Insight Designs launches Crocs corporate website

July 29th, 2010 Beth Krodel

Pardon us, but we at Insight Designs are having a hard time containing our excitement about the fact that we’ve added Crocs™ to our stellar client list.

We just launched a new site for the Boulder-based shoemaker, most known for its colorful, hole-covered, lightweight boat shoes.

We had a ton of fun working with this innovative and clever brand. In our custom design, we integrated both their Feel the Love™ campaign and their Croslite™ characters (personified versions of their trademark shoes) with a lively color palette and a look that is in keeping with the Crocs feel-good image. We handled all of the details, including the photo shoot to get unique full-body shots of the newly-anointed Crocs ambassadors, five lucky folks who get to blog to the world about their love for Crocs via the site’s new Vitamin C blog. Thanks to photographer Rick Cummings (our friend and another Insight Designs client) for the awesome pix!

On the backend, we set up multiple blogs and features, and we integrated the site seamlessly with two other vendors — Taleo who handles the corporate careers search and Thomson Reuters who handles the investor relations content.

In the process, we learned a lot about this revolutionary company. They’ve sold more than 100 million pairs of Crocs in their less than 10 years in business, and since 2007, they’ve donated more than 2.5 million pairs of shoes to people in impoverished areas as well as areas affected by natural disaster, including Haiti.

And their styles go far beyond boat shoes and sandals. They offer more than 120 style for men, women and children. Check them out online. Or the next time you’re in Boulder, stop by their new flagship store at 1129 Peart Street and then come by and say hi to Insight (our office is just a block away at 2006 Broadway)!

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Gearing up for the Tour de France

May 27th, 2010 Beth Krodel

Just five weeks to go before the start of the 97th Tour de France. And as usual, the programmers here at Insight Designs are busy helping code cool features for the Versus website and other yet-to-be-disclosed ways to follow the tour. Keep your eyes peeled. Don’t miss the Versus Tour Tracker. Details below.

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The Death of IE6?

March 4th, 2010 Mike Kohn

Google dropped a bomb (albeit a relatively quite one) on Monday when they began their phase-out of support for Internet Explorer 6 and announced that YouTube will follow suit in a few weeks. For IE6 users this means that certain parts of these site won’t work quite right, and you’ll get a pesky pop-up from time-to-time reminding you to upgrade. For web developers, this (hopefully!) means that it’s time to celebrate, because IE6 might finally be dead.

You see, IE6 is the grandfather of modern web browsers. Not the old, wise kind, though. More like the grumpy kind that yells at you to get off his lawn. It’s an old fellow: it’s been around for almost 8 years in a world where brand new technology becomes obsolete every day. This is the main cause for web powerhouses like Google to drop support for it: the latest-and-greatest web technologies simply don’t work on old browsers, and trying to accommodate for this would only hold Google back.

One of the biggest challenges as web developers is trying to work around IE6’s quirky and illogical behavior. Every website we create at Insight Designs is tested on no less than 8 different browsers including IE6, and IE6 is the one that single-handedly causes the most problems.  Because about 10% of all web surfing is done on IE6, though, it’s impossible to ignore the old browser. But hopefully Google has the kind of clout to change this by strong-arming IE6 users into upgrading.

As if there weren’t already a million reasons to make the switch (including speed, reliability, and security), maybe Google’s announcement will finally convince the last handful of web surfers still clinging to this sinking browser to jump ship.

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Live photos from our 2009 Holiday Open House

December 4th, 2009 Nico Toutenhoofd

We do this every year and each time we try to come up with a new twist on automated photo uploading technology to deliver images in real time. We are shooting these images with a Canon 5D, which is transmitting images over FTP to my laptop in my office with a Canon WFT-E1 wireless transmitter. The files are stored in a folder on my HD, and this nifty little Python app called uploader.py checks the folder every minute and uploads files to our Flickr account. This year we’ve also found a nifty site called Flickr Slide Show that will take images from your Flickr account and turn them into a Flash photo gallery.

And I give this a 50/50 chance of working, but here’s out live Java cam… It uses a GoPro HD Helmet Hero camera and an Eye-Fi card:

Or if you’d prefer you can view these images directly on Flickr here.

