On Friday, Team Rubber were involved in helping raise money for ActionAid as past of it’s Pover Tie Day initiative. The idea was simple; dress up smart for the day!
Team Rubber scrubs up pretty well, although wearing suits in summer is hot!
Archive for the ‘Bristol’ Category
World Cup Giant Screen in Queen Sq
Robin Greene - June 11th, 2010Just outside the Team Rubber office, there is a HUGE £80,000 screen in Queen Square, courtesy of Hyundai. They’re expecting 11,000 people, so could get a bit noisy….!
Working Out
Andy Parkhouse - June 2nd, 2010Working remotely is something Team Rubber does with mixed success. Sometimes we’re very good at it. Sometimes we’re not so good.
I’ve found working in a remote (or distributed) way massively productive, but I don’t think remote working looks like as much fun for other Team Rubber staff as it should be, so I’ve been thinking about how we could and should do it better.
It was a handy co-incidence that I found this piece from Jason Z at 37 Signals about remote working and team parity.
In short, when most of a team work together in one location, it’s very hard to prevent remote team members becoming second class citizens. It’s very easy for the people in the same location to share information and solve problems with quick conversations, white boards, a quick sketch or a quick list of actions on a post-it note. They can also have lunch, tea and banter together.
Those working remotely miss out on this shared ’stuff’, or worse, get the negative side-effects (”we were just talking about the project and we’ve decided xxxx”, “sorry we missed your call, we were having a meeting” etc.). I’ve seen this happen and it doesn’t look like much fun 
Meanwhile I collaborate almost every day on open source projects where all work is distributed. Using tools like internet relay chat (irc), forums, and web-based project management apps, I get stuff done with people in different countries and different time zones (I’m currently collaborating with people in Canada, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden and Russia). We use English, we use a lot of short written communication, a few pictures, and an awful lot of emoticons (to indicate when we’re really not cross…or when we really are). It’s fun and we get stuff done.
I’m not advocating that Team Rubber works remotely by default. Having a base is really important to us, and by working together closely we’ve built strong personal ties, developed seriously impressive capabilities to get stuff done, and had fun. That’s massively valuable – but we should get better at working in a distributed way, because it’s also fun and valuable, and because we already have people in multiple locations.
Wednesday is a great day to work from home – or somewhere else out of the studio/office (get out in the world!). It won’t be compulsory – and some jobs are tied to a office phone – but I’m strongly encouraging distributed working on Wednesdays, and I’m going to be very interested in how we do do it better. Our tools are things like email, irc, trac, and (omg) “picking up the fricking phone”. We’re going to learn how to do it right, and it’s going to be fun 
cheers,
Andy
6′66″ – Sympathy For The Devil (…or how to make Powerpoint interesting)
Rory Ahern - May 26th, 2010Originally posted at Rubber Republic
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[Image courtesy of : Wendelboe on Flickr]
The *devil* in question was indeed the force of office evil that is Powerpoint, and Tom Alcott from the Social Network Company gave us a masterclass in how to keep presentations succinct, engaging and conversational while remaining in total control of your material.
His PechKucha style talk on social network analysis lasted exactly ‘6 minutes & 66 seconds’ and covered everything from a crash course in social psychology, the ambiguity of what being ‘connected’ actually means to mapping the *viral* spread of information within networks.
At the heart of it was that key question: Who is the most valuable node within any social network? The ‘hub’ (the most connected individual within a community). Or the ‘broker’ (the person who bridges between two communities and therefore allows that idea to spread to new audiences)?
Finding this overlap is something we are fascinated by, as it potentially allows the conversation to evolve and new participants to join. This was also a central theme to ‘Connected’ our last Rubber Book Club mail-out which explains the various ways information travels with some very entertaining illustrations.
So all good stuff and many thanks to Tom for coming in on a very warm and humid Friday afternoon.
Incidentally if ‘666′ is the number of the beast, does that ‘668′ the neighbour of the beast?
Leaders’ Debate Live Blog from Bristol
Andy Parkhouse - April 22nd, 2010Politics is changing – and it’s happening right in our backyard. Follow us live blogging from the venue of today’s leadership debate, and on Twitter.
