Here’s a synopsis of where they landed:

- Dave Allen – Epic in Madison, WI – Epic is the world’s leading electronic health record company and Dave is a developer there.

- Matt Briancon – Bloomberg in New York City – Bloomberg is the world’s leading provider of business news and data, and Matt is a developer there.

- Brian Seeders – Listener Driven Radio, Northeast Ohio! – LDR is an innovative firm that puts the control of radio content in the hand of the listeners, and Brian is a developer there.

- Omri Shiv – Case’s PhD program, Northeast Ohio! – Omri is pursuing his doctorate in Information Systems at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve and he will be helping to manage the Qube Lab.

- Eric Tutlys – Akamai in Cambridge, MA– Akamai is the (again!) the world’s leading content delivery network, and Eric is an associate solutions architect in the Advertising Decision Solutions group.

CitizenGroove needed a way to transcode the thousands of audio files it receives everyday so that they could be accessed in a standard filetype. This transcoding needed to be done in such a way that it did not disrupt the regular operation of the site by adding server load. Working with the CitizenGroove development team, the Qube Lab architected a solution and developed it using Django, the Python web development framework used by CitizenGroove’s team. This solution consisted of a single application (in the Django sense of the word) that is run on a separate server that accepts requests from the site to transcode files as they are uploaded. The application uses ffmpeg, an open source, cross- platform library for transcoding audio and video, and the simplicity of Amazon Web Services to accomplish transcoding at minimal cost to CitizenGroove.

According to Knific, “CitizenGroove was very pleased with the work done by Qube Lab. They delivered exactly what we needed at a fraction of what most third-party development groups charge. We were a unique situation. CitizenGroove already had two full-time web developers on staff, but we couldn’t keep up with the demands of our backlog. With Qube, we were able to easily section off a “modular” project, and reduce the pressure on our internal team. As a recent graduate of CWRU and young business owner, I respect how Nick Berente has brought together young talent and showed them how to function as a professional software development group. I implore every entrepreneur to take advantage of the organized, energetic, and intelligent Qube Team… before they all graduate, get hired by the big guys, and you can’t afford them anymore.”

According to Nick Berente, director of the Qube Lab, “The project for with CitizenGroove was a great experience. John and his team are professional and very capable young entrepreneurs. CitizenGroove’s ePortfolio web application is precisely the type of niche technology platform that will shape the next wave of professional social computing. Also, their Digital Auditions application is an elegant and powerful technology. We are thrilled to be involved with their organization.”

Matt Briancon, developer for the Qube Lab, summed it up: “Working with the developers at CitizenGroove was a breeze. They are good people, excellent developers, and they were a pleasure to work with.”

CitizenGroove

CitizenGroove LLC (http://www.citizengroove.com) is a new service to help musicians while bridging the gap between academia and the music industry. While the internet is lined with music sites designed by businesses following the trends of the week, CitizenGroove was built by college music majors turned professional musicians. Born out of a dorm room at Case Western Reserve University, CitizenGroove has grown considerably since its founding in 2008. It is the vision of CG to create a professional networking solution for content creators, interconnecting artists, academic institutions, and the music industry on a single web-based platform.

The idea involves a mobile application that provides “on-demand delivery of critical information” to mobile business professionals. His patent-pending Mobile App offers a unique combination of interactive 2-way text, voice and Internet connectivity that provides a systematic approach to On-demand Support, Mobile Learning and essential social networking features which he calls Intelligent Networking. The nickname “Super” Mobile App came into being as it works on any smartphone.

John presented a prototype of the Mobile App at the world’s largest medical trade-show last year.  The application is now in production for a medical technology company and is also being used by a Fortune Global 500 technology organization. The IMS application has been selected as a finalist in the Best Mobile Application category for the 2010 NEOSA Best of Tech Awards.

“Working with the Qube Lab is fantastic,” states John Steidley, the President of Intelligent Mobile Support, “The team has a ‘we can do that’ attitude, ability and enthusiasm that helped turn a simple idea into a ‘super’ mobile app.  It was exciting to have a working prototype to show customers and gather market feedback. But it was even more exciting to work with the talented ‘super’ team that helped create it.”

According to Nick Berente, the director of the Qube Lab, the students also benefited from the experience: “What a pleasure it was to work with John.  The guys benefited from his wealth of experience and his unique perspective.  John is really a great example for the guys professionally, and his application is cutting edge.  We were really excited to work on the project and we are proud of the result.”

About Intelligent Mobile Support

Intelligent Mobile Support, LLC (http://www.imobilesupport.com) was founded to provide “on-demand delivery of critical information” to the mobile workforce of our clients.  IMS focuses on the needs of a modern healthcare sales force inundated with rapidly changing markets, customer needs, new products and competitive information. The company is based on the business value proposition that on-demand availability of information is the kind of support that allows a business to react to market dynamics faster, be more competitive, lower costs and execute on their business mission.

The exception had a link I followed that gave information on how to overcome this issue. While the article was not super easy to follow, I was able to manage. I noticed a lot of people posted questions on forums on how to overcome this error, so I got to thinking and came up with what I think is an easier alternative.

