Get Updates
Tags
Other Sites

Bit Zesty Labs

Twitter
Contributors
Filed under

presentation

See all posts on posterous with this tag »
 

Likebees Presentation at MiniBar

I gave a short talk at the MiniBar Finance Innovation conference last week.

MiniBar is a monthly tech and business conference which invites innovators and entrepreneurs to get together and share their ideas. This month, the event was sponsored by PayPal X and the six guest speakers each gave a 5-minute talk about innovation in payment systems. I used my slot to explain how we utilized the PayPal Adaptive Payments API when developing a group-buying application for our client, Likebees.

Likebees operates by offering users the chance to buy vouchers for substantial discounts for local services, such as restaurants or hairdressers. The catch is that the discount only becomes activated if enough people buy it, and this is where the pre-approval API becomes necessary. Instead of allowing each transaction go through so that they then have to be cancelled manually if the target number of buyers is not met, the API ensures that buyers are only charged when the deal reaches its 'tipping point'.

Anthony Hicks from PayPal cornered me for a quick interview afterwards:

Yannick, our client and Likebees co-founder also got caught on camera and explained the business side of Likebees in more detail:

Filed under  //  API   presentation  
Comments (0)
Posted by Matthew Ford 
 

Talk at NoSQL EU on Different NoSQL Tools we Have Used

I gave a talk at NoSQL EU on a few of the different types of NoSQL solutions we've used in the past, explaining why we'd chosen each one and how they had worked for us. It was a bit tough to do whilst with a cold, so apologies if I sounded nasally/tired.

I've uploaded the slides to SlideShare for those who couldn't make it to the talk. At the moment, it is limited to the NoSQL solutions we have used on our projects, with case studies and a comparison of the benefits and drawbacks, but hopefully I'll be able to work on it more so that it incorporates some of the other 'bigger' NoSQL players, such as Riak and Cassandra.

Notes from the field: Different NoSQL tools in Production

View more presentations from Bit Zesty.

Filed under  //  nosql   presentation  
Comments (0)
Posted by Matthew Ford 
 

SVG Images and Animations on the Web with Raphaël

Last week I gave a talk at Google OSJam on Raphaël (a javascript SVG library), the library that makes it easy to draw and animate vector graphics on a browser.

SVG is one of the many methods of drawing images on the web. Some of the other technologies include Flash, Canvas and now WebGL.

The reason we used Raphael in some of our projects is that we needed to bind events to the shapes we drew. For example, we had to create an interactive gantt chart that displayed a form via Ajax when you clicked on a task. This functionality in Raphael is made possible by the fact that SVG paths are DOM elements, although it does mean you don't get the performance of pixel manipulation as you would with canvas. Raphael also renders VML when on IE, so in theory your graphics should be cross-browser compatible.

I gave a demo of an animated clock that I'd made a few hours beforehand with Raphael and the jquery.jclock library. The clock will eventually be apart of a Panic inspired dashboard we are building to increase visibility across all of our projects.

The clock itself is quite simple: I modified the jclock library to trigger a 'tick' event, which we later used to animate the SVG clock for the hand rotation. Since the talk, I have also developed an alternate style for the clock, but the original code and examples can be found here (the library is creatively called jquery.svgclock.js):

http://github.com/bitzesty/hud

Svgclocks


Brought to you by Bit Zesty - a 'crack' team of Ruby on Rails web developers

Filed under  //  development   javascript   open source   presentation   svg  
Comments (0)
Posted by Matthew Ford