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How Many Programmers Can You Fit Into A Single Room?

Posted by Kenny Tomlin on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 in Business Insights

"The best programming team is a 'telephone call,' which is two people, you and I, programming together. The second-best programming team is, everybody fits into a single room. All other variants are bad."

Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

We've certainly mastered the art of figuring out how to fit as many developers as possible into a single room.  Nice to learn that Google supports our strategy!

Full interview here.

 

Financial Institutions Need to Improve Online Offerings

Posted by Kenny Tomlin on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 in Business Insights

Financial institutions must sharply upgrade their online offerings and develop a distributed Web presence beyond their own sites, or risk losing share both to faster-paced traditional rivals and to powerful Internet players that may try to invade their turf.

The Web's influence on revenue is up to six times greater than online sales figures suggest, and its importance will boom as today's youngsters mature.

Read the full Boston Consulting Group Report here.

 

Rockfish Interactive Launches Downtownbentonville.org

Posted by Kenny Tomlin on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 in Project Launch



Downtown Bentonville, Inc. is the nonprofit entity focused on strengthening Bentonville’s urban core.  We've got two offices downtown so we have a vested interested in the growth and development of downtown area.  You can view the site here.

 

The Blurring Boundary between Consumer and Corporate Technologies

Posted by Kenny Tomlin on Thursday, April 24, 2008 in Business Insights

Interesting story from the online Wharton Business School Journal about the integration of consumer and corporate technologies. A few of the highlights follow.  The full story is online here.

The ways in which people want to interact with each other inside corporations is changing.

Workers are demanding that corporate technology -- say a search tool within a company -- be as user friendly as Google's popular search site.

Spurring this convergence of corporate and consumer technology is the fact that the line between personal lives and work has blurred.

Indeed, Gartner predicts that by 2011, 10% of all information technology spending will reside with employees. In other words, employees will pay for and bring their own technology -- laptops, iPhones and the like -- to work as their primary tools. By 2015, employees will customize 90% of the technology they use at work, according to Gartner.

A November Gartner survey found that 80% of companies said that social networking was important to their business, but 36% of them banned access to Facebook at work.

 

Response to a Question

Posted by Kenny Tomlin on Tuesday, April 22, 2008 in Careers / Internships

I Received the following email today from a student looking for advice on getting into the web industry.  I thought it was a good question and wanted to post the answer on our blog.  We get a lot of resumes from college students and I thought this would be a good chance to share more about the types of students we look to hire.

The Question:

My name is XXXXX, and I am a Senior at the University of Texas at Dallas. I am currently majoring in Arts and Technology.

Because I'll be graduating soon I wanted to ask someone who is already in my field of interest if you had any advice for someone just getting into web and graphic design.


My Answer:

  1. Build an incredible portfolio.  Hosting is cheap and you can get student copies of the software.  Create pro-bono sites for local non-profits and make local small businesses a deal that they can’t refuse.  If you can’t come up with an actual project to work on, make something up and build a site around the idea.  Most interactive companies are busy and are looking for college graduates that can hit the ground running.  Nothing demonstrates that better than a strong online portfolio.
  2. Participate in great internships.  If you are doing number one above then you will not have any problem finding a good internship.  We actually pay our interns a good wage and provide housing for them.  Most interactive companies probably do something similar.  There’s just no reason to graduate from college without a good online portfolio and actual work experience.
  3. Delete your lame MySpace page.  We do background research on our job applicants and if we find a lame MySpace page with a picture of you and a beer bong then we are going to pass.  Not because we are opposed to beer, but because we are opposed to candidates that don’t understand the influence the Internet has in building their personal brand. 
  4. Blog.  Create a personal blog where you discuss projects you are working on, things you are learning, and stuff in life you find interesting.  It can be personal, but keep it professional.  Again, you are building an online reputation for yourself.  Use your blog to demonstrate your passion for this industry and your knowledge of what’s going on.
  5. Be a passionate learner.  The most important thing you will learn in school is how to learn.  You won’t remember the details in the papers you wrote or the tests you studied for, but hopefully you did develop a process for learning new things and organizing your thoughts around new ideas.  The Internet is a competitive landscape that is constantly changing.  Stay ahead of the curve and you will always be in demand.  When you start your new job, show up believing that you can learn something new from every person already working at that company.  In this industry your work will speak for itself…let it.
  6. Don’t send a resume.  Instead, prepare a letter introducing yourself and why you believe you would be a great fit for whatever company you are applying at.  Provide the link to your online portfolio and your blog.  We get so many resumes from college students with little to no actual job experience, no links to projects they have worked on, and no cover letter explaining why they are applying.  We promptly file those in the not interested folder.

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