After years of using red carpet metaphors, we finally made it to the red carpet. Well sort of. Monsoon partnered with Motion Picture Television Fund and Variety Magazine to create the official touch-trivia application for the Oscars. We are totally psyched about launching this at the Oscars this weekend!

The application lets you spin a virtual orb and answer Oscar worthy trivia questions. HP will be giving away trivia participants some amazing prizes including TV’s, laptops, cameras and free Oscar morning kits.

And while the blue Pandorians may end up mourning their loss to The Hurt Locker, we’ll be celebrating…..because at the end of the day, it’s not really about who took the Oscar home, it’s about which consulting firm made it to the red carpet!

Special thanks to Kevin and John for helping with the install and sharing this video!

I admit it; I wasn’t among the first on the twitter blog wagon. I put if off, for no good reason really; just like everyone else I haven’t quite perfected the art of bending the space-time continuum to my advantage. Then in the summer of 2008, I bought myself an iPhone and dove thumb-first into twitter.

Fast-forward to today, and I can’t help but want to touchscreen-activate everything and tweet every one of my “lightbulb moments” (eat your heart out Deepak Chopra!). Yup, my name is John Doe and there is a tech-junkie in me. Thankfully geek-chic is in, and with Monsoon Company’s latest product launch, my tech-junkie and I are walking the metaphorical red carpet together. Body by touch, brains by tweet.

We are proud to premier the very first Touch Twitter app for Windows7.

Get a taste…scratch that…get a touch here.

The first release of the app brings with it many of the twitter essentials: quick access to tweets via a full feed, the ability to search, post an update, and lots of following/followed views. Let the touch-tweeting begin!

We’ll be releasing an update to the app with a lot more touch-friendly features shortly. The ability to share photos, drag Twitterati (or whomever else you choose to follow) into groups, and save searches and trends, to name just a few.

The app is getting media coverage in almost every major tech outlet and blog. See what Laptop mag and PC World had to say.

To learn more about Monsoon Company’s recent touchscreen projects, follow the links below:

Top 100 colleges app for US News
Notes Application for HP
iPhone app for South by Southwest (*coming soon)

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We’re working with one of our oldest clients to rethink the way the businesses track and manage sustainability efforts.  Here’s a sneak peak.

Monsoon Company collaborated with US News and HP to create a touch-centric Adobe AIR application for America’s Top 100 Colleges. The application provides a fun, interactive way to discover the best National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges.

Being a boutique consultancy that is focused on touch software, we are always excited to see how touch is evolving in education and e-learning amongst other verticals!

Get the US News app here.

This is the first post in a series about the advantages of global collaboration (beyond the obvious cost advantage):

A few years ago, I coined the following statement to encapsulate one of the many things I love about virtual work:

You work. They sleep. Reverse. Repeat.

When global teams work efficiently, they can move with a speed that is impossible for a single-office team to match, no matter how much Blue Bottle coffee is involved.   After cost, it is the single biggest advantage of global work.

Yet, for the past decade, most literature on global collaboration has focused on the negative aspects of 24-hour work cycles.  The party line has been that time zones are a handicap we must overcome, and global teams will always struggle to manage communication, iterate quickly, handle disconnects, and clarify scope.

This is with good reason.  Few global firms have reached a level of efficiency where they reap the advantages of 24-hour work cycles.  Inevitably, the baton is  fumbled, dropped, and stabbed into the hearts of unwitting customers.

Passing the baton is a discipline and an art form.  It is what separates talented teams from stellar performers.  It is a ninja-level skill, and after 10 years, many teams are beginning to show us what is possible when the baton is passed smoothly, day ‘n’ nite.

Because of how important the baton-passing process is, my statement actually needs to be revised:

You work. They sleep.  Everyone talks.  Reverse. Repeat.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be demonstrating how Monsoon handles baton-passing for design and development.  

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Monsoon Company built a software application for the HP Touchsmart called Notes.  The software has been really successful for HP, and we’ve always been proud of the work we did on it.  But, after seeing this, we’re blown away.  A Palo Alto school is using our software to help autistic children communicate for the first time.  Unreal!

Seth Godin writes about products that should strive to be loved vs. those that should strive to be less annoying:

The goal is to create a product that people love. If people love it, they’ll forgive a lot. They’ll talk about it. They’ll promote it. They’ll come back. They’ll be less price sensitive. They’ll bring their friends. They’ll work with you to make it better.

If you can’t do that, though, perhaps you can make your service or product less annoying.

There are things about offshore development that people love.  Price. 24 hour work cycles.  Great service. However, most of the time, they leverage offshore development out of necessity: due to budget limitations or aggressive development goals.  Although we believe they should, most of our clients don’t love offshore development.  They simply do it because it works.  

This shouldn’t be surprising.  It is almost always easier to love a service when it’s sitting next to you than when it’s thousands of miles away, sleeping while you are awake.   Offshore development companies should focus on being less annoying:

Think of the pretty ordinary things you do or places you go. Could they be less annoying? What if the marketers there spent time and money to eliminate annoying? No, it’s not the sort of big time stuff that leads to love, but they’re probably not going to get to love anyway. I’m not going to love my dry cleaner or the post office. But if they made them less annoying, I’d spend more money and go more often. Face it, you use Fedex because it’s less annoying than the post office, not because you love them.

At Monsoon, we’ve spent almost a decade ramping up US project management, leveraging online tools, and streamlining communication to the point where we are as minimally annoying as possible.  Does that mean there aren’t things that people love about our service?  No.  We’ve built strategic expertise.  We’ve set up systems that are, in many ways, more efficient than our onshore counterparts.  And, we’re nice people.  

But mainly, we strive to get our customers their projects delivered on time.  We stay up late so that they get to sleep.  We respond to feedback quickly to take advantage of time differences.  In short, we do whatever we can to limit annoyance.  

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Nari Kanan from SourcingMag talks about the lack of iteration in offshore IT work:

However, (offshore) software development has institutionalized non-iterative ways of doing things. You CAN come up with a definitive requirements document that CAN be turned into a definitive design document that CAN be turned into perfect code, which in turn makes users ecstatic! Couldn’t be further from the truth.

Definitely. But how do you organize a successful, iterative process with an offshore team? Time & geography are the obvious challenges. But, the problem goes much deeper than that. It is about mindset. And, although your business development guy won’t admit it, his offshore team doesn’t have it.

Most offshore developers have never really been included in a brainstorming session or a scoping process - their job is about one thing: take requirements and churn out code. Now, we need them to learn to iterate. They haven’t even spent time scoping!

Successful iteration isn’t about reworking your code 14 times a month. When most offshore firms talk about iteration, what they really mean is that their project managers are going to rewrite requirements over and over again, guiding their developers through a series of protracted, stressful waterfall processes until everyone loses their mind.

14 waterfalls don’t make a river. They just make a lot of noise.

When we first started embracing iterative development 4 years ago, it just meant that we didn’t sleep. We would work with the client during the day, stay up with our team to communicate scope at night, and then get up early to synch everyone up and ‘iterate’ in the morning. Think that’s scalable? Ask my wife.

No, true iteration requires a reworking of the entire offshoring process. More on this soon.

We haven’t done many standard marketing sites lately (focusing mainly on web/mobile apps), but it still felt great to launch a beautiful site for our friends at Spectragenics today.

Congrats to both teams!

spectragenics