BNIRIA Is On!

Today I received notice of approval to start up the Bloomington/Normal Illinois Rich Internet Applications Adobe user group! If you are a Central Illinois Web designer or developer, then we are inviting you to join, discuss, and network with us.

Are You a Recruiter or Business

We also want to reach out to recruiters and businesses who would like to publish design and development positions to a group of professional designers and developers. Your positions would directly reach professionals within the Central Illinois Area and would be published in several social media platforms.

What is BNIRIA

The user’s group is located in Bloomington/Normal, IL, establishing a Central Illinois Adobe platform developer point of presence, community, networking, and social hub which centers on Rich Internet Application development using Adobe tools. We discuss Flex, ColdFusion, Flash, JavaScript, IDEs (e.g. FlashBuilder, Flash, TextMate, DreamWeaver, etc…), along with topics of developer collaboration and project management, which includes discussions of Version Control, RAD development, and team managment tools.

BNIRIA Mission:

To establish a group that will allow networking of local developers, increase local awareness of Adobe technologies, and provide a Web and social-networking presence which is managed by member volunteers. To reach out to local businesses and recruiting companies to provide employment/contract assistance to community developers/designers. To provide a place where developers can come to discuss problems and solutions, establish and maintain contacts and friendships in a relaxed social atmosphere. To have some fun in all these processes.

What Next?

Our next steps are to contact local universities and colleges in an effort to obtain a venue for monthly meetings.  Additionally, we are working to obtain relationships with recruiters and businesses who wish to network design and development positions with our group.  We are going to continue to “get the word out” and let people know about the new Adobe group. We will be working social networking on a continuous basis.

Can I Help?

Absolutely! We need your help in letting people know about the group and where they can join. Let your friends and colleagues know about us, tweet about us and share our links amongst your social networks. If you are a Central Illinois designer or developer, recruiter or business, come join us!

Links

BNIRIA Adobe Group
BNIRIA LinkedIn Group
@BNIRIA

#100blogs challenge Day7 http://bit.ly/4MtAfx

Very recently, myself and family relocated from the Portland, OR area to Bloomington/Normal, IL.  As a result, we needed to decide what we wanted to do with the consultancy.  I decided that Douglas Reynolds Consulting should live on, should continue to provide service to our existing clients, and continue to develop new clients.  Since, to a great degree, our services are provided remotely, we feel quite confident that we’ll be able to continue on with business as usual.  We’ve been spending much of our time getting networked into the new location, communicating with our clients, developing leads for new clients, and managing account changes, etc…  We have much to do yet, amounting to a task list with over 150 items resulting from relocating.  We are very excited about opportunities that are present in Illinois and prospecting is going well.  Certainly, we are interested in your inquiries for RIA, Business Systems, and Executive Administration services, regardless of location, so feel free to contact us to discuss your needs.

We have big, no, huge community goals this year in our new location.  We will be contributing to the community of developer’s in the Bloomington/Normal area.  I have already begun this process by submitting an application to start an Adobe Community RIA group with the hopes of bringing developers in this area together to network, share information, assist one-another with troubleshooting problems, and have a place to “get their geek on” and have fun.  Additionally, we wish to bring area business and education (we have Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan University here) awareness of the local developers and Adobe platform solutions with the hopes of strengthening the Adobe community and resources available to those businesses and institutions.  We’re going for Adobe community with all of our resources.

We are going to be adding a series of ‘Kit’ solution packages.  We are currently breaking down all of the services which we provide, discerning which ones are most in demand, and which ones best compliment one-another.  We will then be putting together a standardized set of packages and pricing.  Of course, any Kit may be customized to fit individual client’s needs, but we will be able to provide a series of entry points, better communicating initial project budget and needs requirements.  We believe this will simplify the process of providing for client needs, as well as to create a degree of self-service that potential clients may use in comparing various solutions.

In order to assist with the new Kit structure, brand awareness, and sales/retention, we are going to be adding a new internal position, Director of Evangelism.  Our new Director, to be named in the next couple of weeks, will aide in Kit development, marketing and sales, and evangelism of Douglas Reynolds Consulting services.

