontSteps shows you a list of the experts you trust, it also needs to retrieve the list of your friends, and cross-check the friends against the experts:

• Friend A trusts experts X, Y, and Z.
• Friend B trusts experts X and Y.
• Friend C trusts experts Y and Z.
• Friend D doesn’t trust anyone.
• Friend E trusts…

Now, each of these cross-checks only takes a fraction of a second, but if you’ve got a page requiring hundreds of cross-checks, those fractions can add up. By the time they’re all done, the user has spent a non-fractional number of seconds waiting for the page to load.

These cross-checks take forever when they have to be done serially – one after another. Obviously things would go much more quickly if you could conduct these operations in parallel – all at the same time. Kevin’s simple task was to find a way to make that possible.

And so he…uh…well, maybe I’d better let Jason describe what Kevin did next:

He started poking around the gory depths of the App Engine source and discovered that all of the API calls stub out in MakeSyncCall. This inevitably led to the discovery of the partner MakeCall which yields an RPC object that you can wait on. Of course, if I can wait on one RPC object, I can also wait on many of them.

What this means is…well, I really have no idea what it means. The gist is that MyFrontSteps can now do a hundred things all at once instead of painstakingly, one after the other. As a result, we can now present information in a way that it wasn’t realistically possible to do it before.

Kevin’s possibility-expanding solution has now been made available to other developers. It’s known as asynctools, and if you’re looking for a way to execute Google App Engine API calls in parallel, you’re welcome to it – it’s open source.

Because asynctools utilizes the Google App Engine API in ways that it hadn’t been utilized before, it’s drawn a little attention from the Google team. Here’s what they had to say about it on the Google App Engine Blog:

asynctools is a rather nifty toolkit that allows you to execute datastore queries in parallel in the Python runtime. The interface is slightly more involved than using standard queries, but the ability to execute multiple queries in parallel can substantially reduce the render time for a page where you need to execute multiple independent queries.

I got lost after “rather nifty”, but that’s good enough for me. Kudos to Kevin and everyone else who chipped in on this rather nifty innovation!