Enjoy!

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Way to go Team Garmin-Slipstream!

July 27th, 2009 Beth Krodel

Three cheers for our friends and clients of Team Garmin-Slipstream! Though they missed a spot on the podium in the Tour de France on Sunday, the Boulder-based professional cycling team boasted an impressive feat: two riders in the top 10. Bradley Wiggins was fourth overall - just 1 minute, 23 seconds behind third-place-finisher Lance Armstrong. And Christian Vande Velde finished eighth overall - just two months after cracking three vertebrae in a crash.

And the next time you talk to Nico or Kelly or Evan, be sure to ask them about all the cool behind-the-scenes technology work we did for both the versus.com website and the slipstreamsports.com website during the tour. I kept nagging Nico to write a blog about what he and the other programmers were doing, but he was simply too busy doing real work to find time to blog. In short, we helped create versus.com’s Race Tracker that provided Live Tour de France coverage including live GPS tracking, real-time play-by-play, interactive maps and profiles, and live broadband-quality video.

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Bing – Microsoft’s “Decision Engine”

June 15th, 2009 Ethan Stemm

Last month Beth posted a blog discussing the new search tool named Wolfram Alpha.  While the book is still out on this new search technology, an old player in a new guise has come upon the scene and likes to be called Bing.

Bing is Microsoft’s new search tool (replacing Live Search), and in an attempt to distinguish itself from Google and Yahoo, it is being touted not as a new Search Engine but rather a Decision Engine. What exactly is a decision engine? I’m not sure, but I found some clues in this article. Apparently, this Decision Engine is going to provide three main elements:

• Quality search results

• Organized search experiences

• Simplified tasks and insight

Keeping these newly discovered points in mind, I took another look at Bing and came to this conclusion:

Bing operates just like any other search engine but with a nice photo in the background.

I suppose the real test of a search engine (or decision engine) would take place late Friday afternoon just moments before the end of the day when we suddenly remember needing to find the address of where we are meeting our significant other(s) after work. We begin searching for this information attempting to not be distracted about missing the bus but still remembering to turn on the office alarm while trying to remember our banking password so we can check if we even have the dough to go out for dinner. In this all-too-real scenario, the search engine is an integral part of the process and if it works correctly, we’ll hardly even notice it. But if it fails, and we end up across town at the wrong restaurant with no money, we’ll notice and remember which search tool to blame.

Since I am not going to complete the test outlined above (I don’t ride the bus), please accept the following observations:

• Bing has a good a look to it and seems to provide good results.

• Once past the paid rankings, Google usually leads us to where we want to go.

• Yahoo is that old “portal” friend providing news and email with its search returns.

The truth of search on the internet is that the technology has not really changed much over the past decade. Yes there have been improvements with the control of spam, search results do provide more localized information and everything is faster, but can we say a current search return is far superior to those we got years ago? I’m not sure we can, and so I say it is time for search to improve in a big way. Perhaps the increasing reliance upon search returns acquired from Twitter, Facebook or a blog will result in some new search paradigms. Maybe a new technology is being developed right now and within a year’s time we’ll be more satisfied with our search returns. Or maybe we have reached the apex of search and right now is as good as it gets. In any case, give Bing a look and let us know what you think.

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Congrats to our client Applied Trust on winning the Apex Award

June 10th, 2009 Beth Krodel

One of our newest clients, Boulder-based Applied Trust Engineering, Inc., was awarded the 2009 Apex Award for Distinguished Professional Services last night during a ceremony also known as the “academy awards of Colorado technology.”

Applied Trust provides IT security and network/systems infrastructure consulting services in the areas of security, performance and availability.

The award — given by CSIA, Colorado’s Technology Association — recognizes the company whose professional services enable its customers to conduct their businesses more effectively and efficiently.

Huge kudos to Trent Hein, Ned McClain and the rest of the Applied Trust team (which includes former Insight Designs summer intern Zack Sanders)! We’re proud to work with such an esteemed bunch!

Our connection to Applied Trust? This spring, we designed and implemented their new custom website using a Joomla backend. Be sure to check it out.