Helen and Sarah did a draw
Andy Parkhouse - April 17th, 2010Simple and pretty awesome: http://bentleg.co.uk/?p=1181
Crash-Talk: David Gilroy from Conscious Solutions on effective selling
Adam Cardew - March 2nd, 2010A couple of weeks ago, David Gilroy from Conscious Solutions came to give a select few of us at Team Rubber a crash-talk in selling. I won’t give away any of the secrets shared with us in this post, but it focused on the different approaches to sales that his company uses. Detailing to us how his team is built in such a way to take prospects through the sales pipeline and underpinning attitudes enabling them to achieve their targets. Other, less obvious techniques (all above board of course) were equally intriguing, and those who were fortunate enough to be in the crash-talk certainly came away with heads buzzing. Even two weeks after, new ideas inside Team Rubber are still emerging from the talk and I think it’s safe to say that it really helped many of us.
Many thanks to David for taking the time to come and chat to us. Crash-talks are definitely of great use – more of the same please!
Fibre in Paradise
Andy Parkhouse - March 2nd, 2010“Bristol offers what 87% of America’s towns and counties lack: the optic-fibre internet.”
Right story, wrong Bristol.
Interested in helping get fibre for Bristol, UK? Try Connecting Bristol.
Nice Space for Rent in Bristol
Andy Parkhouse - February 26th, 2010There’s some nice space in our building coming up. Easy-in, easy-out.
35 King Street, near the Old Vic.
It’s an awesome building, very close to St. Nick’s Market, the Apple, the Royal Navy Volunteer and other important amenities. Plenty of bike parking!
Give me a shout if interested andy@teamrubber.com
Bath openMIC #4 – Mobile Web, HTML5 and CSS3
Robin Greene - February 12th, 2010
Yesterday, I attended the Open Mobile Innovation Camp at the innovation centre in Bath. The event was hosted by Chris Book and had talks from Giles Turnball (Freelance Journalist), Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke (both from Opera). The focus of the day revolved around the current trends in mobile app development and the tensions between Native, Web and Widget apps.
The day kicked off with tech writer Giles Turnball talking about how technology has turned the press industry upside down. He recounted tales from the 90s of infra-red modems, Palm Pilots and GoType keyboards, and being one of the first journalists to actively embrace remote reporting and email. Although initially laughed at, remote journalism is now standard and Giles encouraged us not to neglect advancing technologies, but to learn about them and look to integrate them into our businesses and working lives.
Next up was Richard Spence who ‘controversially’ spoke about non-iPhone development. He reminded us that only 8% of the mobile market is iPhone whereas 71% is browser based. Richard didn’t slag of the iPhone, on the contrary, he “thanked Apple from the bottom of his heart” and agreed with Stephen Fry’s eloquent observation:
Does anybody seriously believe that Android, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000 volt taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?
Richard went on to give a brief history of mobile development platforms and where they are at now. J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian were all covered and commended for their recent improvements in the light of the ‘iPhone effect‘.
The final talk of the morning was from Bruce Lawson from Opera. Bruce was in jovial mood and was quick to evangelise the latest Opera Beta which claims to be the current fastest Javascript engine. Bruce championed the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices and also highlighted some of the UX and accessibility challenges that await. Bruce emphasized the importance of optimization and minimising HTTP requests. He went on to talk about future advancements in HTML5 and CSS3 and the features that the latest Opera already supports. One particular point of interest for me was the use of Media Queries to change CSS layouts dependent on screen size, without JS sniffing. Bruce finally talked about the potential of Widgets, that Opera are involved with in editing the W3C standard.
After a lunch at the local chinese and heated debate on technology, we broke into smaller groups for our barCamp sessions. The philosophy of barCamp is to create open group dialogues about an agreed topic and to work / explore collaboratively. I attended a discussion on HTML / CSS3 with the guys from Opera, and for my second session W3C Standards for Mobile Web. Both sessions were really insightful and was particularly interesting to hear peoples’ comments from the mobile industry on mobile web.
I also picked up a couple of useful tools:
Native Mobile Development Platforms for Web Developers
W3C Mobile Validator
http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
Perhaps most surprising, coming to the event as a pure Web Developer (with past dabblings in mobile), I certainly didn’t feel like an outsider or feel like the technology was flying over my head. In fact, I came away with an increasing awareness that, whether I like it or not, Web Development is not simply going to be solely about the Desktop. As hopes of an archaic browser death is on the horizon, another friend is also lurking. In our discussions on Mobile Web Standards, we were reminded that the largest mobile usage is not in China, the US, or Europe, but in developing countries. If the days of IE6 support is numbered, then the days of mobile WAP support may be coming back from the dead!
