Blog

Feusd Touch for all mobile devices!

We’ve been busy working on a new touch interface for the Feusd Core platform. This allows our customers to offer their users a way to access the most important features of their application wherever they are.

Feusd Touch comes in two flavours. The first is designed to be installable as a downloadable app on the iPhone / iPad, Android and Windows Phone. The second is hosted alongside Feusd Core and is accessible from any mobile browser that is compatible with HTML5.

We think that this approach strikes the best balance between supporting those platforms where users actually download and install applications, and providing an accessible touch optimised experience for all users. Do get in touch if you think we ought to support another platform natively.

Interesting ideas from NFP Technology 2011

We exhibited at the NFP Technology 2011 expo last week, and had a chance to discuss Feusd with lots of interested organisations at our stand and to hear some relevant presentations from industry experts.

We’ve been given a lot of really useful ideas and suggestions from a broad range of member associations, advocacy groups, event organisations and publishing / media companies.

We look forward to continuing a lot of the discussions we started, and working to produce solutions which introduce our sophisticated technology to these sectors.

Feusd launches new CPD Foundation web app!

Feusd launched a new web app for the CPD Foundation this month. Part of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, CPD Foundation asked us to create them a new website for their annual programme of lectures, delivered in London to professionals involved in the commercial property industry.

Our solution dramatically simplified their administration, reduced the cost of providing webcasts (with synchronised slides) to members, and encouraged much more interaction around their events and content.

The Director of the CPD Foundation, Ben Hull kindly said “I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending Feusd to anyone who is looking to work with someone who has an amazingly conscientious attention to detail, who can produce something that surpasses expectations and meets needs you hadn’t even anticipated.”

Why not just use Facebook / Linkedin / Twitter?

For many organisations, the value they provide to customers is as much in the community that they have built up around their services as it is in the services themselves.

They often have a website which provides basic information about their organisation and its events, and may enable people to subscribe or purchase tickets. Interacting with the community is left to an email newsletter, or third party social networking page (Facebook), group (Linkedin) or feed (Twitter).

The trouble with these peripheral channels is that interaction with their customers is divided into multiple locations which only a fraction of their customers will use, it is limited to a single shared conversation in each location, and they have no control over the interaction beyond basic moderation. It is not possible to migrate a community of thousands of users from one of these services to another and maintain the connections between users, nor is it possible to extract important feedback and data from it.

We’re hiring!

Role

We’re expanding our team and require junior Ruby developers for our Edinburgh office. The role involves assisting in the full lifecycle agile and behaviour driven development of sophisticated social website and mobile applications.

Essential Skills

- Ruby, Rails 3
- JavaScript, jQuery
- HTML 5, CSS 3
- PostgreSQL
- Git
- Ubuntu

Experience with alternative technologies will be considered, but successful candidates would be expected to be familiar with the above before starting.

Desired Skills

- RSpec, Cucumber, Jasmine
- HAML, SCSS, CoffeeScript
- PhoneGap
- Amazon Web Services

Qualifications

- Excellent computer science related degree or relevant experience developing commercial web software.

- Strong interest in using SCRUM, pair programming, and unit / integration testing methodologies.

- Perfectionist who produces elegant but efficient code, who enjoys collaborating with peers.

- Availability to work in the UK and to start within a month.

Benefits

- Learning to write commercial web software using the latest technologies and methods.

- Solving interesting algorithmic problems related to relevance, geolocation, metrics and extensibility.

- Being based at our stylish office with a fantastic view of central Edinburgh.

- After an initial apprenticeship, commanding a competitive salary.

Application

Please email admin@feusd.com with your CV and a sample of your work. If we are interested, we will ask you some questions, invite you to interview and set you a task using Ruby.

Five Themes for 2011 / 12

We’ve identified five key themes which are going to be increasingly important in the coming year.

1) Metrics

Organisations will use the detailed metrics afforded by the relationships between users on social websites and the content they share, to discover much more about them and to meet their key performance targets.

2) Relevance

By intelligently and automatically using metrics data, users can be presented with content and suggestions which are highly relevant to their individual interests, rather than being presented with a default view and having to navigate to find the content they are looking for.

3) Location

Tagging a user’s location means that they and the content they share can be easily discovered by other users searching nearby. So far this has mainly been done in location specific applications, but this technology will become mainstream across normal websites and apps.

4) Data Portability

Users of the modern internet are increasingly required to create profiles for any website that they use, sharing the same information and making the same connections, often ceding the ownership of their own data to the website owners. The ability to use existing identities to sign in to website and apps should become more commonplace, as should the ability to extract your data.

5) Mobile

Users now spend more time interacting with eachother, content and organisations on their smartphones and tablets than their computers, and so the importance of creating interfaces which are optimised for small screens with touch interfaces, and which take advantage of GPS and cameras is essential. Technologies like QR code ticketing and mobile payments are starting to disrupt some major industries.