The £250 was split up between the designers as “Best use of Rusic”, “Best Design” and “Closest to complete”… Eveybody that attended voted, and by the end of the day there were a few friends of Rusic making it a little more interesting in the voting process (kindly sponsored IamKeir Inc.). Judging by the effort by all involved it wasn’t about the money though!

If you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

And the entries were:

In no particular order and with links to Twitter and the live application itself. It’s worth stressing that all of these applications were created from scratch in about four – five hours with Rusic. Some aren’t quite finished, but they’re not far off. Expect to see more of these themes…

@iamkeir – Rusicursive

Showing off the Websnappr'd entries to the competition

A really interesting theme that didn’t quite get where it needed to :) Essentially you add a website and it pulls back the web page as an image and adds it into Rusic. Very cool and with a bit more work it could be part of an interesting theme for building on in the future. As Keir is a friend of Rusic he wasn’t allowed to to enter the competition. (Don’t ask about the name)

@daleanthony - Best Recipes

Lovely design and use of Masonry

A really simple and beautifully designed theme built with Masonry. Add recipes and share them. Perfect for a cookery site. Dale is part of the Rusic team and built all of the deafult themes in Rusic, so doesn’t qualify for a prize.

@jamesGuest – Full English Breakfast

I want that breakfast

Building on one of the default themes, James after having to re-install pretty much everything in his laptop, spent a few hours coming up with this. Submit Cafes, their breakfasts and their location to find the best fry up in the UK. Combine this with the iPhone SDK and this is one awesome idea, anywhere you go you can find the nearest decent cafe. Seriously ESSENTIAL. Probably the best commercial idea of the day.

@tholder – Mountain biking locations

Lovely Google map integration

A really nifty geo based app for plotting the best mountain bike trails. Good integration with google maps and another app crying out for the iPhone SDK. While Tom would’ve liked some cash he’s part of Rusic…

@adambu1988 – 360k

A beautiful code snippet in Rusic

Adam’s tag line of “Three hundred and sixty thousand pixels & 360kb to do something awesome with…” is pretty cool. Reminiscent of the demo scene popular “way back when”…

This is one of the themes that blew us away. Adam has managed to make a “code gallery”. Coders paste in their code snippet and then other people vote on it. Slick interface, great idea and slick implementation. Hard to believe this was created in an afternoon.

 @jegtnes and @mark_js – Blah Blah

Liking of Comments.

These two guys, students at UWE performed a minor miracle. I’m still not sure how they did what they did… Essentially they found a way to add “like” states to comments. This is not a core feature of Rusic, it may be one day, but right now it isn’t. Somehow they got it to work. Awesome. Really.

@scottifydotcom – FootoFan

Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting!

I think this goes down as another really good commercial idea for an application, especially combined with the iPhone SDK. Essentially when you’re at the football you submit the match, and then photos and comments as you’re watching the game. I suspect this theme needs the most extra work as it needs some clever implemenation tricks to get it rocking… although Rusic that won’t take long.

@benjaminReid – Eye Bomb

The lovely action hover bar

A beautifully designed theme just for submitting pictures of inanimate objects with eyes on. :) Beautiful action menu appearing over the main image and a nice simple navigation. Worth mentioning the cool Google maps integration here.

A worthy mention goes to Roy that completely stripped and one of the default themes of CSS and javascript and rebuilt it semantically as HTML5. I can’t find your Twitter address or theme Roy. Where are you Roy?

And the winners were:

Best Design - Eye Bomb and 360k.

Best Idea - 360k

We didin’t do the “Nearest to complete” prize in try end as the guys that used the default themes were the  closest to completion which we thought wasn’t on in the end. ;) So instead:

Generally Cool - Footo and Blah Blah

Overall a really awesome day and a testmant to the talent in Bristol. Feed back on Rusic from the guys was really positive, we learnt a lot as well. Thank you so much to everybody that came. Roll on the next one.

Just in case you missed it at the top of this post if you want to come to the next event please sign up at our Meetup page.

A user sends a Twitter name by SMS (to a short code) and receives back a message with their full name, location and other networks. The person will also be saved to your online account so that when you’ve sobered up got in front of a PC the next day you can check out (and connect with) the people that you met last night.

It’s super simple and good fun. We’ve got a few neat enhancements in the pipeline too.

Currently it’s UK and O2 only due to the use of the Bluevia Oauth. We’ve got another etcher post coming about the development journey.

We recently pitched the government via the Technology Strategy Board for a system to predict where this stuff might happen (better the devil you know!)… They are taking this stuff seriously, there was £600k available to research this “Minority Report” style software and while its not where it needs to be yet, it is not as far off as you might think.

Well now (via a new company) we’ve done the opposite of predicting the future and discovered an interesting twist – humour, however “dark”, plays a large part in social communication and trending. Using control data and then a continuous stream of “chatter” that fits targeted queries, the Churnbar system was “taught” what it should be looking for with minimal human interaction with some interesting results.

To quote Nigel Legg the auth of the post,

Care is needed when using social media to find the instigators of criminal activity.  Law enforcement agencies need to determine whether a post is humorous or serious in intent.

For a full explanation read Nigel’s excellent post.