My basic setup is as follows:

1. The buttons are first created on the form.
2. A timer is started.
3. Threads are created that shrink images to thumbnail sizes for being displayed on the button.
4. A class ThreadedQ is created in which it stores a thread number, a reference to a button, a reference to the image to be shrinked, and a reference to Q (defined next)
5. The calling form has a variable, List Q, defined.
6. As threads complete, they push ThreadedQ objects onto Q.
7. Whenever the timer ticks, it checks Q for items; when one is found, it maps the newly created thumbnail to the button it references.
8. When all threads have completed, the timer stops.

While this setup may not be as good as what the original tutorial proposed, I think it may be easier for beginners to follow.

OK, maybe not all over, but a few of us were on Channel 3 News and we were in a Crain’s Cleveland Business story in October. We’ve been hearing from a bunch of people on both stories.  It is amazing how many people watch WKYC news and read page 11 of Crain’s.

On Channel 3, it was a story about how Wi-Fi is easily circumvented and packets can get intercepted:

http://www.wkyc.com/news/local/news_article.aspx?storyid=125268&catid=45

Of course, they were with us for two hours but the story was just a couple of minutes. Anything we mentioned about SSID, opening portals, and the detailed, balanced way we viewed these things did not really come across.  We were probably too technical and Mike the reporter wanted sound bites (like the comment James made about what is “stupid”).

The Crain’s story was about Goldstein, Caldwell & Associates – our friends who work with small startups (http://www.goldcald.com/).   It did a nice job introducing us.  Here’s the text that discussed the Qube, followed by a link to the story:

“…The Qube Lab, a software development company Mr. Berente leads at Case Western Reserve University [note: The Qube Lab is not formally associated with Case, beyond all of us also either work or go to school at Case], stood to benefit by partnering with the early stage business development firm in University Heights. However, Mr. Berente also found that he and Goldstein Caldwell’s founders shared a passion: helping Northeast Ohio’s young entrepreneurs…

“…More people should share that focus, said Mr. Berente, who leads a group of students who provide low-cost software development services to Goldstein Caldwell’s portfolio companies and other organizations. “The companies that everybody is talking about were not created by 40-somethings,” said Mr. Berente, who also is an adjunct professor at CWRU’s Weatherhead School of Management and a research fellow at the University of Michigan’s school of information.”

The article “Young entrepreneurs build firm around startup investments,” was written by Chuch Soder and ran on the October 19 issue:

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20091019/FREE/310199972

We’re working on a project that requires the Drupal platform for a client. The client requires that new stories that are created on Drupal will be posted to Twitter and Facebook. That should be simple enough as there are modules to do this using Drupal. Wrong.

I’ve now spent a good two hours trying to set up Twitter integration with the site. Not only was the module completely unintuitive, that is, I expected it to post immediately after I set up my account and created a story. No, it required more modules that needed to be installed, but weren’t required upon activation as well as setting up a user’s specific twitter account, creating special triggers, and a lot of debugging. This is where my frustration stems from.

Why is it that once I hit publish I’m immediately greeted by that all too reassuring PHP error handler. A Google search quickly turned up multiple users experiencing the same problem with the creator saying he fixed it in the next release. After I fixed the first bug, another came up of the same nature. Luckily, there was another patch on the same page as the original problem.

So is the fun of using open-source, community driven applications

On my system, I can press Windows+G at any time and resize and place the current window in the top left corner, or fill the entire right half the screen (or a number of other configurations), or force it to be on top of all other windows by pressing 1-9. You can choose from a number of “templates” (mappings of buttons to screen locations) or create your own.

I find this utility to be helpful when programming (cycling through tutorials, code, output, etc) and grading programs for my TA position, where I have literally seven active windows up at a time.

Gridmove can be found here: http://jgpaiva.dcmembers.com/gridmove.html

Windows Grep allows users to do in depth file searches. The user can define a string to search (or a regular expression) and specify a directory and file types and the program searches within the file’s contents.

In case you were not aware, Grep comes from a unix command and is an ancronym for Global Regular Expression Print. There are variations of this tool for windows, but I am drawn to Windows Grep because of its GUI layout and informative search results.

I used this tool by looking at a web page on rails, viewing it’s source, copying a small string of text that I thought would be unique, and pasting it into Windows Grep to find results. It certainly helped with the beginning stages of learning my way around the project.

Windows Grep can be found here: http://www.wingrep.com/

The ability to easily update your mobile device by pushed updates or syncing with your laptop are also a cause of excitement. Today we see how many users still use out-dated versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, causing many security and layout issues for developers. Now that devices can be updated more easily, updates to mobile browsers are even easier.

With mobile browsers in mind, I wonder what HTML 5 features will be incorporated into mobile browsers. The new features of HTML 5 are really exciting — If you have not had a chance to read about HTML 5, I would recommend reading Dive Into HTML 5, a book written by Mark Pilgrim. Dive Into HTML 5 is available on the web, reads easy, and is free!

Should be interesting to see just how many new mobile browsers come online within the next year.