When you think of development, you may think of ironic-tee-shirt-clad developers chewing caffeinated gum while scrolling through thousands of lines of arcane code in search of a misplaced semicolon. Sure, that's all true: we have a strong and experienced team of developers, and we give them the tools¹ they need. We work with ColdFusion, Flex, Flash, and we build web, mobile, email, kiosk and desktop applications. We are Adobe Partners and beta testers, meaning we have access to technical assistance and input into the further development of the platforms we use.
But writing code is only one stage in the development process.
That process starts with trying to understand your business, your customers, what you're doing for them — we need to ask a lot of very basic questions such as: "But why?" From that basis of understanding, we learn how we can help your business. Perhaps we can expand your reach, make things easier and more efficient, help you keep in touch, inform your customers, establish and strengthen your brand. We will share our ideas with you as a functional specification and see what you think. Then we will build it.
It all starts and ends with thinking about people. It has to: otherwise you would be the owner of an application nobody wants to use, or knows how to use. That's why almost all our developers are real people. To us, development means building a solution that works for its users: for people.
Thrive and friends
You may have heard of Thrive: our content management system. But it is much more than that. Thrive supports an array of applications, and is ready to support new applications built just for you. It is the gateway to your digital presence, providing both asset and application management along with management of one or more websites.
Dissatisfied with what was out there, we also built ThriveMail, our own electronic mail campaign management software. It now delivers millions of messages to New Zealand and around the world every year.
Identifying a need, we compiled a comprehensive database of New Zealand tourism operators, along with tools to maintain and share that information: we called it TourismData.
When we need to, we build. When we don't need to, we integrate.
Our development philosophies
Here are the principles that guide us as developers:
- Recognise and respect cool technologies from other vendors, and integrate with them
- Think about the best solution to a problem, design and build it properly, and with a long term vision
- Commit to ongoing development of our technologies, resources, and skills
- Think about applications as a community of inter-related tools rather than as stand-alone solutions to individual problems
- Figure out the simplest application that addresses your business problem
- Speak Human
- Make it hard or impossible to make "errors" — just guide people gently
Beyond the web — coming with us?
In researching people², we have discovered the following facts:
- People want to know about things
- People want to do things
- People want both at the same time
Imagine a future where physical spaces are overlaid with rich, contextual information: history, commentary, ratings, conversations, directions, recommendations, deals. Imagine a future where you can find answers when and where you need them (Who is that person? What does this sign say? Is this really a good deal?). Imagine participating in this environment, contributing, and making it richer. Imagine filtering it, searching it, and turning it off when you don't need it. This is what we imagine. The challenges we are tackling are:
- Mobile information access
- Public information sharing
- Getting your files, wherever you are
- Finding the information you need when there is too much information
- Adding information as an assistive overlay to your life
- New media as conversation spaces
In preparing for this future, we are helping businesses to understand and manage their digital assets, and to learn to engage in a dialogue with their customers. The conversation is already beginning, whether businesses choose to participate or not.
Because the world is changing, we think about what we will need tomorrow and build it now.
Notes
1. Tools like bug trackers, version control repositories, development servers, product development plans, quality assurance protocols, seminars, mentoring programmes, and thick manuals (which make nice monitor stands).
2. Internal strategic discussions over beer and wine on Fridays.