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We took a stab at video production….

May 15th, 2009 Ellie Childs

We’ve obviously made websites. We’ve designed logos, brochures, t-shirts, banners and more. But until today, we’ve never made movies. Feeling adventurous and a little egotistical, we set out to show the world what a creative, talented and - at times - completely unskilled bunch we are. Check us out. And it’s okay to laugh.

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NCWIT turns 5!

May 12th, 2009 Beth Krodel

Congratulations to our friends at NCWIT - the National Center for Women & Information Technology!

Executive Director Lucy Sanders and the rest of the NCWIT team are at the Google Campus in San Jose, CA, this week hosting their semi-annual meetings AND celebrating the organization’s 5th birthday. (Not bad to have the world’s coolest company throwing your 5th birthday party, huh?)

NCWIT - a non-profit established in 2004 with the goal of increasing women’s participation in information technology - today boasts a coalition membership of more than 170 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies and non-profits.

And based on the numbers, they have a huge task ahead:

• In 2008 women earned only 18 percent of all CS degrees. Back in 1985, women earned 37 percent of CS degrees.
• Women hold more than half of all professional occupations in the U.S. but fewer than 24 percent of all computing-related occupations.
• Only 16 percent of Fortune 500 technology companies have women corporate officers.

NCWIT’s goal isn’t just about parity for parity’s sake. It’s about ensuring that the information technology that this world creates is the most innovative and useful it can be. And having women involved in the IT creative process makes it better: A study on U.S. technology patenting reveals that patents created by mixed-gender teams are the most highly cited (an indicator of their innovation and usefulness); yet women were involved in only 9 percent of U.S. tech patents.

In January, I attended a talk by NCWIT Communications Director Jenny Slade at the Chicks Who Click social media conference in Boulder. Jenny’s talk about “Enlisting Women in Tech” was informative, eye-opening, clever, funny and accessible. She used the right mix of data with real-world examples of why women’s participation in IT matters. The example I loved the most was about the first voice-recognition software used in answering machines. When a woman tried to use the system, it hung up on her because the machine hadn’t been programmed to recognize female voice octaves; the creators - all men - had only tested it using men’s voices.

When I recently asked Jenny about the creation of NCWIT, she recalled this of the organization’s initial plenary discussion in 2003: “A huge snowstorm blew in the night before and it snowed all the next day, but almost everyone showed up anyway - many from out of town. There were industry folks and academics and researchers and marketing types and several people who had been single-handedly working to attract and
retain women in computing for decades. We gathered in a conference room at the UMC. …In the afternoon we split up into groups to brainstorm what solving the “problem” of women’s lack of participation in IT would look like, and when we re-gathered it turned out that every group had proposed creating some sort of united, national organization. Originally we called ourselves the National Center for Gender and Information Technology, but then that seemed opaque when it was clear our focus was to be on women (why not just say what you mean?).”

A year later, NCWIT was on its way, with funding from the National Science Foundation and others.

At NCWIT’s board of directors dinner at the end of April, Brad Feld - NCWIT Board Chairman and well-known venture capitalist - told the audience that NCWIT had always considered itself a two-decade organization. It had spent the first five years figuring out why there’s a derth of women in IT, and now it will spend the next 15 years changing that.

Let’s wish them luck as we all will surely benefit from NCWIT’s success.

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Will new search be competition for Google?

May 7th, 2009 Beth Krodel

People have long been wondering when some real competition for Google will come along in the world of internet search. Wolfram Alpha, a new tool set to be released later this month, could be just that.

The claim is that the software will understand and respond to ordinary language in the same way a person does. You could type in “What was the weather like in London on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated?” and instead of getting links to 18,500 web links, as you would on Google, this system will simply return the answer.

Some internet watchers have gone as far as calling this the internet’s “Holy Grail.” Others are much more skeptical.

The software’s inventor, Brit Dr. Stephen Wolfram who showcased his system at Harvard University last week, is the first to admit it has shortcomings. For example, it doesn’t yet have a great grasp of popular culture.

Want to know more: Check out this article from The Independent and watch the software demo on YouTube.

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