Soon you’ll be to customise the message it sends out whenever you create a new idea, like an idea or comment on an idea. And not only can you include your own content but you can also give the message some great context too. We’ve made it really simple to drop in tags for things like: the idea’s title, the bucket name, the comment text as well the user performing the action and the idea or bucket owner.

As a quick example, you could setup the twitter post for creating an idea to this:

Hey {{bucket_owner}}, {{idea_owner}} just created an awesome idea 

called {{idea}} in the {{bucket}} bucket, have a look here: {{link}}

Now, whenever a user creates an idea, a tweet is posted from them saying (something like):

Hey @joebloggs, @johnsmith just created an awesome idea called 

"Some idea" in the "Cool thoughts" bucket, have a look here: 

http://cool.rusic.com/cool-thoughts/likes/123

This is all done using an amazing templating engine called liquid which was developed by the guys at Shopify, so hats off to them!

We’ll be rolling this out as a feature on all paid account soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

The sparkly cakes from the lovely folk at Go Ape were to thank us for delivering their summer campaign with such brevity and fabulousness!

We built the social competition using the pro version of our new Rusic.com product, enabling us to build the competition in days instead of weeks (or months). We think it’s pretty awesome and after only a few days it’s already got some amazing stories going on.

Craziness by Go Ape, design by Refreshed, social and tech by Simpleweb, and of course the CAKES by Rachaels Kitchen. Awesome.

If you type in a tag into the “quicksearch” box you will be able to click it and see the contact list filtered to this tag.This makes exploring hot prospects or Twitter people a breeze. You can then clear this by clicking the “people” link above the contacts directory. You can expect this to improve in the near future.

We’ve improved the “discuss” button from the previous orange link. It’s only a little change but the improvement is big. It’s much more obvious now what is expected of the user.

We also improved the footer and more importantly improved stability. You also no longer need to log out to view the buckets on the home page. Expect a big update in this area soon…

The PRO version (coming soon) is awesome

Check out the lovely new moderation area for the yet to be publicly released PRO version. It enables quick moderation of comments and ideas within a bucket. Nothing is deleted it’s just deactivated.

There’s also a new webhook system for firing events to external services, meaning integration with mailing providers is pretty straight forward amongst many other cool things.

Also GoApe is the latest PRO user for their summer campaign as you can see Rusic is fully skinnable… We’ll save that for another post.

Enjoy.

Contests

Should you add contests to your marketing strategy? Here’s 4 reasons why you should!

What is quality?

How do you define what quality is? Seth Godin explains.

qTranslate 

If you’re looking for a way to setup a multilingual site in WordPress try the qTranslate plugin.

Super easy to use!

Rack-webconsole

An awesome way to interact with Rack applications from your browser. Perfect for local development and staging environments.

Check it out!

Agile development

Learn and improve agile development through Tetris. A cool presentation by Mark Daggett

OpenStack 

OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. Join their global community!

Mentor SME scheme: “Rejected”

Mentors in new government network “prevented from giving bespoke business advice”. Find out why.

The other side to this positivity coin though is the impending doom of “feature creep”. Sometimes its inevitable. It’s just the way it is. Get used to it! Over the years we’ve created a system that has evolved into something that seems to work for the client and for us. It’s even spurred us to build an application to manage the process.

We call this process the “bucket of love”. It’s a virtual bucket that all ideas go into. The term is fluffy and golden enough to take the edge off of a client feeling like they’re being ignored. They’re not of course, it’s just a sound way to remove feature creep until the end of a sprint. When we reach the end of the sprint, if it’s still a good idea we can discuss implementing it. Voila, everybody is happy.

This brought us to actually creating a system to do this and thus Rusic.com was born. A user logs in with their social account (Twitter or Facebook) and they then create “idea buckets”. Each idea bucket holds the basic premise of a question, “how can we improve sprint X?”. Everybody can contribute their ideas, “like” and comment on other peoples ideas. It’s a great way to see what is interesting (and what isn’t).

Interest doesn’t necessarily mean “like” either. I can make a negative comment but it still shows that I’m interested in an idea, just like in a real conversation.

There’s also a lot of social goodness going so that each idea bucket gains some momentum. Momentum is necessary for the generation of ideas. Ideas breed ideas…

It’s early days yet so we’ve got loads that we want to do, we just didn’t want to go down the “beta” route with this. It’s either useful or not?

We describe it as social ideas; in that it only works via Twitter or Facebook and it’s very simple to use and appears to self promote. The basic premise is to generate ideas or responses to questions.

For example:

“How can we improve our local playground?”

“What can we do to improve our website?”

“What shall I wear to the wedding on Tuesday?”

You can even use it to have Twitter conversations that need more than 140 chars.

A great feature that’s coming soon in a paid tier is custom skinning and domains. This opens up all kinds of possibilities as Fat Face our first paid customer demonstrates. The skinning engine is liquid as used by Shopify so it’s already easy to do.

We’ve setup an “idea bucket” for how we can improve Rusic so please let us know how we can improve. We’re not doing the beta thing, we’ve just put it out there and we’ll see how it goes.

We really do want your ideas for feedback so please let us know.