jwalpole's blog

Last Friday afternoon we got most of the company together at the park outside the office. We were joined by family and some of the dogs to share some BBQ, Bocce, frisbee and refreshments. A fun time was had by all despite the heat. Here are the pics from the event.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/phase2/pool/show/

We have been messing around with a new technology lately called Apture that provides a very cool way for content publishers to contextually link terms in their content to related rich media items in a clever way. With just one line of code placed on the page, publishers and bloggers can quickly and easily turn flat pages of text into a compelling multimedia experience by providing pop up supplemental references.

The next stage of the Internet has been lurking around the corner for a long time and referred to as the “semantic web”. The concepts behind the semantic web are purported to have been in Tim Berners-Lee’s original intention for the Internet over 15 years ago. I suspect that means they were academically interesting, but technically impractical at the time. While I am certainly not qualified to predict exactly when this vision of the semantic web will be fulfilled as a technical reality, I can tell you about it’s enormous potential.

Lately I have been seeing more and more examples of cutting edge sites built on Drupal. My favorite magazine just went completely collaborative online with a great redesign and a full suite of community features - check it out...Fast Company @ http://www.fastcompany.com/.

In a growing business, there is nothing as important as finding good people. Or more to the point, the “right” fit for your business. Like any lasting partnership, the “right” one is a tough person to find.

Here at Phase2 we find that the recruiting process consumes a great deal of time. But good hires are worth the time and effort and the consequences of a bad hire are unthinkable

A few weeks ago I looked up “agility” on “wikipedia”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agility to help with a marketing piece. I wanted to explain how our company’s philosophies on agile software development also applied to our entire operation.

My presumption was that the concept of agile software development is still relatively unknown, so I would need to define the concept in an easily digestable way.