Within our Adobe platform development, we will be implementing Flex 4 for all future developments, unless otherwise specified by client requirements.  ColdFusion will continue to be our server-side platform solution in all cases where possible, falling back on PHP as needed.
We intend to incorporate allot more JS jQuery into our maintenance and future projects.  We have been so stoked with the UX design results we’ve achieved, in such a light-weight library, that jQuery has won our hearts and minds.

We will be coming up with more business/platform development ideas along the way, because, well, that is what we do.
Thank you to all of our clients for making it possible for us to do what we love…Develop.

RIA | Business Systems | Executive Administraion
“Putting it all together”^sm
Douglas Reynolds Consulting
http://www.douglasreynoldsconsulting.com

#100blogs challenge Day3 http://bit.ly/4MtAfx

Today we launched the first version of Douglas Reynolds Consulting. Our company provides RIA Development, Business Systems Analysis, and Executive Administration services. For more information about these services, have a look at Douglas Reynolds Consulting Services.

Here is a little bit about us:
Douglas Reynolds Consulting provides Web application development services to project teams and businesses using Adobe Flex, ActionScript, AIR, and ColdFusion technologies. We collaborate with development teams and work with client representatives to ensure accurate requirements definition and scope.  Our Administrative Assistant works directly with clients in order to help them with business needs identification as well as facilitation and fulfillment of general business requirements related to their projects, thus allowing our clients to concentrate on what they do best – manage their business.

We are looking forward to building your next RIA, providing supporting business systems, and helping you through your technology project with our Executive Administration services.

TweepJob

TweepJob is a service who’s goal is to bring job seekers (#tweepseek) and organizations, recruiters, and individual’s, termed as Hunters (#tweephunt),  who have open opportunities for employment or conrtacts, together using tweets as a means to communicate.  The TweepJob application can find user’s tweets by using the special hashtags and then notify the users that there is a potential match by tweeting such needs or opportunites so that followers, and the public time line, will be alerted to new leads for available employees and jobs.

TweepJob was conceived out of the experiences of our developers in harsh economic conditions, especially in technology fields, where unemployment rates were hitting mid to high 12% ranges.  It stood to reason that since we were already using Twitter, were familiar with the API, and enjoyed using the service for personal and business networking, that we should incorporate our enjoyment of the service with an application which attempts to help others in a valuable way. As such, we’ve created TweepJob as a free resource for seekers and hunters so that we might be able to help you find each other.

TweepJob cares immensely about the quality of our application and finds a great deal of satisfaction in watching it grow through increasing adoption, feedback, enhancements, and contributions of our community.  We are looking forward to improvement of the application over time to better meet user’s needs by listening, watching, analysing and under standing how our user’s interact with the service, how the service performs, and what the service offers functionally to the user.

So keep posting to Twitter using our hashtags and we’ll hook you up!

TechCrunch’s Mark Hendrickson posted that Google has purportedly been in press pre-briefings related to the launch of the BigTable non-relational database system developed and used by Google to back such projects as Search, Earth, Blogger, and more. The release would emerge as a direct competitor to the Amazon SimpleDB Web Service. Hendrickson mentioned that it should be expected that Google will follow up with Cloud Storage and processing solutions as well.
I think that having a bit of competition in the Cloud services market will be great for continued development of the technologies and hopefully create better services overall. Hendrickson believes Google will most likely follow the Amazon Web Services model where customers pay for the services that are used only, and nothing more. However, it might also stand to reason that Google could make some ‘beta’ services freely available with ‘pro’ service upgrades. One of the issues that I see with the current Amazon model, and if Google were to follow suit, is that entry into the cloud is targeted toward the technically savvy. I would like to see improvements in usability, apart from FireFox plugins were a greater market of users could be tapped.
All-in-all, I hope to see the rumored release come to fruition. I believe improvements to the Cloud services will only improve as a result.

Elmo knows your name – and wants to Kill you!

A seemingly possessed Elmo chants “Kill James…Kill James”, the Elmo toy can be programmed with your child’s name to personalize your kids play experience. I’m thinking that there might be a couple overworked programmers over at Fisher Price.

Simeon Bateman announced that he will be presenting on RESTful Webservices created using the Ruby on Rails framework and Flex. He will be presenting via Connect on March 4th. Check out his post for further details. Simeon brings an immense knowledge-base to the table, this will be a great presentation!